Last Updated on September 18, 2021 by scottkandh
If you’re wanting to get a better handle on your website’s SEO and improve its traffic one of the best ways to do is to use a Holistic SEO approach.
Before getting into Holistic SEO, it’s necessary for a moment to talk about the search engines that drive the traffic to your blog in the first place for you to get a better understanding how they work.
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Table of Contents
Search Engines
The most popular search engine people use to browse the Internet is without a doubt, Google. Some of the other search engines out there are Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, and Yandex. According to StatCounter here are the stats for each of them:
How do search engines work?
The search engines crawl the Internet looking for data to show it to users. There are three main elements within a search engine:
1. Crawlers
2. An Index
3. An Algorithm
Crawlers
Crawlers are often referred to as bots, robots, or spiders. They work around the clock 24 hours a day, 7 days a week collecting information. After the information has been collected it’s fed into a huge database called the Index.
The Index
It’s not important to know how often it comes around to collect the data, but an interesting thing to make a note of is that if Google determines that you have an important site or are making numerous changes it may come around more often.
The Search Engine Algorithm
After your website has been indexed (cataloged) the search engine can now show the search results to you in the form of what’s called a SERP (search engine result pages). The search engines take into consideration the information that you the user have searched for and produces the results that might interest you from the factors it gathered. For example, here’s the SERP for my website PinArtwork. One of the things that perplexes is me is how to get your blog posts within the SERP. I’ve written over 200 posts so I was under the impression there would be more posts showing up but that will come with time as I learn more about the search engine algorithm.
For this reason, it’s very paramount to use internal and external links in your blog so that you the search engines can crawl your site, find the data, catalog it to the index, and then show the results that it forecasted.
Another reason that the links are important is that they help determine your website’s ranking and domain authority score. It’s better for you to have external links to websites with a higher domain authority score than yours.
Establishing a fair number of links on your website ensures that you are making it easier for Google’s crawlability across your blog.
What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as defined by Wikipedia is:
“Search engine optimization is the process of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic to a website or a web page from search engines. SEO targets unpaid traffic rather than direct traffic or paid traffic.”
Earlier I discussed how search engines work and it’s important to have an understanding of how they work for one very important reason. According to SearchEngineJournal:
“A study of billions of search results finds over a quarter of Google searchers click on the first organic result. The first organic result in Google Search has an average click-through rate of 28.5%, according to a newly published study.”
That means 25% (one-fourth) of people are clicking on the first result that is shown. What’s really surprising is: “it’s well known users rarely venture into the second page of search results”.
So hopefully now you’ll see that it is important to practice SEO. The best advice I can give to new bloggers and according to SEOMechanic is that it takes 4 to 6 months for your SEO to take notice. So use those first few months of blogging to learn as much as you can about SEO.
There are two factors of SEO: 1) On-Page SEO and 2) Off-Page SEO
On-Page SEO – the technical expertise of your blog, the content, quality, structure, your words, color, layout, graphics, etc.
On-Page SEO – external or internal links and your social media following. I prefer to use Pinterest as my number one source, but you don’t want to put all of your eggs into one basket. For that reason, a good backup to Pinterest is Facebook. Now, we’re finally ready to move on to the next big topic which is Holistic SEO.
What is Holistic SEO
A Holistic SEO is looking at the overall big picture with the primary goal of building and maintaining the best website. What will come along naturally if your website has extremely high quality is a better ranking.
This post uses a lot of terms (that have already been updated elsewhere) so for the sake of my simplicity please refer to my Keyword Strategy Glossary of terms for bloggers.
Neil Patel does an awesome job of explaining rank with his post: How to Rank a Blog in Google’s Top 10 Search Results.
“What Does It Mean to “Rank’’ on Google?
Ranking a blog on Google simply means getting your website listed in the search results when someone Googles a term or question. This is a fundamental goal for most website owners and it opens up opportunities to gain a large amount of traffic to your site.”
Neil Patel
Since it’s a fundamental goal of most bloggers that they should want to rank well you need to develop an extensive SEO Strategy. That’s where having a Holistic SEO approach comes in to play to focus on many different aspects such as:
- Promoting your blog with Pinterest Marketing
- Providing top notch content on your blog
- A good user experience (UX)
- Good website design
To make your website awesome you can take advantage of Google’s mission: “Our company mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. That’s why Search makes it easy to discover a broad range of information from a wide variety of sources. Some information is purely factual, like the height of the Eiffel Tower” and combine it with an effective Pinterest Marketing strategy.
How do you develop a holistic SEO strategy?
Your principal goal should be to make a great site with your user in mind. Keeping your end user in mind is important in order to get better rankings.
A Holistic SEO approach focuses on several aspects:
- Proper Keyword Research – finding the right words to search
- Good technical SEO – like using Yoast SEO Premium
- User Experience (UX) – easy to navigate and find things
- Writing quality content – easy to read and to the point articles
- Solid social media presence – master at least one social media
- Mobile Optimization – more and more people use their phones, is your website mobile friendly
- Secure website – making your website safe with HTTPS protocol and preventing spam
- Accessibility – blind users can use it (use Alt + text in your images)
- Improving your site with internal and external links
- Improving your site’s page speed
Utilizing the factors above may not result in an instant high ranking, but in the long run hopefully your efforts will be rewarded with more blog traffic and sales conversions.
The advantage of having an awesome website is having high conversion rates. Conversion rates are the desired action you’re trying to have your visitor accomplish on your website which 9 times out of 10 is usually buying a product. The likelihood of increasing your conversion rates is when people like and understand your website and come back to your website for more visits.
Another extra bonus for having an attractive website is that it may receive a higher amount of social media attention (i.e. Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, etc). When people begin to start sharing your site, Google takes notice that your website is receiving attention which is ultimately very good for your SEO.
In Conclusion
To quote the people from Yoast on why Holistic SEO is very beneficial to use:
“At Yoast, we believe that holistic SEO is the best way to become the best result because you focus on making every aspect of your site great.”
Yoast SEO
Please check out these other related links on my website:
Pinterest Overview for new bloggers
SEO Tips to rank your pins faster in just 24 hours
SEO Tools sorted by cache – keyword – or SEO Effectiveness plug-ins
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