Search Engine Optimization - Everything you need to know to succeed with SEO

The problem is that search engine optimization is a broad topic and the content we have published can be difficult to find. We, of course, link between different articles (as long as it is relevant), but we still think it could be done better. We wanted to create a clear starting point or red line to all the SEO knowledge we've shared over the years, and that's why we created this guide. It is designed to describe and provide tips on all important aspects of search engine optimization, from finding terms and phrases (keywords) that can generate qualified traffic, to making your website search engine friendly, building links and promoting your website.

Whether you're just starting your SEO journey or already know the basics, this guide is your travel companion.

What is SEO?

SEO, which in English stands for Search Engine Optimization (search engine optimization), includes all the work done on the website with the aim of ranking higher in the search results when someone searches for the products or services you offer. Google is the largest search engine with 55 million searches a day in Sweden alone, which is why more and more companies want to be seen on the platform.

By appearing on Google in the right way and with a high position in the search results, more organic traffic is generated to the website, which in turn can generate more new customers. Thus, Google is a very profitable channel for your marketing, for which SEO is an important tool.

Search engine optimization—Guide to how to succeed with SEO

These five chapters are all you need to build a strong foundation and start ranking higher in Google. If you want to get even better at SEO, each chapter has links to more advanced articles with a stronger focus on solutions. You can also subscribe to our newsletter, where every month we have quick links to new articles in the blog.

All the chapters below are tagged so that you can quickly get to what is most interesting at the moment.

Chapter 1 / How search engines work

Before you start learning search engine optimization, you need to understand how search engines work.

Chapter 2 / Technical SEO

It is important to ensure that there are no technical faux pas that prevent Google from accessing and understanding your website.

Chapter 3 / Keyword analysis

The starting point in search engine optimization is to understand what your target customers are searching for.

Chapter 4 / On-page SEO

This is where you optimize your pages to help search engines understand them.

Chapter 5 / Link building

Links are how search engines discover new pages and assess their “authority”. It's hard to rank for competitive keywords without links.

How do search engines work, and why should you care?

Search engines work by crawling the web using robots called spiders. These crawlers follow links from page to page (internal and external) to find new content to add to the search index. When you use a search engine, relevant results are extracted from the index and ranked using an algorithm with the goal of providing the best possible answer to the searcher's question.

If that sounds complicated, that's because it is. But if you want to rank higher in search engines to get more traffic to your website, you need a basic understanding of how search engines find, index and rank content.

That is what you will learn in this chapter.

Before we get into the technical stuff, let's first make sure we understand what search engines actually are, why they exist, and why any of this even matters.

What are search engines?

Search engines are tools that find and rank web content that matches a user's search query.

Every search engine consists of two main parts:

Search index. A digital library of information about web pages.

Search algorithms. Computer program that ranks and matches results from the search index.

Examples of popular search engines are Google and Bing.

What is the purpose of search engines?

Every search engine aims to provide the best and most relevant results for users. This is how they gain or retain market share – at least in theory.

How do search engines make money?

Search engines have two types of search results:

Organic results from the search index. You cannot pay to be seen. (Search engine optimization / SEO)

Sponsored results from advertisers. You can pay for specific keywords and appear at the top.

Every time someone clicks on a sponsored link, the search engine gets paid. How much a click costs is influenced by various parameters such as location, competition, add quality, relevance, etc. This form of advertising is  called PPC advertising or (pay-per-click).

Therefore, market shares are important. More users mean more ad clicks and more revenue.

Why should you care about how search engines work?

How search engines work is fundamental to being able to work effectively with search engine optimization and get results. Understanding how search engines find, index and rank content will help you improve your website and drive traffic from relevant and popular keywords. If you can rank high for these keywords, you will get more clicks and organic traffic to your content.

Diagram of organic CTR

Image source

How search engines build their index

Most well-known search engines such as Google and Bing have huge numbers of pages in their indexes. So before we talk about how search engines rank content, let's take a closer look at the mechanisms used to build and maintain a web index.

Let's break this down, step by step:

Web addresses / links

Crawling

Processing

Indexing

Step 1. URLs / links.

It all starts with links. Google detects them in different ways, but the three most common are:

Sitemaps

Sitemaps or sitemaps are a file on the website that contains information about which pages Google should know. Submitting your sitemap to Google (through the search console) can help them discover your site faster.

Backlinks

Google already has an index of several billion websites. If someone links to one of your pages from one of these, Google can find that route.

Loading

Another option Google makes available through Search Console is to submit individual URLs for loading.

Step 2. Crawling

Crawling, or in Swedish scanning, is when a bot, also known as spiders, visits and scans the pages.

It is important to note that Google does not always crawl pages in the order they discover them. This is especially important to know if you have a website with many pages. Then Google creates a queue where PageRank is an important factor in the order in which the pages are crawled.

Step 3. Processing

Google tries to understand and extract important information from crawled pages. Apart from Google themselves, no one knows every detail of how this process works. What we know for sure is that Google extracts links and stores content for indexing.

Step 4. Indexing

Indexing is where processed information from crawled pages is added to a large database called the search index. This is essentially a digital library where Google search results are  pulled from every time you search.

When you type a question in a search engine, you are not searching directly on the Internet, but you are searching a digital library of web pages. If a web page has not gone through this process, it will not appear in the search results. This is why it is so influential to get your website indexed in major search engines like Google.

This is how search engines rank pages

Discovering, crawling and indexing content is only the first part of the puzzle. To be successful with search engine optimization, you need to understand that search engines also have a way of ranking relevant results when a user searches. This is the job of algorithms.

Each search engine has unique algorithms that are used to assess web pages and determine what position in the search results each page should have. Google is by far the most used search engine in Sweden and for that reason, we will focus there.

Google has over 200 ranking factors that together determine which pages rank. No one knows what all these ranking factors are, but we who work with search engine optimization know the most influential ones, and here we will discuss some of them.

Backlinks

Relevance

Thought leadership

Page speed

Mobile friendliness

Backlinks

Backlinks are one of Google's most significant ranking factors, and you can consider each link to your page as a “vote”—but unlike what we are used to, not all votes (links) are of equal value. There are six influential attributes that determine the quality of a link, and we will take a closer look at the two most significant: authority and relevance .

Authority

Links from authoritative pages and websites usually have the biggest impact on rankings.

How do you define authority? In the field of search engine optimization, authoritative pages and websites are those that have many backlinks or “votes”. If you want to determine how good a link is, there are a plethora of web-based SEO tools at your disposal, some are free with limited functionality, and then you have the premium tools that cost a penny a month.

Link relevance

Links from relevant websites and web pages are typically the most valuable. If other prominent sites on the subject link to you, that's a good sign that the information is of high quality.

If you wonder why relevance matters, consider how things work in the real world. If you want to renovate the roof at home, you would probably value the advice of your friend who is a carpenter over your friend who is a doctor. And for matters of health it would be the opposite.

Relevance

Google has many ways to determine how relevant a page is. The most basic thing is to try to match the search query against pages that contain the same keyword.

But relevance is about much more than just keywords. Google also uses interaction data to assess whether search results are relevant to the searcher. In other words, do searchers find the page useful?

Repeat visitors, average time on page, bounce rate are all examples of interaction data that Google uses to make this assessment.

Thought leadership

Google wants to rank content from websites with authority on the subject. This means that Google may see a website as a good source of results for queries on one topic, but not another. In the video below, you get an excellent explanation of how this works in practice and why Google can prioritize one site over another even though both are in the same niche.

Page speed

Nobody likes waiting for pages to load, and Google knows it. That's why they made page speed a ranking factor for desktop in 2010 and for mobile searches in 2018.

Many companies that implement search engine optimization spend a lot of time right here, but the fact is that your pages do not need to be lightning fast to rank. Google says page speed is only a problem for pages that “deliver the slowest experience to users”. So if you already have a page that loads quickly, you have very little to gain by speeding up the page further, put those resources on something else. The site just needs to be fast enough to not negatively impact users.

You can check the speed of any web page in Page Speed ​​Insights, which also generates suggestions on how to make the page faster.

Page Speed ​​Insights also shows how your page performs in terms of Core Web Vitals.

Core Web Vitals consists of three metrics that assess the load performance, interactivity and visual stability of your pages. Since June 2021, Core Web Vitals is also a ranking signal.

If many URLs are not working well or need to be improved, you can contact Buzzlemedia, and we will help find a solution.

Mobile friendliness

Since 2019, mobile-friendliness is also a ranking factor as Google's switched to mobile-first indexing. This means that Google "mainly uses the mobile version of the content for indexing and ranking".

In other words, a website with poor mobile friendliness can affect rankings on all devices.

You can check the mobile friendliness of any web page with Google's Mobile Usability Test Tool or in the Mobile Usability report in Google Search Console.

Search engine optimization and technology

Technical SEO is the most important part of search engine optimization until it isn't.

To rank, pages must be able to be crawled and indexed, what makes this possible we call in the industry technical SEO or sometimes also technical search engine optimization.

However, technical SEO will have a minimal impact on a website's ranking compared to quality content and links.

It refers to the work with underlying factors such as website architecture, mobile optimization and page speed. These aspects of SEO may not be as interesting as creating content, but they are incredibly significant.

The first step to improving your technical SEO is to know the current situation, and you will get there by performing a technical analysis.

The second step is to create a plan to address the issues that arise.