People run millions of searches every day โ is your store anywhere in the results?
Landing on the first page of Google can be the difference between a business that grows and one that doesn't. SEO basics are not as complicated as they look: most people running websites understand only a little of it, so getting the fundamentals right is usually enough to pull ahead. In this guide, you'll learn what SEO is, the difference between white hat and black hat practices, and the four foundations of a strategy that works โ keyword research, on-page optimization, accessibility for both people and crawlers, and backlinks.
SEO, or search engine optimization, is the work of improving how a site appears in the free, unpaid results on engines like Google. You do it by learning what your customers search for, optimizing your pages for those keywords, making sure both people and crawlers can use your site, and earning links from other websites.
๐ Article overview
- What SEO means
- White hat and black hat SEO
- Step 1: find out what your customers are searching for
- Step 2: optimize your store pages for your target keywords
- Step 3: make sure search engines and people can reach your store
- Step 4: build backlinks from other sites
- Frequently asked questions
๐ฏ What SEO means
Search engine optimization means improving how a website or a single page appears in the free, unpaid results on engines like Google, so it lands near the top. That comes from understanding how search engines work, knowing which factors decide the order of results, improving those factors, and fixing the errors and problems on your site.
Put another way: SEO is the process of improving your content online so a search engine is happy to show it as a top result for a particular keyword.
๐ฏ White hat and black hat SEO
Practices for preparing a site for search engines fall into two camps.
White hat covers the methods search engines allow โ the kind Google publishes for site owners. It's about how your content is structured and how good your site actually is.
Black hat covers the tricks that are rejected and off-limits, which the white hat camp sees as an unfair way to climb the results. The black hat argument back is that the whole point of optimizing for search is to get your site ranking ahead of everyone else's, whatever the method.
๐ฃ Step 1: find out what your customers are searching for
You can't improve your site without knowing what your customers are searching for. The best place to start is plain common sense.
Say you run a mandi restaurant in Riyadh. It takes no SEO genius to guess that your customers are typing things like:
- "restaurants in Riyadh"
- "mandi restaurant in Riyadh"
- "mandi food in Riyadh"
Before you do anything else, think about what your customers might search for and write your ideas down. You can also just ask them.
a) Find the most common way people search for your business
Some of your customers search using exactly the words and phrases you'd use yourself. Most of them are another story.
So the first job is finding the most common way people search for what you do. Use the ideas you already wrote down. Start by searching Google for one of the words or phrases on your list โ it doesn't matter how simple or how long the phrase is.
Here's a deliberately simple one: "I'm looking for a mandi restaurant in Riyadh in Saudi Arabia please".
These are the top results for that query:
b) Dig into the more specific searches your customers run
Now that you know how people search for your business, go deeper into the more specific searches they run around what you do.
The simplest place to start is Google's autocomplete. Go to Google, start typing a query into the search box, and don't press Enter. Google immediately suggests extra search terms that other people have used:
If that feels like too much manual work, open a keywords explorer and check its search suggestions report. It automates the process and shows the keywords Google's autocomplete generates alongside useful SEO metrics such as monthly search volume and keyword difficulty.
One option: https://ahrefs.com/
If you want to know what questions people are asking โ and searching for โ look for the "People also ask" box in Google's results:
c) Look for popular topics in your field
To do well at SEO you need to understand how people talk about the space you work in and the problems they run into. Take every chance you get to talk to customers, and pay attention to the language they use.
Doing that in person is excellent, and it also takes a long time. So here are a couple of places to find the words people use when they talk about your subject:
1. Forums. There are plenty of communities where people discuss almost any subject. [Verify: the Arabic says "where people discuss travel", which does not match this article's restaurant example โ it looks like leftover text from a travel-industry source.]
2. Facebook and LinkedIn groups. LinkedIn leans toward B2B markets, while Facebook has a group for nearly everything. Any site or social network with a lot of visitors and user-generated content can be a source of inspiration and keyword ideas.
๐ฃ Step 2: optimize your store pages for your target keywords
Keyword research is only the first step toward more free search traffic. Your pages also have to be well organized and actually satisfy the person behind the search if you want to rank for the keywords you picked.
Start with the experience your visitors get. Use a design and typography that make the content easy to read, and remove anything unnecessary โ pop-ups, subscribe boxes, and the like โ that gets in a reader's way.
On-page optimization is the next step. Even targeting the most profitable keyword with the "best" content won't help if your pages aren't optimized for search engines. Here is what setting your pages up for success involves.
a) Create content that matches search intent
Wanting to rank for a keyword doesn't mean you deserve to, even with all the traditional on-page elements in place. The reason is search intent.
In short, there are three main types of search:
- Navigational: they're looking for a specific site โ for example, "Riyadh airport".
- Informational: they want to learn more about a subject โ for example, "things to do in Riyadh".
- Transactional: they want to buy a specific product or service โ for example, "book a hotel in Riyadh".
Searches with high commercial intent are naturally more valuable to a business, because the people running them are closer to buying and more likely to spend if they land on your site.
But intent isn't always obvious from the query itself. Take "best restaurant in Riyadh". You might think, "my restaurant is the best in Riyadh, so this is a transactional term I can rank my home page for." Not so fast. [Verify: the Arabic stops here and never explains what the intent behind this query actually turns out to be.]
b) Use short, descriptive URLs
Your page's web address signals to search engines what the page is about. Get it right the first time, because you should avoid changing it later if you can.
Keep your URL structure as simple as possible. Organize your content so URLs are built logically and stay readable to a person โ real words wherever possible, not long ID numbers.
In other words, don't go with:
domain.com/56945602_86587356.asp
when you could go with something descriptive like:
domain.com/riyadh-guide
The other advantage of descriptive URLs is that they usually contain the keyword you're targeting, or at least words from it. Don't force keywords into a URL if the result reads unnaturally.
c) Write titles and descriptions worth clicking
Search engines use specific page elements when they build a search result. Despite the name, the meta title tag doesn't appear anywhere on your page โ it sets the browser tab name, and Google and other search engines use it when they display the page in results.
Worth knowing: Google doesn't always respect the title tag you set. Sometimes it chooses to show something slightly different.
The title tag is still a good opportunity to write a headline that:
1. Contains the keyword you want the page to rank for.
2. Is compelling enough to make searchers click through to your site.
Conventional wisdom says keep it under 60 characters so it isn't truncated in results. In practice it's less about character count than pixel width, so it's worth using a SERP pixel tool to check your titles aren't being cut off.
One option: https://serpsim.com/
d) Use headings and subheadings to build a logical structure
Use standard HTML heading tags, H1 through H6, so search engines can follow your page structure and see how important each section is.
Reserve the H1 for the title of your page, and ideally include the keyword you're targeting, or something closely related to it. A page can carry more than one H1, but we recommend sticking to one.
Use H2 for the main section headings on the page. These should also include your target keyword wherever it fits naturally โ don't force it โ and they're a good place for the extra, longer-tail keywords you want to rank for.
Every time you go one level deeper into your content, move to the next heading level: H3 for subheadings inside an H2 section, and so on. A clear, consistent structure makes your content easier for search engines to classify, and easier for people to read.
e) Optimize your images
Images are great for people, but search engines can struggle to understand them.
Here's the point in practice. Upload a photo of butter to Google's Cloud Vision API โ its machine-learning image recognition tool โ at https://cloud.google.com/vision/, and this is what comes back:
Google is 91% sure this is a picture of cheese, and it's wrong.
To help Google and other search engines understand your images, describe them with an alt tag. In this case a good one would be alt="Butter".
๐ฃ Step 3: make sure search engines and people can reach your store
When you work on SEO, remember you're serving two separate audiences: human readers, and the bots search engines use to index your site.
Bots have become smarter and more human-like, but plenty of differences remain. Your goal is a positive experience for both.
Building pages that are properly optimized for bots can get technical, so while it's worth understanding the points below, this is an area many store owners hand to a professional. Here are the essentials.
a) Make sure your site loads fast
People and search engines both prioritize load speed. Studies suggest up to 40% of people leave sites that take more than 3 seconds to load.
b) Make sure your site works on mobile
According to one study, more than 60% of searches now happen on mobile devices.
Use Google's mobile-friendly test to check your site works on mobile: https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly
c) Install an SSL certificate
HTTPS is officially one of the ranking signals Google uses.
You can tell a site is using SSL because there's a padlock in the address bar:
Running without an SSL certificate is also a security problem, especially if you run an ecommerce site or accept form submissions.
๐ Important notes
Salla installs an SSL certificate on every store, free.
d) Upload a robots.txt file
Where your sitemap describes the full structure of your site, a robots.txt file gives search engine crawlers specific instructions about which parts of the site they should and shouldn't index.
e) Link internally between related posts and pages
Linking strategically between pages on your site is a good way to speed up how quickly search engines crawl it, and to point them at the pages that matter most.
There are several strategies for this โ hub and spoke, pillar content, and others. They work, but they can get complicated. For now, focus on building a solid structure with plenty of links between related pages.
In our example, you could create a page targeting "Riyadh guide" and link it out to separate pages covering "sights in Riyadh", "restaurants in Riyadh", and so on.
๐ฃ Step 4: build backlinks from other sites
Link building is critical to a working SEO strategy. If you're ready to spend time and money producing content, be ready to commit at least as much to promoting it and building links to it.
Google itself acknowledges that backlinks are one of its three ranking factors.
There are many tactics for getting other websites to link to your pages. It's also worth setting aside time to review and analyze how your competitors build theirs.
Guest blogging
Guest blogging is writing for another website in your field.
A lot of people believe guest blogging died shortly after Google published a warning about using guest posts to build links.
Google doesn't discourage these articles when they inform users, educate another site's audience, or raise awareness of your cause or company. What breaks Google's guidelines on link schemes is when the main goal is generating links back to the author's site at scale.
One thing that crosses the line: using or hiring writers who don't know the subjects they're writing about.
As long as your guest posts are useful, informative, and good, there's nothing to worry about.
Guest blogging works for link building when you follow three basic rules:
1. You publish on a trusted site with a large, relevant audience.
2. You produce a high-quality piece that's genuinely useful to that site's audience.
3. You link to related resources on your own site that help the audience go deeper.
Done that way, guest posts become a strong tool for building your brand, generating referral traffic, and improving your rankings.
โ Frequently asked questions
How do I measure my store's SEO efforts?
The last step in setting up an SEO strategy is working out how to track your performance. There are so many methods and metrics available that it's easy to get lost, so focus on the fundamentals. The two that matter most are:
- Traffic. Measure it with Google Analytics.
- Rankings. Track how your content ranks on Google over time. One way is Google Search Console, where you can find average position, impressions, and clicks for different keywords.
SEO is competitive, but it's still by far the most effective way to drive sustainable traffic to your site. The work you put into optimizing compounds over time, so the more consistent you are, the more traffic it returns.
Do I need an SEO expert?
An SEO expert is someone trained to improve your visibility in search. Follow this guide and you should learn enough to get well on your way to an optimized site. Beyond that, you may want to bring in a specialist to review your pages.
Hiring one is a significant decision that will probably improve your site and save you time. Research both the potential benefits and the damage irresponsible SEO can do to a site. Many SEO agencies and consultants offer services that are genuinely useful to site owners, including:
- Reviewing your site's content or structure.
- Technical advice on site development โ hosting, redirects, error pages, and JavaScript use.
- Content development.
- Running online business development campaigns.
- Keyword research.
- Expertise in specific markets and regions.
What's the difference between white hat and black hat SEO?
White hat covers the methods search engines allow, built around content structure and site quality. Black hat covers the rejected tricks used to climb the results by other means.
Do I need to install an SSL certificate on my Salla store?
No. Salla installs an SSL certificate on every store for free, so your store already runs on HTTPS.
How long should my page title be?
Conventional wisdom says under 60 characters, but what actually gets truncated is measured in pixels, not characters. Run your titles through a SERP pixel tool to check.
SEO rewards consistency more than cleverness. Learn what your customers type, write pages that answer them, keep the site fast and reachable, and earn links โ then keep doing it.