The SEO Secrets Every Independent Hacker Must Know!

The Purpose of SEO

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There’s only one goal in doing SEO: to increase the visibility of your website/product and attract traffic from search engines. The primary mission of search engines is to present the most relevant results to users. So, basically, SEO is all about making sure your target audience finds you first.

How Search Engines Work

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To achieve the above, you need to understand the basics of how search engines operate:

Indexing: Getting your website listed in a search engine’s index is like making sure the search engine knows you exist. Ranking: Using algorithms to select the most suitable results from the index based on a user’s search query. Mastering SEO for Higher Rankings

Step One “Indexing” is a Sure Thing

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Let’s dive into how search engines build their indexes. We’ll use Google as an example since it dominates over 90% of the search engine market.

First, you need to let search engines know about your website’s existence. How can Google find your website link?

External Links: If your website’s address appears on other sites already indexed by search engines, they’ll discover your site and send crawlers to gather information. Sitemaps: These inform search engines about the important pages on your site. Submitting Your Site: Google allows webmasters to request their site to be crawled via Google Search Console. If you nail all three above and your site is crawlable, it’s guaranteed to be indexed.

Step Two “Ranking” is Key

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Apart from Google’s insiders, no one knows the exact ranking rules, but nailing these points can boost your rankings significantly:

External Links: The most influential factor for Google rankings. Quality trumps quantity in terms of backlinks. Ahrefs offers a free backlink checker but only for your own site. Relevance: The stronger the relevance between your site’s content and the user’s search query, the higher your ranking. Freshness of Content: Searches for the latest info (like ‘best’, ’top’, plus a year or month) favor newer content. Website Speed: Google cares about user experience, so faster websites rank higher. Ahrefs also offers a free tool for testing site speed. Mobile-Friendliness: Sites optimized for mobile devices rank higher. If you can only focus on one of these five points, make it the first one.

Other Factors Influencing Search Results

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Google also considers the following to display search results:

The user’s location. The language used for searching. Search history. Basically, it’s about language and preferences. If your website is only in Chinese, it’s unlikely to appear in search results for someone searching in Russian.