What is Search Engine Optimization

What is SEO?

SEO refers to search engine optimization, a set of practices designed to improve the positioning and appearance of web pages in organic search results. In order to improve the traffic and quality of the website, it is important that an SEO strategy is used for discovering and accessing the online content. In simple terms, SEO helps improve your website's visibility, automatically bringing in the desired results, attracting visitors to the website and turning them into your business customers or clients who keep coming back. Search engines need SEO efforts to attain page ranking and a positive user experience.

In other words, SEO is all about fulfilling the user requirements by creating the necessary content which is relevant, high quality based, leading to the best user experience. Whenever the user searches for a product, the goal is to show up your website or business on the top, so that people find and click on your website.

Why is SEO important for marketing?

To gain a clear understanding of how SEO is important, let us break down the SEO definition and understand more.

Organic search results: It is important that the search engines have to pull up the results page when the user enters a query. Once the results appear, it includes the Ads on the first page and is positioned based on the organic ranking algorithms. The organic search results are distinct from the ads appearing on the Search engine results page (SERP).

Below is an example of how the results are categorized.

Quality of organic traffic: The user’s query must match the content on the SERP results. If the user searches apple computers while the website is about selling apples, then this is entirely irrelevant. There is no match between the query and the product, which does not lead to conversions. Hence, it is crucial that the question and the results in the website match, providing quality content.
Quantity of organic traffic: This refers to the number of people visiting the website through the organic search results. With an increase in the high-quality visitors to the website or business, there will be a drastic increase in the conversions made.

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How does SEO work?

The crawlers, spiders, or bots are used for gathering the relevant information which can be found over the internet. The search engine algorithms and the ranking factors are some of the criteria that are used for performing SEO. Whenever the user types in or searches for a particular query using the search box, the search engine will utilize the algorithms that help retrieve the best and most valuable results from the content in the search engine. The results are called organic results and include all kinds of information in multiple formats like text, images, videos, business listings, and many more.

The above image shows some of the criteria and their utilization for performing SEO as per some of the recent surveys conducted by the experts.

Where Do We Use SEO?

Website: SEO improves traffic to your website or business, visibility, and ranking.

YouTube Channels and Videos: SEO helps reach a wider audience and grows organically in YouTube and Google, which further helps increase video engagement metrics.

How do search engines work?

SEO is simply called a product of the search engine companies, which helps in developing the ranking factors and utilizing them to identify the relevant content based on the user query. Crawling and indexing the same before determining the relevant content is important.

Below are the steps which have to be followed:

• Crawling: The crawler is used for discovering the new and existing pages that are available on the web. These crawlers are also called spiders which help re-discover the content, which further needs internal linking and linking back-backlinks in the optimization process in SEO.
• Indexing: Indexing is used by search engines to store the content and provide the same via the search results. Indexing takes place after crawling. Each page will be indexed, and there will not be any blocked, spam, or duplicate pages in the results when provided on the SERP page.
• Ranking: After crawling and indexing are done, the search engines perform analysis based on some of the ranking factors like keyword usage, speed, mobile friendliness, backlink profile, and many more.

How to optimize for Google?

Google is capable of using almost more than 200 ranking factors as of now and was around 10,000 in the year 2010. Google works on ranking the web pages, not the websites. The different keywords and topics can be ranked on different pages.

Let us discuss some of the critical factors that help in optimization for Google:

• Crawlability: Google uses crawlers or spiders that follow a link on the pages they already know. The crawling begins from the home page to the other pages on the website. Some parameters, like non-indexed pages, poor internal links, and blocks in robot.txt files, cannot be crawled.
• Mobile-friendliness: Most users hit the back button when the mobile shows a desktop version. The pages which are not optimized for mobiles give such an experience. Google’s mobile-friendly testing tool helps check whether the mobile pages are mobile-friendly.

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• Pagespeed: Page speed is a ranking factors that determine how fast the page is loading. Google users platforms like ahref sites for determining the fastness of the webpage.

• Search intent: You can search for the relevant keywords using the keyword research tool and identify the best keywords which have a higher search volume.

• Backlinks: Google uses a page rank algorithm to determine the backlinks. Google uses a backlink checker to determine the top 100 links and reach out to those sets of people for backlinking.

• Authority: Boosting the authority of the page is a tough task, as it definitely requires backlinks. You can check for the best by linking report to identify the most authoritative pages.

• Content quality: The content should be created effectively. It has to be short and easily understandable to the users. Linking to some of the useful resources also helps.

How Does Google Rank Websites?

Google follows two many things called relevance and authority. Google uses the ranking algorithm for ranking a website and also uses the information gathered by crawlers or spiders. If the page is on the top of the SERP page, it shows how relevant and communicative the website is based on the user query.

All results appearing on the SERP pages are based on the algorithm, and no manual intervention exists to change the rankings. All the ranking factors help you place your website on the top through SEO.

Types of SEO:

SEO is categorized into three main types, which are discussed below:

On-page SEO: The primary focus of On-page SEO is to ensure that the content available on the website is relevant to the users. It includes the keywords and phrases in the heading or the body of the pages and the internal and external links, meta descriptions, etc. the content management systems are used for creating the content.
Off-page SEO: Off-page optimization is a technique that is deployed for improving the rankings of the website through the activities that take place outside the website. Backlinks are used for off-page optimization.
Technical SEO: Technical SEO is a technique that is used specifically during the building or maintenance process of a particular website. Some of the technical optimization manipulations that can be performed are XML sitemap, structuring the content for a positive user experience, improving the website performance, etc.

On-page SEO:

In On-Page SEO, we will deal with controllable SEO elements.

• Keyword Research: Use the keyword research planner to identify the keywords that best suit your topic. Choose the keywords which are of higher search volume.
• Title Tag: The title tag is the tag that appears on the search engine results page.
• Meta Description: Meta description is generally a blurb that appears below the title tag.
• Header Tags: The header tags include the H1 title and H2 headings.
• URL Structure: The URL has to be short and clean.

• Content Optimization: The content has to be rich and easily understandable, rework on the grammar and ensure that the content is clear. Use content management solutions for creating content.

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• Internal Link: Internal link optimizations can be done through the anchor text, which follows two rules: Optimizing the anchor text with the target keywords and also choosing the link placement effectively. The anchor text has to be chosen carefully.

• External links: External links are hyperlinks which are pointing from one target domain to another document in which the link is available on the source.

• Sitemaps: A sitemap is generally a file that provides information on the videos, pages, and other files on the website, along with their relationships. A sitemap is needed when the site is large, has lots of media content, and has only a few external links.
• Robot.txt: The robot.txt file helps in telling the crawlers of search engines about which URLs the crawler can access on the website.
• Schema: Schema is generally a code that helps search engines in understanding the content better and representing it better.

• Alt text: Alt text is used for providing the context to the image displayed by providing the information to the search engine crawlers and helping them index correctly.

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Off-page SEO:

In off-page SEO, activities occur outside the website. Below are some of the critical activities that help in performing off-page SEO.

• Link Building: Link building is building links from other websites. There are different types of links that can be attained:
  A.earned or natural links: The brand will be mentioned organically by the consumers or the establishers.
  Built links: These links are out of effort - like mentioning or attritioning them.
• Social Media: Social media is among the best ways to increase search engine ranking. It helps in attaining domain authority. When the content is shared over social media, we see diverse traffic toward it, meaning it is high-quality. Hence, backlinks, shares, and engagement help in building domain authority.
• Content Marketing: Content marketing helps reach the target audience and address the users with the information needed. Blog posts, offer pages, surveys, reports, and guest posting help in driving traffic to the website.

Technical SEO:

Technical SEO deals with the technical aspects of the website. Below are some of the key characteristics of a technically optimized website.

• Fastness: The website needs to load fast as people never wait for the page to load. Use the speed-checking tools to determine the fastness of the website.
• Crawlable search engines: As search engines use crawlers and spiders for crawling, an internal linking structure must be used to identify important content.
• No dead links: We need to ensure that there are no dead links to the website. A 404 error occurs when the link leads to a non-existing page.
• XML sitemapS: An XML sitemap is a roadmap for the search engines that includes the list of all the web pages. There is no need for an XML sitemap if the website holds an internal linking structure.

White-Hat SEO

White Hat SEO is one of the best SEO practices that help create and optimize the website successfully. It helps improve the ranking on the search engine results pages and regulates the website's integrity. Some of the white-hat SEO techniques are:

• Using rich keywords, and descriptive meta tags
• Providing the best quality and content to the website visitors
• Easy website navigation

Black Hat SEO:

Black Hat SEO is a practice that is against the search engine guidelines and helps rank SERPs high. A few black hat SEO techniques include cloaking, keyword stuffing, private-linked networks, etc. These unethical tactics provide instant results but negatively impact the website if Google identifies the same.

Gray Hat SEO:

Gray Hat SEO is riskier when compared with white hat SEO. Gray Hat SEO techniques will not lead to any website bans. All the content or material published per the Gray Hat technique will be termed ill-defined. Gray Hat SEO might help keep the website traffic constant but might bring you negative consequences.

Do's and Don'ts of SEO

Some of the Do's and Don'ts of SEO are listed below:

• Do use long tail keywords
• Do use related keywords
• Do create the best possible user experience.
• Do create titles and meta descriptions
• Do keep track of the site metrics

Don'ts:

• Don't ignore the user search intent
• Don't do keyword stuffing
• Don't keep the pages slow
• Do not use incorrect linking methods

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 Conclusion:

As everything has turned online, digital marketing has gained vast demand in the past few years and is still growing. Improving your businesses through digital concepts and optimizing through SEO helps you reach the target audience which has a higher ranking. With this, there is growth in the opportunities around you in the digital marketing era. Get trained and be a skilled professional to grab the best among the available options.

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