Core Principles of SEO, Part 1

Let’s start this lesson with a question: how often do you click on the second page of Google?

Only in desperate circumstances? Accidentally? Almost never? And when you do click on it, you’re subjected to the wilderness of unproven sources, AI-generated articles, potential malware risks—and everyone who doesn’t quite know how to properly leverage SEO.

With that harrowing image in mind, it’s easy to see the importance of the first page—and the necessity of a proper SEO strategy. But before you get to establishing said strategy, it’s always best to bring it back to the oftentimes-less-than-basic basics with the core SEO principles, so you can hit the digital ground running.

      1. Usability

When developing your plan, it’s easy to mentally separate your site’s usability from your actual SEO practices. I mean, what does a neat menu have to do with keywords and rankings?

Think of it this way: SEO draws the users in, and your site’s usability helps keep them there. But there’s still a sliver of overlap that makes the whole thing come together. Despite there being some aspects of SEO or usability that still exist independently, that sliver makes them inextricable.

Above all else, user experience (UX)—and SEO as a byproduct—remains king. This means following responsible web design practices to make your site easy to navigate and easily accessible. Just don’t forget to make it ADA accessible, too.

Ultimately, this helps encourage repeat users, fosters inclusivity, builds future business, and is a great means of developing a loyal following. But more on ways to further increase your site’s usability later.

      2. Accessibility Part 1: ADA Compliance

Before we jump into ways you can ensure a fluid UX, let’s first touch on accessibility guidelines. Since 1995, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has curated the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). They’re a set of recommendations for making online content more accessible for all users—especially those with disabilities. The four main points of WCAG 2.1 (the present version of these standards) are as follows:

• Perceivable: Any information and components on your site must be presented to users in a way they can perceive—meaning it cannot be invisible to all their senses.
• Operable: Users must be able to operate and use all components of your site, and there can’t be any interactions they cannot perform.
• Understandable: The information and operation of your site must be understandable by all users.
• Robust: Your website’s content must remain accessible and easily interpreted, even as technologies and user agents continue to evolve.

It’s worth noting that the official W3C recommendations page points out the WCAG covers a wide range of issues but doesn’t address the individual needs of users. These guidelines are a living, breathing thing so it’s best to revisit them occasionally.

      3. Accessibility Part II: Web Content

Surprise! The “later” I mentioned above has arrived. To make the four abstract WCAG points a little more concrete, the following are a few of the ways you can improve your site’s overall usability:

• Descriptive page titles
• Proper heading hierarchy
• Descriptive alternative text
• Clear navigation
• Easily readable copy with legible fonts, colors, and formatting
• Accessible interactive elements
• Descriptive multimedia transcripts and captions
• Clear and consistent site structure
• Proper color contrast

…and the list goes on. But ignoring even a single one of these can cause someone to not want (or be able to) user your site. So it’s always best to cross your digital t’s and dot your web-based i’s.

      4. Accessibility Part III: Readability, Crawling, and You

After all this talk about accessibility, you’d think it’s a huge player in search engine rankings, right? Ultimately, Google doesn’t factor it in when determining SEO rankings, but it does value user experience. As it turns out, many of the same principles that help create an easily usable website help make it easily accessible and readable, too.

However, this section isn’t about helping out actual, living humans. It’s about catering to our algorithmic overlords. The Google algorithm values the following (non-exhaustive) list to do its job correctly:

• Clear and consistent site structure
• Proper URL structures
• Optimized Robots.txt file to allow essential pages and avoid blocking CSS and JS
• Proper HTML markup and headings
• Optimized page speed
• Proper canonical tags
• Regular content updates
• Properly structured data

With these elements in place, the Google crawler can easily access and read your site, so you can improve your SEO ranking. If it can’t crawl, it can’t rank.

      5. Loading, Loading, Loading…

Likewise, making sure everything on your site is fully optimized to load fast and seamlessly is a huge factor in improving your SEO and ranking. This means ensuring images are a file size, resolution, and format that won’t bog your website down, limiting the number of HTTP requests, and employing the use of a caching plugin. Among a whole litany of other techniques that I won’t get into here. It’s a lot.

6. Stick, Don’t Bounce

Trampolines? Fun to bounce on. The hotel bed while your parents are yelling at you to stop? Also fun to bounce on. The Internet? Not fun to bounce on.

Bounce rate—or how quickly users visit your site and leave—is not a ranking factor in SEO. However, it is a good indicator of how well your SEO is working. So keep it down! A high bounce rate might be indicative of a slow load time, and if that’s the case it’s time to get troubleshooting to address the problem at hand.

Or, you can just go jump on a trampoline. That’s just as fun.

What SEO Principle Should You Focus On?

Well, all of them. This isn’t even the whole list—for the second installation of the core SEO principles, click here. But the importance of the ones I’ve listed above shouldn’t let you forget the fact that keywords are still important. They’re all just one part of a larger puzzle of user experience and catering to a rather confusing algorithm that can be a bit of a headache to put together at times.

Alec Sarnowski is a content writer, SEO junkie, and serial comma abuser for one of the most dynamic content agencies in Atlanta.