✍ Written by Krisada Eaton. 🔊 Read by AI Assistant Jennifer.
An "SEO website" refers to a website that is specifically designed and optimized to improve its visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs) through search engine optimization (SEO) techniques.
🏆The goal of a Real SEO™ Website is to attract more organic traffic by ensuring that it ranks higher for relevant search queries.
Key Components of a Real SEO™ Website Optimized to Compete Against Standard SEO Websites.
1. Keyword Research.
Standard SEO Websites - Identify relevant keywords that potential visitors might use to find the site's content. This is fundamental. Understanding user intent and incorporating these keywords strategically throughout the website has become as important as what words to use.
▶ Real SEO™ Websites - Cluster keyword variations into a hierarchy within the website and interlink them in a natural progression of discovery...leading visitors to the most valuable keyword pages from multiple paths of intent.
2. On-Page Optimization.
Standard SEO Websites - Optimize individual pages by using relevant keywords in title tags, meta descriptions, headers, and throughout the content. Additionally, ensuring that images have appropriate alt text and that internal linking structures are effective enhances user experience and search engine crawlability.
▶ Real SEO™ Websites - Organize website components & sections (pages that have functionality besides simple articles and blog post) to be comprised of the individually optimized individual pages and assets. This connects multiple broader, relevant topics to individual pages.
🍞 The point here is that it's no longer effective to optimize individual pages. Pages have to be optimized within topic groups and user intent paths....like breadcrumbs from a loaf that came from a bakery, that began as wheat in a field from somewhere else on the website.
It's important to also note that well optimized video or audio media should be included for any competitive page, not just images. Intergrating video coordinated with your video marketing ensures the most exposure for the strongest pages.
3. Technical SEO.
Standard SEO Websites - A well-optimized website must have a solid technical foundation. This involves ensuring fast loading speeds, mobile-friendliness, secure HTTPS protocols, and a clear site architecture that allows search engines to crawl and index the site efficiently.
▶ Real SEO™ Websites - Technical SEO is a black hole of endlessly unnecessary task. Only address those task that move the needle. While it is very helpful to have 3rd party SEO platforms for identifying technical SEO issues, always temper your priorities with knowing which issues are actual ranking influences, and not an issue specific to your reporting platform.
4. Quality Content.
Standard SEO Websites - Content should be high-quality, relevant, and regularly updated. It should fulfill user needs and answer their questions, which not only helps with rankings but also improves user engagement.
▶ Real SEO™ Websites - AI generated content will not stand on its own as quality content. That's not to say AI shouldn't be used. I used Perplexity AI for this article and a lot of the articles as the framework for the outline of a thought. But unless you add, edit and refine AI content, like any publication editor would do, then it's just a generic salad bowl of already existing content. Always add value and personalize your content with meaning and relevance.
5. Off-Page SEO.
Standard SEO Websites - Build authority through backlinks from reputable sites. The more quality links pointing to a website, the more credible it appears to search engines, which can positively impact rankings.
▶ Real SEO™ Websites - Create organic backlinks with irresistibly sharable content, charts, graphs, unique insights and projections. Outreach to authoritative websites has become increasingly more difficult with AI because no one needs content written for their blogs and articles from other sources.
A cluster of loosely related SEO websites can provide optimized backlinks but it can take a very long time to build authority in a satalite website so the results will vary depending on the maturity of the satalite network - *and they can't exist solely for backlinks. Satalite SEO Websites must have their own independant purpose, distinct value and direction.
6. User Experience (UX).
Standard SEO Websites - An SEO website must provide a positive user experience, which includes easy navigation, a clean layout, and quick loading times. Search engines prioritize sites that users find helpful and easy to use.
▶ Real SEO™ Websites - Prioritize user experience from the user's perspective. Most users don't care about a theme park of bells and whistles so keep it simple. Time, Trust & Attention are the most important digital currency. Allocate your efforts towards those three things with the utmost respect for the user. Avoid ego fulfilling efforts that the user does not care about.
📰 Formatting your text and organizing your SEO Website in a visually efficient layout is EXTREMELY UNDERRATED.
I'll get a lot of pushback and opposition to this point but anyone that optimizes an eCommerce website professionally will know how much of a difference a uniquely well written and formatted product description will make.
One of the most basic things you can do (and surprisingly effective if done right) ...is simply break up your text blocks.
Pay particular attention to how websites like Search Engine Land, Search Engine Journal, MOZ, Coursera, WordStream or any website that makes a living studying user behavior, create breaks in text. They break text into small blocks with headers, spaces and graphics. They know people pararead pages and need visual hooks all along the way to lead them through.
7. Analytics and Monitoring.
Standard SEO Websites - Implement tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console which allows website owners to track performance, understand user behavior, and make data-driven decisions to enhance SEO strategies.
▶ Real SEO™ Websites - Use analytics like explorers mapping a territory not yet fully discovered. Having SEO Website Analysis "sight" is critical. Understanding what story the data tells is even more important. For that, you could use the basic guidelines like everyone else. But there's an art to mining deeper to construct the insight that will shape the stories that favor your SEO Website.
Achieving Real SEO™ Website Status
Achieving Real SEO™ Website status is not just about the regurgitated the same SEO practices everyone hears repeated over and over in a nicely choreographed white hat dance.
Getting up to the next level involves a holistic approach that elevates what we already know into a more expansive and deeper execution of our SEO understanding, thus achieve maximum visibility, and perhaps even page dominance.
Do More. Better. Faster.
That's a Real SEO™ Website.