The Three Pillars of SEO: Technology, Content, and Link Building

The Three Pillars of SEO: Technology, Content, and Link Building

The Three Pillars of SEO

In the world of SEO, there isn’t a single winning tactic that will get you to position 1 in Google in the short term. It’s a long process that requires a significant investment of time and attention. To maintain a successful SEO strategy, various factors must work together. We call these factors the three pillars of SEO.

1. Technology

technology pillar seo

How a site is technically structured is of great importance nowadays. This should be understood more broadly than just how a website is built. Here we discuss some aspects that influence Google’s algorithms. If you already have a website, you can quickly read through this to see if you’re adhering to these principles.

Choice of Your CMS

cmses

To easily publish and manage your content, you can use a Content Management System (CMS).

WordPress is the most widely used CMS in the world. It’s estimated that about 35% of all websites use WordPress. And in my opinion, this is justified. WordPress is by far the most SEO-friendly free CMS and so user-friendly that a novice can understand it in just a few minutes. Even for e-commerce purposes, there are suitable plugins or even entire themes that can fulfill this in WordPress itself: Cart66 or WooCommerce for example. For more extensive webshops, Magento is a more suitable CMS.

The absolute must-have plugin for WordPress is Yoast. Read more here about how you can optimize your WordPress with Yoast for SEO.

Speed

Google is sensitive to the user-friendliness of a website. The User Experience (UX) is an important factor for Google, as Google’s goal is to deliver the best search results. Because of this, website loading times are very important. This is determined by the size of your site (in MB) and by your hosting.

The loading time of a page should be as fast as possible. Aim for a loading time of under 2 seconds. Google itself advises bringing your loading time under 1.4 seconds. A good tool to test this is Pingdom or GTMetrix.

testing speed

As you can see in the test report, this page is about 1 MB. Given that there are quite a few images on it, this is a good result. You’ll always have to make compromises in the quality of your pictures and photos if you want to have a low Page Size. A good WordPress plugin for automatically optimizing (reducing) your images is WP smush.it. But there are numerous similar plugins available for this task.

To make your website load faster in general for returning visitors, you can use caching. This ensures that parts of your website are remembered by the browser so it doesn’t have to reload everything the next time. My tip for a plugin for this is W3 Total Cache. The server load time, server uptime, server location, and type of hosting are factors that determine how quickly your website is served. Especially for larger websites with blogs, databases, and webshops, good hosting is extra important.

My favorite hosting is Digital Ocean. For as little as $5 per month, you have access to very fast servers (with SSD drives). If you have an extensive website, also consider signing up for a CDN network. This ensures that your website is loaded from multiple servers simultaneously and it’s also secure. You can arrange this for free with Cloudflare.

Clean Code

Make it easy for search engines, so ensure a clearly written code for your website. Google doesn’t like clutter, and this applies particularly to your site’s code.

Ensure that you (or your website creator) adhere to the W3C standard. To find out if there are errors or warnings in your website, you can use this free tool: W3C Validator.

Installing many plugins can have a negative impact on your code. Especially for WordPress, there are countless poorly written plugins that won’t improve your rating by Google.

Site Structure

Both your visitors and Google dislike having to search. An easy structure of your site is important. Create a hierarchy:

To help search engines understand your site structure, it’s useful to place a sitemap. Google provides a complete explanation on how to create this.

But it might be easier to use a plugin like Yoast which automatically creates a sitemap.

Clean URLs

The importance of a matching URL is diminishing. It now appears to be less important to have a domain name that exactly matches your keywords. For example, if you want to sell hotdogs online. A descriptive URL like “buyhotdogs.com” or “onlinehotdogs.com” will contribute little to nothing to your findability in search engines.

Nevertheless, it’s important to have a clean URL structure. Apart from the fact that this is important for Google, your visitors find this to exude trust. Or rather the opposite: if you have an unadjusted, messy URL, it damages the trust in your website.
In WordPress, you need to set your permalinks correctly. By default, WordPress shows the page ID of your created page:

http://example.com/?p=N

This should be changed to, for example:

http://example.com/2012/post-name/

Internal Links

Interlinking (internal) ensures that search engines can find their way more easily. But, as with everything in SEO, don’t overdo it and keep it relevant.

Also check if your site has any broken links. It’s very detrimental if this occurs in large quantities. Google Webmaster Tools can provide insight into this.

Technology in General

Building a technically good website involves quite a few factors. Here are some more aspects to keep in mind:

If many topics in this chapter were new to you, you’re best off with a WordPress site. Most components are then already well set up or easy to set up with a plugin.

2. Content

content pillar seo

Content Strategy is seen by experts as the “New SEO-Strategy“. The trend is to deliver unique valuable content to your target audience. The path that Google has taken since the Panda and Penguin updates makes qualitative content increasingly important.

This emphasis on quality over quantity ensures that readers appreciate what you’ve written and therefore return. Become an authority in your field! If you think your business doesn’t need that, you’re wrong. Customers and Google are constantly looking for the best providers.

Take for example an online store selling nutritional supplements. This online business could benefit tremendously from blogging about health and fitness. Those interested in these topics like to read about them, and when they find useful information on your blog, they’re likely to order from you.

A less obvious example is Weber’s content strategy. The barbecue brand Weber has set up its so-called Grill Academy, where “the finer points of better barbecuing are taught”. This works in two ways. 1) Barbecue enthusiasts looking for tips can end up on the blogs. These are directly potential customers for Weber. 2) By presenting themselves as the “Academy”, authority is built. This gives people the impression that for really good barbecues, you need to go to Weber.

weber grill academy1

But having well-written content on your site alone is not enough. It starts with target audience and keyword research. Questions you should have clear beforehand:

Good content also encompasses the user experience (UX) on your site. What does a user think of the look and feel of your site? How does a reader behave? Is the entire article read or is it scanned (check Google Analytics for ‘time on page’)?

The Content Cycle

Writing great content always involves going through six fixed steps.

content cycle

1. Idea
Content starts with an idea. What do you want to write about? Consider carefully if this aligns with your general content strategy. Look for a topic that you haven’t covered enough on your site. The topic determines which keywords you will use.

Tip: Create a mind map for your topic. Put your keyword in the center and think about which words are associated with it.

After mind mapping, you can use online tools to further supplement your keyword research. One of the most important tools for this is the Google Keyword Planner.

What type of content do you actually want to create? The easiest is a blog or an article. But perhaps more fun is conducting a (small) survey and publishing the results in an infographic. My first and immediately effective infographic was published on my webshop Leds Refresh and looked like this:

My first infographic based on a survey

What can also be very effective nowadays is placing a guest post. This can be a guest blogger on your site (maybe a friend or colleague), but you can also try to place your content on another website.

2. Research
This is a step that often gets too little attention. Here are some tips:

Google your keyword(s) and analyze the results on the first page. Is there good content and is it what you wanted to write? Learn from this and think about what you’re going to do differently.

Look for your input and search beyond Google. Good sources are, for example, (websites of) trade journals and for more scientific topics, Google Scholar.

Study at least 5 articles about your topic and summarize them. This is your first draft that you’ll work with.

3. Writing
The actual writing of content is only a small part of your total content strategy. Nevertheless, a lot of attention must be paid to this, because you can easily damage readability by wanting to do it too quickly.
I always write my articles in the free online tool Evernote so that I can always access them from any device. Google Drive is a good alternative for this.

As a rule, long texts perform better for your SEO than short ones. Although there are no strict guidelines regarding length, for my articles I use the rule of at least 400 words, but preferably 1000 to 2000 words. This article is actually over 2400 words!

It’s important that you actually go in-depth and don’t keep it superficial. The reader may be challenged to think so that they stay on your site for a long time. Google sees when people keep reading for a long time, and this is one of the factors in Google’s ranking of content.

The title should always contain the keyword and preferably at the beginning. The title should be between 15 and 70 characters and in H1. Work with short paragraphs with clear headings (in H2 or H3).

NOTE: Never copy parts of texts from other websites. There is an unavoidable Google penalty for duplicated content.

4. Publishing
Placing content on your site still has some pitfalls. In your CMS (WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, etc.) you place a new page or a post (blog) and use the title tag and heading tags tactics as explained before.

5. Promoting
The world needs to know that you exist! The main aspects of promoting your content are social media and newsletters. But it doesn’t stop there. Some alternatives to bring your content to attention:

Approach news sites, especially if you’ve obtained interesting results with your research. Create a press release and send it to them. You have the best chance if you have a warm contact at a news site because you know someone (or through someone) who works there. A handy tool to keep track of this is BuzzSumo.

Approach other blogs and tell them about what you’ve done. Perhaps they can write something about it. Try to build a relationship with blogs that are related to your industry.

6. Maintain
After researching, writing, publishing, and promoting truly high-quality content, readers will naturally follow. Always provide the opportunity for readers to comment on your blogs and articles, and encourage this as well. You can do this, for example, by asking your readers if they have experienced something similar or what their findings are. Asking for reactions will actually generate interaction, which Google also notices and which in turn leads to better appreciation of your content.

Upon completing this cycle, it’s actually time for a new start again. Consistently delivering content is an important factor. Try to keep the publication time phases roughly the same. Every day would of course be ideal, but a guideline of at least one article per week is recommended.

3. Links

Links pillar SEO

Google became the most popular search engine by doing one thing differently than all other search engines in the early nineties: indexing links. The idea of Google’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, was that the quality of a website could be measured by how many other websites link to it. This is comparable to citations in scientific articles. The quality of a website was expressed in the PageRank and had a scale from 0 to 10. The PageRank is still used, although this method of measurement has become outdated as more and more factors influence the evaluation of a website.

Link building is still one of the most important aspects within SEO. Link building is the creation of hyperlinks from other websites to your site with the aim of introducing readers to your website’s content. Not only the number of incoming links, but especially their quality is nowadays an extremely important factor in organic search results.

The trend in recent years has shifted from link building to link earning. Instead of purely focusing on obtaining links through link exchanges, link farming, and other black hat techniques, naturally acquiring links to your content is becoming increasingly important.

Link strategies are increasingly becoming part of the content strategy.

Conclusion

SEO is complex. You need to think about dozens of things at once. We can divide these into the three pillars of SEO:

When you have all three components well in order, you will automatically rise in the search results.

Do you want to know more about the possibilities of SEO and about creating good content? Then check out Hulc.io.