What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a process that improves the visibility of a website or web page on a search engine resulting in more traffic and higher sales of the business without investing as much capital as more traditional marketing strategies. SEO provides long-lasting benefits, as when your website begins to appear at the top of a search engine results page, it will start receiving organic traffic (traffic coming directly from search engine results). This will continue to generate new customers and revenue as long as the website’s results page ranking is maintained.
Search Engine Optimization Is About Teamwork
SEO requires multiple departments, and its success is contingent on all of those departments working as a team. Departments include: design management, content management, analyzers, and SEO experts. Some SEO work involves business analysis, but the most important part involves the ranking algorithms of different search engines. These algorithms can evolve over time and will be discussed later in this article. The basic criteria of these algorithms is that sites and web pages with high-quality content, more external referral links, and more user engagement will have a higher ranking on the search engine results page (SERP).
Advantages Of Seeding SEO In Your Business
SEO helps small business owners to create fast, powerful, and user-friendly sites that rank higher in search engines.This attracts more qualified leads to your website and may increase conversion rates. Search engine optimization also helps build brand awareness for your business, as search engine users are more likely to trust sites on the first page of search results than to trust big name brands.
Best for SEO Beginners
If you have just started your business and want to increase your presence in the market of the modern era then there is no better time to get started on SEO. When you start investing time into SEO early you are setting it up to grow alongside your business.
Better UI May Get You More Traffic
Business owners who are just starting will need a website that’s smooth and loads quickly. Some people who are familiar with older SEO techniques believe that it’s just about some small tricks, but Google has vastly improved its artificial intelligence and it really takes into account user interface (UI) and user experience on your website. A well-structured, clean, and orderly website makes temporary visitors stay longer, reducing bounce rates and increasing page views. This creates a better image of your brand as your site interacts with every single client according to his/her requirements in your absence.
Better Brand Awareness With SEO
Increasing brand awareness is one of the benefits of getting a better SERP ranking. As your website starts appearing on the first page of any search engine’s ranking, you’ll start getting more site visitors, and by extension more potential customers. Consumers are more likely to trust a brand that appears on the first page of results than one that does not. Compelling content contributes to making this possible.
That’s why small businesses that want to build brand awareness (local or national) need to invest in SEO and start getting the highest rankings of key terms related to their business. We are no longer in the 1990s; search engines now play an integral role in creating and maintaining your brand.
Take, for example, two companies in the same industry that sell similar products at similar prices. One has an optimized website and the other has a non-optimized website. Considering the other things being equal, which company do you think will attract more customers to visit their website through local search? Which business might grow faster and more successfully? Even someone with little to no business experience knows the answer to this question. It’s intuitive.
Search engines and SEO are very powerful. If your competitor is doing SEO marketing, you just need to ask yourself why you have not invested in such a strategy.
Stages of SEO
The SEO process consists of six general stages:
- Research, including business research, competition analysis, status assessment and keyword research
- Planning and strategy, including how to manage content, create website links, manage social network presence, and implement technology strategy decisions
- Implementation of optimization decisions on the website and on the entire website’s web pages.
- Monitor web spider activity, traffic, search engine rankings and other parameters to generate reports that will be evaluated.
- Assessment, including the overall effectiveness of the verification strategy (and its implementation) and the objectives, set out in the reference process
- Maintenance, when a minor or major problem with the operation of the website is handled as it occurs
Types of SEO:
SEO is a complex field which requires a great deal of experience and analysis. It’s not possible to cover all the complexities in one single article, so we’ll stick to the basics, which fall into two categories: On-page (work done on your site) and Off-page (work done on the internet).
This will help you get started with SEO. However, if you plan to pursue it as a primary marketing strategy, we strongly recommend that you read more complex SEO aspects as soon as you understand the basics.
On-Page SEO
The On-Page SEO is what you do on your own website to get a high ranking on search engines. Your goal is obviously for your site to appear on the first page, possibly even in the first three search results. Page references are not as heavy as off-page rankings, but if you don’t understand the basics then your off-page search engine optimization is unlikely to produce results.
Value of Content and Keywords
Your content must be written in a way that increases the value of your audience. It should be a mix of long and short posts on your blog or website. You shouldn’t try “key phrases” (referring to a key phrase over and over again in an attempt to attract search engines) because it is now penalized by search engines. However, your text should contain at least one of the most important key phrases, preferably two or three times. Ideally, it should appear in your title. However, readability and value are much more important than today’s keyword positioning.
Meta Descriptions
Meta descriptions are not a huge ranking factor, but it is the text that people will see in search engines. Be sure it is well written and you will likely see more visitors. The meta description is HTML code – you can find links to HTML code and their usage at the end of this article.
Title tag
Try using your key phrase in the title (as much as possible), but keep it fewer than 70 characters if you can. Make sure the title is clear and natural.
Importance of Headings (H1, H2, H3 and other tags)
Always use the H tag to optimize the layout of your content. Also, try to use variants of key phrases in some headlines. Do not repeat key phrases in the title unless absolutely necessary. (This will not prevent you from repeating key phrases in the body of the content). The H tag is also found in the HTML code. You will find links to HTML code and its usage at the end of this section.
Consequences of Copied Content
Do not copy the content. Don’t do this even if you have a smart CMS (Content Management System) that allows you to create multiple URLs for a single page. Google hates duplicate content and removes it from the search. If you need to create multiple URLs, you must first perform a normalized search.
Readable URL
Many content management systems have the option to create a URL from the title text if you enable it or else you’ll have to do it manually. ABC.com/seo-is-best-marketing-technique is way better than the URL: ABC.com/2871648.
Robots.txt and On-Page SEO
Check your robots.txt file. Make sure you learn to hide content that you don’t want to index in search engines and search engines can also search for content that you want to index. (You will want to hide elements such as duplicates that may be penalized by search engines, but are still required on your site).
Adaptive Themes
Use adaptive themes for your website. These are specially designed themes that change the shape based on the device used to access the site. Older themes display poorly on mobile devices and as a result appear lower in ranking on mobile search.
Image Tags
Study more about alt tags and use them appropriately with your images. If you learn to use the appropriate labels correctly, you can also refer to the images. Don’t send spam in your key phrases, but use variants of the theme at all costs.
You may have to create a lot of content for each key phrase, depending on the level of competition. These basic rules do not apply to all On-Page SEO but should be enough to get you started.
Off-Page SEO & Backlinks
If all of this work on the page is not enough, then you should also work on off-page SEO. Fortunately, this boils down to one main idea: creating backlinks. Now the real question is, What the term “backlink” is? It simply is a link to link to your site outside of your site. For example, the word “Google” is a backlink that is referring to some other site. However, before you start creating 10,000 inbound links, you need to understand some basics. Again, building an upstream link is a complex area so if you want to start using SEO, you should read it after mastering the basics.
Internal Link Building
Why create a link? Google’s algorithms are complex and constantly changing, but backlinks are still an important factor in how each search engine determines which site ranks with which keyword. Link building is one of the many strategies used in search engine optimization (SEO) because links tell Google that your website is a quality resource worth mentioning. As a result, sites with more backlinks tend to get higher rankings.
However, we can control our site ranking by linking our own pages to our own other pages as well. We can:
- Determine the anchor text to use.
- Determine the page that points to the anchor text.
- Make sure the quality and content of the linked pages are high (because this is our page!).
It’s important to create external links to your site, but by focusing more on optimizing these internal links, you can create high-quality internal links with rich anchor text to the appropriate pages, which will give you an unparalleled ranking boost.
Avoid Blackhat While Using Backlinks
Black hat SEO should be avoided at all costs. This is essentially a link to spam. You can pay for peanuts and get results in a short amount of time. Then Google will see how you achieved these results and permanently delete your site from search engine rankings. Now you need a new website, new content, etc.
Do Backlinks From Social Media Count?
Another place where backlinks are frequent is social media. If people share your content on social media, search engines will notice it and provide you with a search ranking.
This means that if you focus on off-page search engine optimization, you also need to learn how to do some long-term social media marketing. However, before you learn another form of marketing, it’s best to first master the basics of SEO (if this is your main strategy).
The only strategy to get organic backlinks is to create great content and encourage others to promote your content. In order to get backlinks from social media at the beginning, you must have a little knowledge of social media marketing which will get you organic shares on any social media platform. It will get you organic traffic as well if your content is strong enough to proliferate multiple social media platforms.
Backlink’s Relevance Matters
Nothing is worse than spammers, it doesn’t help your marketing. If you want your content’s link on another website, make sure it’s relevant to the keyword of the backlink or otherwise it may turn into a spammed backlink which may negatively affect your website’s ranking. Google’s artificial intelligence can catch your relevance with the other content. If it’s not relatable then your ranking will be dropped.
Conclusion
Search engines let the customers find businesses or services providers online, so search engine optimization really comes handy. Search engine optimization can be very powerful, but in the cases where a business requires customers today or this week then it’s not the type of marketing they’re looking for. It’s cheap (although it’s not free – your time is worth it) and it’s very effective in the medium and long term.
