In this section of our Knowledge Base, we answer common questions and concerns our customers have about Search Engine Optimization. If you are a Huckabuy customer and your question isn’t answered here, please contact our Support Team in your Huckabuy Dashboard . If you are not a Huckabuy customer yet, click here to get in touch with a Huckabuy team member.

SEO FOR DUMMIES

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of increasing the quality and volume of organic search traffic to your site through search engines like Google, as opposed to other channels like direct, referral, and paid advertising. To do good SEO, it’s important to understand how search engines work. 

This article provides an introduction to the basics of SEO. We cover how it works, why it’s important, and 10 actions you can take immediately to increase your organic traffic.

SEO TOPICS

INTRODUCTION TO SEO

This is a quick guide to search engine optimization for those that are new to it and it covers some SEO basics. To learn more about individual SEO topics, click on the links below.

Chapter 1: Crawling & Indexing 

Chapter 2: How People Interact with Search Engines

Chapter 3: Why SEO is Necessary 

Chapter 4: The Basics of Search Engine Friendly Design & Development

Chapter 5: Keyword Research Overview

Chapter 6: How Usability, User Experience & Content Affect Search Engine Rankings

Chapter 7: Growing Popularity & Links

Chapter 8: Search Engine Tools & Services

Chapter 9: Myths & Misconceptions About Search Engines

Chapter 10: Measuring & Tracking Success

KEYWORD RESEARCH

If you are new to SEO, one of the first things you should learn is what keyword research is and how keywords work with search rankings. When creating an SEO strategy, the first step should be to conduct keyword research and identify at least one target keyword. Keyword research identifies which search terms many people are using in their search queries to find content and resources to solve their problems or answer their questions. Each piece of content on your site — blog posts, case studies, and other content — should be created with keywords in mind.

In this article, you’ll learn what keyword research is, how you can utilize it in your search optimization efforts, SEO tools you need to help you find the right keywords, and conduct competitor comparisons, and you’ll learn how to understand seasonality and search intent.

ON-PAGE SEO

On-page SEO refers to a wide range of best practices that help determine whether your page is properly optimized for search and will be able to rank when your intended audience searches for terms relevant to your content. In this article, you’ll learn the importance of user experience (UX) to SEO, how to avoid writing thin or duplicate content, how to write high-quality headers, title tags, and meta descriptions, and on-page best practices.

BACKLINK PROFILES

If you work in web content production or digital marketing, you are probably familiar with backlinks. Backlinks — links from other sites that link back to web pages on your site — add to the relevance and authority of your content, and thereby influence SEO rank. Your backlink profile is the total list of backlinks that lead back to your site from websites around the web. The more sites that choose to link to your web content, the more authoritative your website appears in comparison to other websites. That means that Google will want to direct more search traffic toward your website, and your content will rank higher than content from other sites in search results.

One way to build and diversify your backlink profile is through link building efforts like backlink outreach. The best link building tactics focus on getting relevant sites, web pages, and blog posts to link back to your quality content. It can be difficult to build links organically if people — writers, content creators, and site owners — are not aware of your content. That’s why manual outreach and strategic link building tactics can be necessary. But, at the same time when someone links to your website, it’s important that those links actually aid users in getting more out of the content they are reading.

Read the full article to learn more about backlink profiles and white hat SEO recommendations.

SEO FOR BLOGS

To make sure your blog content marketing strategy is optimized for a search engine it is important to know the ranking factors that search engine algorithms use to determine which content is high quality and what the content visibility should be in Google search results.

To help combine a blog content strategy and SEO strategy for your site’s blog we’ve assembled this step-by-step guide on how to optimize blog content for SEO. This guide will help you identify keywords, ensure your metadata is properly written, maintain a mobile-friendly design sensibility, optimize alt text, and the content of your blog posts is fresh and up-to-date.

SEO FOR VIDEOS

Improve your video content SEO and make sure your content is properly positioned to drive a high volume of search traffic, engagement, and become an authoritative source of thought leadership for the topics your content covers.

To help you achieve success in your content and SEO efforts, we’ve assembled the following step-by-step guide on how to optimize videos for search engines. This article will cover the importance of video transcripts, options to host your videos, choosing thumbnail images, choosing a single location for your video, and following general SEO best practices as they relate to videos.

GUIDE TO OPTIMIZING SITE LINKS

In order to make sure the site links feature is displaying the right links for your site, we’ve put together the following resource of things you need to know. Google determines site links by requiring sites to follow a set of best practices. Once these best practices are followed, user behavior (such as time spent on a page, how often it’s accessed, etc.) will be a major factor in determining which pages appear in site links.

UNDERSTANDING CLICK-THROUGH RATE

Click-through rate (CTR) is an important metric both for paid search and organic search. Ideally, paid search and organic search work together to ultimately boost your overall traffic, and make one another work more effectively. But this article will be focusing on CTR associated with organic search. CTR is a metric that measures audience engagement with your content and web pages. CTR is the percentage of your total impressions that resulted in a click. So, if 100 people saw your URL in search results and 3 people clicked on that URl, then your CTR would be 3%. Continue reading to learn more about CTR, what defines a high or low CTR, and the business implications of a high or low CTR.

ISOLATING ORGANIC TRAFFIC & UNDERSTANDING LONG TERM PATTERNS

Google Analytics looks like an intimidating compilation of graphs and data if you don’t know what you’re looking at and how to view it. There’s a wealth of data available and there are many different customizable views available to present data about your site. Google Analytics is also a powerful SEO tool that you can use to help you understand the amount of traffic coming from your organic channel.

This article will explain step-by-step how to navigate Google Analytics, discover how much traffic is coming through your organic channel, and help you understand long-term patterns associated with that search channel.

Domain Rating

Ranking/Average Position for Priority KWs

SEO DELIVERABLES

Huckabuy offers a list of SEO deliverables to help you get the most out of our software. SEO deliverables are available ala carte to any software contract. These deliverables are listed and described below.

SEO TERMS GLOSSARY

TECHNICAL SEO TERMS:

API: An application programming interface is a set of programming code that can be used across different software platforms and comes with a defined set of rules and conventions to follow.

Caching: The act of storing data in a caching memory. Search engines store a pre-rendered version of a page in caching to serve pages to users more quickly.

CDNs: Content Delivery Networks are globally dispersed locations where data is stored. They are often used to solve page loading issues associated with the geographical distance between a user and a host.

CLS:  Cumulative Layout Shift is a page experience metric that measures the time is takes for all elements of a page to fully load. It measures visual stability.

Cloaking: Cloaking is a spam technique meant to trick a search bot. Cloaking happens when the content on the page on the user-facing side is different than the content presented to the search bot.

Core Web Vitals: CWV consist of three metrics: LCP, FID, and CLS. These three metrics measure page experience and overall page speed.

Crawl Budget: The number of pages that Google will crawl on your site in a day. Crawl budget can vary from site to site.

Critical rendering path: The steps a browser takes to convert HTML, CSS and JavaScript into a page that can be viewed by a user.

DNS:  A Domain Name System (DNS) connects URLs with their corresponding IP address. Web browsers process data in numbers and a DNS is the thing that matches a searchable domain name (like Huckabuy.com) into a string of numbers that the browser can process.

Dynamic Rendering: The process of serving a client-side version of your site for users and a separate, server-side version for Search Bots. On the server-side, javascript content is converted into a flat HTML version preferred by Search Bots. Dynamic rendering is not cloaking.

Edge SEO: The practice of utilizing CDNs to speed up the delivery of content to users.

FID: First Input Delay is the loading time it takes until the first user input (whether they click, tap, or press any keys).

Google Lighthouse: One of the Google Webmaster tools that can be used to measure page performance and page experience.

HTML: Hypertext Markup Language is a standardized system for tagging text files to achieve design effects on web pages.

Javascript: A programming language typically used to create interactive effects and dynamic elements on web pages.

JSON-LD:  JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data (JSON-LD) is a format for structuring the data of a web page to better communicate with search engines. There are other structured formats, but JSON-LD is the one preferred by Google.

LCP: Largest Contentful Paint is a page experience metric that measures the time it takes for the largest image or text block on a page to render. To a user, LCP is when the loading of a page visually appears to be complete.

Page Speed Insights: One of the Google Webmaster tools that measures page speed.

Rich Result: Also called a rich snippet, a rich result is a snippet of information (be it an image, video, a review, etc.) that appears on the top of a SERP above the 10 blue links.

Sitemap: a file that explains the connections between various pages on your website.

Structured Data: Another way to say “organized” data (as opposed to unorganized). Schema.org is a way to structure your data, for example, by labeling it with additional information that helps the search engine understand it.

Technical SEO: refers to optimizing your site for the crawling and indexing of search engines, but can also refer to any technical changes you make to your site to help your site appear better in search results.

URL Routing: the practice of defining URLs and their destinations.