What is SEO + 13 Really Simple Tips

If you have an e-shop, website or blog, you’re probably struggling with how to get people to your site. You can pay for advertising or share content on social media but you’ll never get the quality of visitors you get when they find you through search engines. Just how do you go about making sure you show up in their searches?

To make your content traceable, you need to control SEO. In fact, when you build a content strategy with SEO in mind, you can get thousands (even hundreds of thousands) of visitors per month without paying for clicks. Let’s now take a look at what SEO is and how to do it. We’ve also prepared 13 simple tips for SEO – search engine optimization.

What is SEO and how SEO works

SEO belongs to content marketing and it stands for Search Engine Optimization, and it is the process of optimizing a website in order to achieve the highest possible placement (ranking) in internet search results. Let’s explain it even more simply:

If you type “How to do SEO” or “What is SEO” into Google or Seznam, this article should be among the first to pop up in 3-6 months after it’s published. I don’t know when you read this article, but chances are you got here from a search engine. We don’t pay for any advertising. This is the magic of SEO.

💡 TIP: Read also, how to start a blog .

What SEO is used for in marketing

• To build organic (unpaid) traffic,
• branding,
• lead generation,
• to reduce the share of margin on advertising.

What SEO includes

SEO is an essential element for effective digital marketing and it involves a lot:

1. Keyword analysis: identifying relevant keywords and phrases that potential customers use when searching for the products you sell or the online content you offer.
2. SEO content creation: Creating quality, relevant and engaging content that is keyword optimized and exhausts the topic so much that readers don’t feel the need to go looking for other content.
3. Technical SEO: Ensures that your website is well optimised from a technical perspective for search engines (it’s fast, displays well on different types of devices and has a great structure).
4. Off-page SEO: activities outside your website that help improve your search engine rankings (linkbuilding, social signals, good domain reputation).
5. Local SEO: optimizing your website for searches in a specific geographic area.
6. Measurement and analysis: monitor the success of your SEO strategy using tools such as Google Analytics and make the necessary adjustments to improve.

Why do SEO – thousands of visitors from one article

When you dedicate yourself to search engine optimization on your website and e-store, you can drive quality traffic to it over the long term without having to pay for clicks.

While in PPC ads you have to pay per click, in SEO you pay for technical optimization and creation of quality articles on a one-time basis. If you have a good specialist, one article can bring you hundreds or even thousands of visitors per month.

Your stats can then look like this:

How search engines work and how it relates to SEO

We all know search engines and we all use them. You probably know very well how they work from the user’s point of view. You type in the phrase “What is SEO” and the search engine will offer you relevant links or a straight answer to your question. But to “do SEO” you also need to understand how search engines work technically. Let’s take a look.

Principles of search engines

The basis of every search engine is the so-called web crawler. Under this terrible English name is a script or program that crawls internet links and indexes them. Imagine that a web crawler is a kind of fast bookshelf and web pages are books. The librarian goes through the books and puts them in the library according to themes. This is called indexing, and search engines draw from this library when offering you relevant results.

Search engines consist of two main parts:

1. A search index, which is a digital library of information about a website.
2. Search algorithms, which are computer programs responsible for displaying results from a search index.

Your goal is for the librarian to know your site at all, to like the search alogirtm and to offer it among the first. If you create bad content, the librarian (search engine) may also decide it doesn’t like the content and not rank it at all.

How search engines index and rank pages

There are many search engines and each one works a little differently. Here are the basic things that search engines rank:

First, the search engine must find your website and all its pages

Nowhere does it say that search engine robots will find your site on their own. We need to help them as much as possible. And there are several ways to help:

Provision of sitemaps to search engines

A sitemap is a special page on your website in XML format that clearly lists all the URLs (pages) you want to get into search engines. Its generation is usually handled for you by the tool in which you build the site (e.g. WordPress). This is how the sitemap of the blog loudavymkrokem.cz looks like:

The robots can find the sitemap themselves, or you can slip it to them directly in the administration interface. For example, for Google, the sitemap is passed within the Search Console:

Manually submitting the URL to a search engine

Most search engines allow manual URL forwarding. If you don’t have a plugin on your site that does this for you, you can slip the URL to search engines every time you publish a new article. They, in turn, will give him a preferential look. For Google, the manual handover looks like this:

Trackbacks

Every page on your website/blog should have at least one link from the same website (e.g. category, footer, etc.). It shouldn’t happen that no link leads to a page on the website, because then the search engine may not find it.

Search engines crawl sites using “crawling”

It sounds terrible, but it just means that Google or another search engine crawls sites and pulls known URLs. In the case of Google, we call the robot that does this Googlebot.

This step is followed by “processing and rendering”. In this step, the search engine works to understand the content and structure of the page. This involves running code on the page (such as JavaScript) to understand how the page looks and how it is structured. This may include identifying links on the page and other important information.

SEO basics: 13 simple tips

Now, we’ve given you quite a bit of background on what SEO is and even talked a little bit about how search engines work. But let’s stop talking to you in the language of SEO specialists and tell you 13 simple tips that you can apply even if you don’t understand it. Of course, if you have a technically messed up website, this might not help.

The following tips are based, among other things, on Google Search Essentials = recommendations on content creation directly from Google, which everyone interested in SEO should know.

1) Start with keyword analysis and competitor analysis

Do your keyword research before creating content. Find out what phrases and words people are using to search for topics related to your website. Then, find out who and what is ranking in the top search engine positions for the keywords you want to work on. Tools to help you do this are listed below.

2) Create the best content on the internet

For a long time, I didn’t know a thing about Google SEO and Seznam, yet my articles ranked first in the search engines. Why? I always wanted to create the best article you can find. Best structured, readable for the reader and full of information. If anyone had 10 tips, I wrote down 20.

Open the first 10 articles on the internet on your chosen topic and write a better article. Longer, better structured, easier to understand. Search engines are trained to recognize the content that is most valuable to readers. If you want a little more information, on Patreon we’ve added a very comprehensive guide on how to write the best articles with using artificial intelligence.

3) Optimize subtitles

The title (headline) of a page is one of the first things search engines check. Include keywords, use numerals where possible. According to surveys, people prefer odd numbers to even numbers. This is not the case only for 10, 50 and 100.

Don’t write headlines too creative, meaning, that the title of the posts must make it clear what it is about. When you write an article about SEO, I’m not gonna call it “The Great Marquee Treasure, or What You Probably Didn’t Know.” Although it may be creative.

4) Structure the data

Stick to a clear structure and use the text correctly. Use headings and subheadings (H1 to H5) so that H2 headings introduce larger topic units, which you break into subtopics using subheadings H3, H4 and so on.

Don’t forget to add a table of contents in the introduction of your articles. Use FAQs and other elements to help make your content more friendly for people to browse. Keep in mind that people scan when reading articles, so try to make it easier for them to navigate the text.

If your article is a review, use Schema.org structured data. Every CMS platform has a number of plugins for this.

5) Start with very specific questions

If you are starting out, choose keywords to process that are simple. And we don’t mean simple to process, we mean that they are not very competitive. How do you know? A great tool is the Czech Collabim.

It will not only find you the approximate search volume, but for each keyword you will also see how much competition there is for it.

A great way to get relevant traffic quickly and build domain value is to focus on the so-called. Long Tail keywords. In English we would call them “long keywords” and they are specific phrases that people type into search engines.

These phrases are generally longer and more specific than a general keyword. Although they may get fewer searches than more general keywords, they are easier to get to the top positions and yield far more targeted hits.

For example, if you have a barefoot shoe store, you can target a general keyword like “barefoot shoes”. This keyword is likely to have a large number of searches, but also higher competition.

If, on the other hand, you focus on the problems people are solving with barefoot shoes, like “Do barefoot shoes help flat feet?”, not only are you more likely to get paid quickly, but people who are solving a specific problem are much more likely to invest in a product.

6) Texture everything that goes

Whether you have an e-shop or a content site, text categories, tags, add captions to photos and alt descriptions. Fill in all the metadata you can. Why? One reason is that you let search engines know what’s in a category or image, and another is that the vast majority of sites don’t give a damn. For example, we always start with category and brand descriptions in our e-shops. And of course you should have them better than your competitors.

7) Link everything you can = internal linking

In articles and categories, in short, wherever possible, link to relevant products or other articles. Make perfect site linking so that you keep people on your site as long as possible. This is called internal linking.

But don’t be afraid to link to other sites, especially ones with a lot of authority. Search engines also look at whether you are linking to relevant and valuable sites.

8) Shrink images

If you have a WordPress site, be sure to download a plugin that automatically shrinks your images. For those of you who have an e-shop on Shoptet, beware, Shoptet can’t automatically shrink images. You have to do it yourself in Canva or Shortpixel.

And why shrink images? Because the bigger the image, the slower it loads. And search engines don’t like that.

9) Name the pictures

Before you upload the image, be sure to name it correctly. We name our pictures like this: holcicka-s-jablickem.jpg.

It’s the only way to tell the search engines what’s in the picture. This allows you to appear in Google Images searches, for example. Don’t forget to fill in all the attributes for the uploaded images. You can read about how to create good alt texts on hubspot.

10) Work properly with URLs

Even from the URL, search engines can tell what is on the page. So make it easy for them. Don’t make them too long, but try to make them clear and concise. For example, the URL of this article is www.loudavymkrokem.cz/pruvodce-seo/.

11) Get relevant backlinks

The first thing to do is to sign up for all the possible listings on the internet, by which we mean companies.cz, and create a profile on Google My Business. If you are an e-shop, you should be in online catalogues and comparison sites, if you are a blogger, try to get in exchange for a link to articles with relevant listings.

Exchange links with relevant sites, but never overdo it. If you’ve gotten a total of 3 links in the last year and you’d get 50 in one week, search engines will find that suspicious.

Get relevant links gradually and mainly from sites that are valuable and are thematically similar to your content. For example, you can analyse the quality of the domain from which you are being offered a link using the Ahrefs tool.

One way is by writing guest posts on other other sites. Caution: buying PR articles on news sites is usually pointless because the links you get from them are not DO-FOLLOW, but NO-FOLLOW. If they are no-follow, it means that such links do not carry the so-called. reference authority. In short, it tells the search engine “disregard this link when ranking the linked page”.

12) Share your content on social media

By sharing on social networks, you get the so-called. social signals. “Social signals” are interactions that happen on social media, such as likes, shares, comments, retweets, etc. These signals can indirectly affect SEO (Search Engine Optimization) for the following reasons:

1. Increased visibility: when your website content is shared on social media, its visibility increases. This can lead to more visits to your website and therefore more links to your content.
2. Credibility and trustworthiness: when your content gets a lot of interaction on social media, it can signal to search engines that your content is useful and valuable, which can also help.
3. Long-term effect: When content gets a lot of “social signals”, it is more likely to be shared in the future, which can lead to a sustained increase in traffic and links.

It is important to note that Google officially states that “social signals” do not directly affect page rankings. However, these interactions can indirectly help SEO by increasing your site’s visibility and authority.

13) Measure and improve content

Use tools like Google Analytics a Google Search Console to measure your website’s performance and identify areas for improvement. Without measuring and monitoring your performance, you won’t know what’s working and what needs improvement.

We recommend keeping a content plan spreadsheet where you keep a list of blog posts with the last update date and notes on what you’ve changed.

Checklist: how to write a quality optimized article on WordPress or Shoptet

Are you a copywriter, have a blog or e-shop and want to create quality articles that will maximize your chance of getting organic traffic? We have checklists from our workshop for WordPress and Shoptet. For the price of one coffee (59 CZK).

Top 10 SEO tools

SEO tools are a good friend to every SEO specialist, but also to the skilled copywriter. Personally, I use Collabim the most, which is great for day-to-day content work. But there are other tools we couldn’t do without, such as Marketing Miner or Ahrefs. Below you will find a list of the most used ones on the Czech market.

Marketing Miner

Marketing Miner is a Czech SEO and marketing tool that provides a wide range of features for data analysis and website optimization. It contains a number of modules that allow you to display various data about:

• domains
• keywords
• specific URLs.

With one click, you can find out what keywords drive the most traffic to your competitors, which content is the best on the domain, or what the biggest competitors the domain has.

Marketing Miner also allows you to perform analyses on larger datasets. If you process keyword analysis, you can use the so-called. miners that are able to find out the keywords that you have uploaded to the application (for example in excel):

• keyword search
• position of the selected domain on keywords
• keyword competitiveness
• suggestions for other related keywords
• and much more.

Collabim

Collabim has similar features to Marketing Miner, but excels primarily in continuous SEO work. You can upload tens of thousands of keywords to Collabim, and every 14 days Collabim will look at what search engine positions your website is ranking for those keywords.

A very useful feature of Collabim is the Holy Grail – a report that fills in an Excel spreadsheet with all the keywords for which your chosen domain ranks in search engines. This is a great way to monitor the content strategy of the competition.

At the same time, you can monitor the performance of multiple domains at the same time in Collabim over the long term.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is an SEO tool focused on comparing domains and finding opportunities in search engines. It has great datasets on links across sites. We often use Ahrefs to analyze the link profile of a domain (what sites link to the domain and how often) and to analyze the competition.

Ahrefs provides all the data it knows about all domains, so it’s very easy to find out what strategy the site is using to build backlinks, what topics are the strongest in searches, and how it got to the top of the search engines in the first place (whether through honest work or more likely fraudulent practices).

Ahrefs also plots the data into graphs that allow you to estimate how the site is performing over the years. Often this is how we uncover content opportunities – we come across a website that is strong on a topic, but hasn’t been cared for in years and is slowly disappearing from search engines. We take up his theme and go beyond it with activity.

O Ahrefs writes excellently Zdeněk Dvořák .

Semrush

Semrush is a popular offshore SEO tool that provides a wide range of features for keyword analysis, position tracking, competitor analysis, backlink management and more. He’s great for foreign countries. Semrush can speak Czech, but is generally one of the more expensive tools and the above mentioned tools are better for the Czech market.

Answerthepublic

Answerthepublic.com is a relatively undiscovered service in the Czech Republic, but we are very excited about it. After entering 1-2 keywords, it will perform a small keyword analysis for you. He speaks Czech. It finds out what other keywords are related to the topic and displays them in clear circles and tables, from which you can come up with a fancy article outline in minutes.

Sitebulb

Sitebulb is a tool that can automate a fairly detailed technical and content analysis of any website. It runs as software on a computer (Windows and Mac) and results in detailed reports on all areas of SEO.

Although Sitebulb is simple to use and creates a nice report, the most important thing is your interpretation and how you really understand SEO. This is the only way to put the recommendations into practice.

Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog is a similar tool to Sitebulb, but less visual and more focused on data collection, and can generally handle larger sites (500,000 URL+) than Sitebulb.

Google Search Console

Google’s Search Console is an absolute staple that everyone trying to drive organic traffic should use. Search Console shows you how your website is performing in search engines, what keywords people from Google are clicking through to your website and where you could improve.

It also has basic technical analysis and will tell you if Google doesn’t like something about your site.

Webmaster list

Seznam Webmaster is a similar tool to Google Search Console, but for Czech Seznam.

PageSpeed Insights

PageSpeed Insights is a free tool from Google that analyses the technical side of your website and offers recommendations on how to improve its performance and user-friendliness.

How to do SEO on WordPress?

The principle of SEO is the same on all platforms, but it is true that SEO on a platform WordPress is easier due to the wide range of tools and plugins available. Plugins for better SEO on WordPress:

• SEO plugins: there are several popular plugins for SEO on WordPress such as Yoast SEO, All in One SEO Pack or Rank Math. We use Yoast SEO on some sites and Rank Math on newer ones. These plugins offer advanced features for content optimization, meta tag management, keyword analysis, etc.
• Image optimization plugins: to speed up the loading of images, it is advisable to compress them. You can use several plugins for this: smush, Imagify or Shortpixel.

All interesting plugins can be found here.

How much does SEO cost

SEO specialists charge from 500 CZK to 5000 CZK per hour, it always depends on the scope of work and the expertise that is needed.

The most expensive are keyword analyses, high-quality ones cost at least 30 thousand, where part of the price includes the cost of analytical tools. Keyword analysis then involves dozens of hours of manual work, which an efficient specialist can simplify by using various scripts, but still usually does not get under 15 hours for larger keywords.

Sample keyword analysis

What to watch out for: keyword analyses are often fudged. If an “SEO specialist” only supplies you with a few dozen keywords that are not categorized in any way, they probably don’t know what they are doing. Are you worried that you didn’t get a comprehensive enough analysis?

We have prepared a sample keyword analysis for you in the format we process and use. The keyword analysis is on the topic of accounting. The sample keyword is free in Discord for our Patreon subscribers.

SEO Audit

Another big item is SEO audits, which include :

• Technical analysis (examining site architecture, crawling, crawling pages with no-index attribute, pages returning 404 error and dead links on the site, evaluating URL structure and page load speed, including analysis of .js and CSS files and sizes of images and videos on the site + many other aspects of e-shops, etc.),
• content analysis (category and product titles, meta titles and search engine descriptions, alt text for images and videos, content pages and internal linking, attention is also paid to crawl depth, redirects, use of filtering and the use of parametric filters to create impactful pages)
• link profile analysis (whether spam links lead to the website, what the link portfolio looks like)
• and makes sure that the website is properly connected to systems such as Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Webmaster List and Bing Webmaster Tool.

Overall, the goal of an SEO audit is to identify and correct issues that could negatively affect a website’s performance in organic search. These audits can cost 5-50k depending on the size of the site/e-shop. The average price is 20 thousand.

Content strategy

The last big item is the creation of content strategy based on keyword analysis. In this case, it is based on keyword analysis combined with competitive analysis and company priorities. Content strategies usually cost 10-20 thousand.

Once you have completed the keyword analysis, SEO audit and content strategy, the monthly price depends on how many errors you need to fix and how much content you and your SEO specialist will be creating together.

Bonus for Patrons: the 17 most common mistakes when working on SEO

For our Patreon subscribers, we made a video describing the seventeen most common and important mistakes that e-shop owners, bloggers and marketers make most often when working on content SEO.

Sources

• Google Search Essentials
• Backlinko.com – Google Ranking Factors