Components of SEO

The components of SEO are really simple.

There is a technology component: making sure that search engines can crawl and index your content; making sure that your web page looks great on a mobile device, on different browser widths and on various Internet connectivity speeds. All of those technical components play a role in your long-term search strategy.

Second is user experience. When they get to your content, is what they were searching for available on the web page? Is the end desire of what they were looking for on that web page, and not just the keywords? The keywords are easy -- do research and you can slap some keywords on a page. But when the user sees that page, is it helpful or are you just shoving search terms out to try and get your page to rank in Google? Users know when they hit a web page whether or not that page serves what they were looking for and was helpful. So pay attention to both the technical and contextual aspects.

The last thing is around user experience related to search results. When a user does a search, they have to make a decision. Are they going to click on your results, or are they going to click on someone else’s results? There are things you can do to get them to want to click on your results, including making sure your title and your description look excellent.

Well, how do you know? Thanks to paid search like AdWords and adCenter, you can test ads, and see which get the highest response rates or click rates. And you can experiment with titles and descriptions, and see how users interact with them. Google Search Console and the webmaster tools give you all that information.

Think about the technical parts of what search engines and users look for. They look at the contextual piece, "Did I solve the problem?" And then the user experience of search behavior, “What happens when a user performs a search" and "Do they stay?" are very fundamental to SEO.

The last thing that plays a part is your visibility online: How are people sharing, linking to, and searching for your content? I think that’s something to which search engines pay close attention. It’s the foundation of Google’s algorithm, which is called PageRank.

Those four components are essential to what goes into search engine optimization.

Combine search engine optimization with great user experience to gain the most value from your SEO efforts. When users find your site easy to use, they will spend more time, and search engines will refer more traffic.