Focus On Early Secret

 Black-Hat SEO   Despite knowing that black-hat SEO will result in penalties, some SEO experts resort to  underhanded techniques. Link farming, cloaking, keyword stuffing, irrelevant content,  and spamming are black-hat techniques that are still in use. The results may seem  positive, but eventually Google and other search engines realize that they are being  duped, resulting in a penalty.   Let’s consider the cloaking black-hat SEO technique. It is akin to spamdexing , where  the content presented to search engine crawlers is different than the content presented  to human users. It is a deceitful way of achieving higher rankings: the content delivered is  different depending on IP addresses or HTTP headers. This manipulative technique tries  to trick search engines into believing that the content is the same as what users see.   Another black- hat SEO technique is link farming , where sites exchange reciprocal...

 There are many search engines, but Google remains the undisputed leader in the worldwide  search industry (barring a few, such as Baidu in China and Yandex in Russia). Google is  the dominant engine, controlling more than 70% of the search market share. It is “batteries  included” and offers a suite of utilities that can boost your SEO processes. This chapter looks  at some of the most powerful Google tools that belong in the SEO expert’s arsenal: • Google My Business  • Google AdWords Keyword Planner  • Google Trends  • PageSpeed Insights  • Google Analytics  • Google Search Console   Google My Business   Google My Business is a new portal for local and nonlocal businesses ( local businesses  are those present in the vicinity of the user or in the same geolocation). It is a complete  ecosystem for local business or brands. It replaces Google Local and Google Places, other  than mainstream integration ...

 On-Site SEO   Whereas on-page SEO is relevant to individual pages, on-site features affect your SEO  process on the website as a whole. This section explains the following (see Figure  3-6 ): • URL optimization  • Site maps  • Domain trust  • Localization  • Mobile site optimization and responsive websites  • Site-loading speed or page-load time URL Optimization   URLs play an important role in SEO, and you need to plan holistically for making  your URLs as SEO-friendly as possible. Each URL should be human-readable and  not consist of a bunch of special characters or numbers mixed with words. It should  be meaningful and should reflect what the site is about. For example, https://www. searchenginejournal.com is meaningful because it tells readers that the site offers a  comprehensive array of topics and guides related to SEO. Using hyphens (-) instead of  underscores is a good practice recommended by ...

Meta Keywords and Meta Descriptions   Recently, Google confirmed that it doesn’t consider meta keywords and descriptions  as ranking factors. Nevertheless, meta keywords and meta descriptions are cached,  so it would not be a best practice to ignore them. Although they are not consequential  in determining search engine results, meta descriptions can be an excellent way of  advertising; they may or may not be displayed in the search results.    provides an example of a meta description. It is a good practice to limit  the meta description to 155–170 characters. It provides a preview of the content or  information on that page and should contain the gist of the entire page. If the description  is apt, informative, and meets the needs of the user, it may work like free  advertising: the user may be compelled to click that site link to view the content.   The meta description must be unique for each page on a website, li...

  few years ago, there was certain predictability in understanding the factors that let to a  site being ranked higher in search results. However, many professionals used black-hat  SEO techniques (such as link farming and stuffing pages with keywords) to gain higher  rankings. Using underhanded techniques may have elevated sites in the rankings initially,  but the sites were penalized later by the search engines. The deceptive techniques were  rank-specific and did not take website users or customers into consideration.   Over time, search engines became more efficient at judging sites based on user  intent and weeding out sites that were using deceit to rank higher on search engine  result pages (SERPs). Today you cannot get away with spamming the search engines— Google and the others have become adept at knowing which sites are adhering to their  guidelines.   Studies suggest that search engines consider more than 250 f...

 Benefits of SEO   SEO is not a cost but an investment that imparts results in the long term. You cannot  expect a miracle to happen overnight—it takes weeks or even months to reach the  top-of-the-results chart. There is no fixed way to accomplish this; however, a  combination of several methods can help you achieve higher rankings in a calculative  (and not manipulative) way.   The following are several advantages of implementing SEO in your web design  projects: • Catering to a massive audience: SEO is organic, and as your site  goes up the rankings, you get more traffic. Studies related to  various factors of SEO (link building, user-engaging content, and  so on) indicate that sites visible in the first few pages of search  engine results garner more traffic than the rest. For example, if a  user wants to buy sneakers online, they usually click site links that  appear on the first or second SERP without ...

Search Engine Processes and Components   Modern search engines perform the following processes: • Web crawling  • Indexing  • Searching   This section presents an overview of each of these before you move on to  understanding how a search engine operates.   Web Crawling  Web crawlers or web spiders are internet bots that help search engines update their  content or index of the web content of various websites. They visit websites on a list  of URLs (also called seeds ) and copy all the hyperlinks on those sites. Due to the vast  amount of content available on the Web, crawlers do not usually scan everything on a  web page; rather, they download portions of web pages and usually target pages that are  popular, relevant, and have quality links. Some spiders normalize the URLs and store  them in a predefined format to avoid duplicate content. Because SEO prioritizes content  that is fresh and updated frequ...