SEO is first and foremost a discipline aimed at producing pages that appeal to the user. Beyond the technical aspects, it is particularly important to show empathy and put yourself in the user’s shoes in order to understand how they navigate, what they are looking for, how they look for it and what will make your page appeal to them more than those of competing sites.
So here are the 6 keys to SEO:
1. SEO semantics
Semantics takes an important part in natural referencing. It is the guarantor that your website respects a hierarchy of content, structuring – which is a very important element for search engines.
The idea to remember is that each page must correspond to a unique semantic universe. So one theme and one idea developed per page. This will allow the algorithms to clearly identify what is treated on each page to define its relevance. If you create a site in “one page”, that all your content is mixed, without structure – you will strongly penalize your natural referencing.
Each page must be associated with a keyword + associated keywords. These keywords will correspond to the core of a page. All content and ideas developed around these keywords will have to carry the message and the overall information of the page. It is essential to structure each page through clearly identifiable semantics to promote readability and ranking by search engines.
2. The keywords
To organize the structure and content of your pages you need to highlight keywords. These keywords will have the relevance to make you emerge when a user makes a search around these terms. It is therefore important to study the keywords related to your activity on which you need to position yourself before building your website intuitively, in order to optimize your SEO. It’s all about competition. If many of your competitors are positioned on keywords, the probability that you will come out ahead of them on search engines is slim. You will have to devote a lot of energy to surpass them. It is then necessary to position yourself on similar keywords, close but more worked, with a low rate of competition.
Tools exist to analyze the popularity of search terms. You can know the frequency of search, seasonality, and the degree of difficulty to position yourself on these keywords. You can then create the content you want, always related to your keywords, but in a way that increases the quality of your page.
A more advanced technique we use in web writing to position blog posts and content pages are secondary keywords and lexies.
Secondary keywords are searches similar to the main query. For example, if we take “Chestnut Pie” as the main keyword, here are the secondary keywords that we will have to integrate into the text:
- “chestnut pie recipe”…
- “salted chestnut pie.”
- “chestnut flour pie. ยป
This type of keyword tells Google that your content is related to the topic in question. To improve your ranking, you can include them in your text in a natural way (once is enough) and if the context is so ready (always write first for the user).
3. The tags
It’s the hidden part of websites. A tag is a piece of code that is invisibly embedded in a page. It allows to structure a page and to specify what corresponds to what element. Is it a title? is it a paragraph? is it an image?
To identify this, we must integrate tags and structure the content of a page like a pyramid. At the top is a page TITLE. Followed by a title of level H1 and an associated h1 text content. Then a title of level H2 … etc. This construction prioritizes the elements of a page and structures the way things are presented. This is what allows the algorithms to control that a page is well presented and proposes a coherent content.
META tags (meta description) are complementary since they present in a short summary what a page will deal with. It will be displayed on the search engine to present the content of a page. It does not act directly on the natural referencing but is decisive since it is it that encourages the click. The more powerful your meta descriptions are, the more likely you are to increase your traffic.
4. Editorial staff
Optimizing natural referencing requires good writing. It must be structured to deliver clear and precise information.
Each page must contain a title. It should be short, and serve to identify at a glance the information that will be found on a page.
Each page contains keywords to be positioned throughout the content (between 4 and 10 keywords for optimized SEO).
When you write, write for the Internet user, not for Google. However, remember to include your keyword in the text in a natural way (we provide you with the keywords to insert in your texts for each page). Even if there is no official rule, you can check if your keyword is repeated once for every 100 words. If your text is 700 words long, make sure that your keyword is repeated about 7 times in your text.
You should develop your ideas in order of importance, in paragraphs with a legible presentation. Sentences should not be too long and should contain about 20 words. Reading poorly presented and unstructured content is not pleasant. Google can recognize a page that is poorly constructed.
Be careful, the content of each page must be unique. A site that includes identical elements on several pages is strongly penalized by Google. Its natural referencing is directly impacted because the information provided will be identified as poor quality.
5. The internal network
To decipher whether a site is well constructed, search engines observe what is called internal meshing. This is the way in which pages are linked together in a site. The internal links that allow you to navigate from one page to another. The more important a page is, the more links it should receive to it from the pages of its site. These links must insert text content. This internal wing allows the algorithms to draw the scope of a site, the importance of pages, to check if the assigned hierarchy is correct.
It is important to take into account this parameter to increase the quality rating of your site.
6. The images
Google analyzes all the images present on a site. This allows to reference them. It is possible to make a search on Google image since 2001. To enrich the quality of your SEO, the images on your site must be indexed. They must be named, by a unique keyword. This indexing allows you to associate page content with images and increase the quality level of your content.
A site that contains a lot of images but that are not identified will be penalized by a natural referencing that is not optimized.