- Reality: Self-managing SEO without the ability to understand a page's source code is not going to get you far. Also, you should have a basic to intermediary grasp of HTML(5), JavaScript, PHP, CSS and server tweaks.
- Suggestion: The ability to tweak to your advantage source code and server files will be vital! Here are a few links to start your learning curve:
Your firm, brand, product, app, and every theme/topic will have one central keyword phrase. You can not optimize each page on your site for this phrase.
At most two pages should be focused on the most important term. This could be your home page or directly tied to your home page. To establish an effective list of words which will be then associated with a geographic area you will want to start off with a 12 month search in the target country / area using the invaluable Google search statistics.
Have a look, for example, at trending US daily searches. Then see real-time Google searches in different countries. Here are a few: Germany, India, Canada, and New Zealand. These links take you to searches in all areas / categories. On the right top of the Google Trends page you can fine-tune the per-country search to defined categories. Note, Google states: "(...) Realtime Search Trends highlight stories that are trending across Google surfaces within the last 24 hours, and are updated in realtime. These stories are a collection of Knowledge Graph topics, Search interest, trending YouTube videos, and/or Google News articles detected by our algorithms. (...)'. Learn more.
You are now ready to start the several hour work to select the best keywords which will be used with a city or location. There are some rules here to respect. You should (at most) have two canonical pages (or one page and one PDF file) which focus on the most important combination of words.
- Suggestion: Bing Webmaster Tools Help & How-To Center is also a good, free tool for keyword discovery.
SEO is about adding to content tweaks and many accessibility requirements will help your ranking on search engines! When you take the time to seek out descriptions of web links (adding title tags to URLs), provide "noscript" content options (so that someone with a screen reader does not get confused by JavaScript run content), use ALT tags with informative descriptions for images, check the automatic captions and if need be re-write them (see: "How to adjust your caption settings on YouTube"), and more. Once done, check your work with (not a sponsored link) powermapper.com.
From "Guidance on Web Accessibility and the ADA" we read: '(...) People with disabilities navigate the web in a variety of ways. People who are blind may use screen readers, which are devices that speak the text that appears on a screen. People who are deaf or hard of hearing may use captioning. And people whose disabilities affect their ability to grasp and use a mouse may use voice recognition software to control their computers and other devices with verbal commands. (...) Examples of Website Accessibility Barriers:
- Resources:
- Overview: Your ranking across regional Google search engines may vary in complexity and the key is to first rank well on Google.com (the so to speak “mother-ship”) with Twitter posts, a blog on an external platform (such as Medium), one to ten good videos on YouTube which have followers, likes and traffic. Add to this with a special section of your website destined for the region or country you are expanding your business towards.
- In more technical detail: The ranking in other languages or on regional search data centers is about fine tuning blog posts and often is a very different “animal” to manage.
You may need tweak Google.fr (France) organic SEO work to include blog posts from French hosted domains. Or in (there are so many other examples, but here is one that comes to mind) wishing to rank in the top 5 across Switzerland - on Google.ch in French, German and Italian (IP-based results showing in different languages if you are in Geneva, Zurich or Lugano) you find that certain global social media sites will rank well in all Google.ch languages while you might need to write / translate into Italian or German your content. Note that Switzerland uses English as their cross-culture / trade language.
This means that besides having organic results in the various national languages, your commercial interests are well produced English pages. Here the secret is to use correctly European weights, Celsius and other expected forms of expression. For example, no one goes by first name basis when initially introduced.
At its inception Google would rank the quality of a site by a trust system based on incoming links. In non technical terms this was one authority site making a link to another site. It was initially a process that was not abused or manipulated. "PageRank" was (again simplified) was a process of recommendations where a webmaster would place a stamp of approval for connecting content with a in-text (within the body of paragraph) outbound link that he/she felt added good related information to what they were presenting.
[Related: https://searchengineland.com/what-is-google-pagerank-a-guide-for-searchers-webmasters-11068 || From 2008: (...) when the links are merit-based and volunteered as an editorial choice, they're also one of the positive signals to Google about your site's importance. (...)" Source].
Today, FACTS have replaced (to a large extent) backlinks. thanks to progress in their ability to read page content. It is our contention, that Google's trust from backlinks has become a mere 10% in the ranking factors (for most small sites and blogs).
[Related: Knowledge-Based Trust: Estimating the Trustworthiness of Web Sources].
If you follow the path of working on high quality content your site will be trusted without having to get many backlinks. In the early days of organic ranking it was imperative to have hundreds of in-body text links from sites or blogs that were related to your topic or theme.
- Exceptions: For certain large corporate sites that are trying to rank higher than their direct competition for high demand single words, there is still a need to ensure the traditional link building process.
- Advanced users: You will need to know how to disavow links. This is a process which requires caution and is rarely essential as Google has extremely powerful filtering mechanisms. The process of reporting bad links to Google should take place only upon seeing in your stats an extremely high number of inbound links from low quality sites (see more about this).
-Take-Away: One can achieve success in organic ranking by blending commercial content with niche topic expanding authority status. Links from within the body of a high quality article on a respected university page, long time active blog or newspaper's site should be made from the keyword phrase you wish to rank high (in arrangement with the author). You may encounter issues of "no-follow" site-wide coding.
Making content that answers various needs and intentions of someone using a search engine is a complex task. Organic ranking from the perspective of potential clients is a sign of seriousness (and prestige as you blend commercial information with knowledge sharing) so rank well for ONE high traffic query at a time!
Users typing 'Palo Alto' (without the brackets) on Google are given various options:
Years ago, you would have to type 'Palo Alto the movie', or 'Palo Alto Networks' to get something other than information about the City of Palo Alto, California. Also, back in early day: If you were looking for the town of 'Palo Alto in Spain' you had to type the city and country.
User intent is now a central factor for traffic building and should be seen as a long term part of your Search Engine Optimization work.
It is tempting to imagine that you could make a long page with various headers that answered various queries. The trick for this is to make a F.A.Q section initially and then, over time dedicated 3000 word pages per topic.
- Tip: A short term work-about: You can purchase Google ads to answer high traffic related queries and direct users your F.A.Q page.
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