SEO
areas
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is a huge area. Anyone who has ever heard of SEO and has not yet dealt with the topic in depth will wonder what areas SEO covers and what factors are important here.
We have divided the topic of SEO into the respective sub-areas to give you a rough idea of the scope.
Offpage-SEO – what is that?
Off-page SEO (off-page optimisation) is a sub-area of search engine optimisation (SEO). In contrast to on-page optimisation, it includes all external measures outside of your own website.
The focus here is on link building. High-quality backlinks can significantly improve the ranking with the search engines Google or Bing.
However, a backlink (reference from an external website to my website) should ideally only be placed by websites with high relevance and authority.
Total scope:
- Link building
- Optimisation of broken links
- Optimisation of brand recognition (brand mentions) in external media, such as social media, blogs, but also external websites
- Content-marketing
- etc.
Goal of off-page optimisation
The aim of off-page optimisation is to improve the popularity, authority, relevance and trustworthiness of the website for search engines and users.
This can be achieved by pages, portals, companies or people linking to your own website and thus making a recommendation.
Why is off-page SEO important?
Google is the most used search engine in Germany and although the Google algorithm is secret, studies such as those by SEMRush, show how important backlinks are for a website.
What ranking factors are there for off-page optimisation?
There are three main ranking factors here:
- Brand authority is the brand mention (brand) of the company in external media, e.g. press, publications, but also e.g. the search volume of brand keywords
- Domain authority is the number and quality of backlinks of this domain, as well as the ranking (PageRank) of the domain, etc.
- Page authority and keyword relevance in the form of the number and quality of backlinks in relation to the entire website, as well as PageRank and TrustRank (quality of the web pages) of the website
Content-SEO – what is that?
Designing content such as images, text or videos in such a way that they are ranked by the search engine is the area of content SEO. These can also be optimised according to certain specifications in order to appear higher up in the search results.
Content SEO covers the following areas
:
- Snippet Optimisations such as page titles, descriptions, rich snippets, etc.
- Optimisation of headlines
- Featured Snippets
- Usability (anchor, content design, structure, etc.)
- Keyword research & keyword analyses
- Research topics
- Images & video content
What is technical SEO (Technical SEO)?
The area of technical SEO enables the error-free capture (crawling) of content and the backup/storage (indexing) of content. This makes it possible for search engines to read the website quickly and smoothly.
The so-called bots or crawlers that search the internet for the search engines should be able to find the appropriate content as quickly and easily as possible via links, domains and URLs, read it out and, by saving it, play it out to the searchers of Google & Co. searchers.
The search engine's algorithm is learning every day and is therefore becoming increasingly complex. This and also the large increase in websites, as well as the increasingly differentiated web search have increased significantly. Therefore, the significant changes can be found above all in the area of technical/technical SEO and this area has therefore become much more important and is now one of the ranking factors. The accessibility of a website or the number of 404 errors (a website cannot be reached) has a strong influence.
The most common errors here are above all
- Error in the robot.txt
- Incorrect forwarding
- Crawling and indexing of non-relevant content for the search engine
- No or bad internal links - Broken links
- Canonical links to avoid duplicate content
- Error with CSS or Java Script files
- Poor loading times
- Incorrect page layout
- Missing mobile optimisation - responsive design
- http/https – Safety-related customisation
- Source code: compress content, delete unused tracking codes, remove superfluous codes
Core Web Vitals as a new ranking factor 2021
Google
has announced that there will be a new ranking factor in 2021, the Core Web Vitals. This primarily includes the loading process, but also the visual stability of a page.
Google is thus providing framework conditions in the form of key figures that website operators can use as a guide to optimise their website.
Why is the page speed of the website important?
Search engines now know that the page speed of a website has a significant impact on the bounce rate.
As an example, you can compare two results:
- If the loading time increases from 1 to 3 seconds, the bounce rate increases by 32%
- If the loading time increases from 1 to 6 seconds, the bounce rate increases to over 106%
- Studies
- LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) - Loading time: The time it takes to fully render the largest visible content within the display area when a URL is called up. The largest element is usually an image, a video or a large text element at block level. This is particularly important so that the searcher knows that the URL is being loaded and does not contain a freeze.
- FID (First Input Delay) – Time to interactivity: The time span from the first interaction of the page view with the page to the browser's reaction to this interaction. An interaction is, for example, clicking on a link or a button.
- CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) – Visual stability: This is the value for the extent to which the page layout shifts during the loading phase. There is a score from 0 to 1, with 0 being no shift and 1 being the greatest shift. A shift, e.g. of the page menu or other elements, is not ideal and the value should therefore be very low.