What is SEO or Search Engine Optimization?

What is SEO?

 

Source: Adrian Rosche

Search Engine Optimization also called SEO, is the act of improving traffics through organic or non-paid ways to generate more sales, leads, and many goals with the help of the search engine’s audience. It is clear that the benefit of SEO is huge as you can get thousands of traffic for free and for the very long term, unlike paid marketing where you have to pay to see the results and that result will also be there as long as you pay.

So the main question arrives here is how to do SEO or how to optimize our content or website to get thousands or even millions of traffics for free. To answer this question I will have to mention all the points that will be very effective to optimize your website because there are hundreds of factors that search engines consider before ranking your website. So before going for optimization you will have to see how a search engine works and how they rank every website.

What is a Search Engine? and how does a Search Engine work?

A search engine is like a directory that keeps records but this is a modern directory instead of storing pages it stores webpages and when you search anything on a search engine it searches on every web site’s pages and tries to give the most relevant page first and according to the relevancy of your search it ranks the page so that you don’t have to search on every page of search engine and for this, it uses a program called an algorithm.

What is SEO? How SEO works? Or how to optimize our website for better ranking on the Search Engine?

Basically, SEO works by showing the search engine’s visitor the content that is most relevant to its visitor’s query. This is because all web crawlers have similar goals and that is to show its visitor the best and most appropriate results possible.

The way you will optimize the content is that way only search engine shows your content e.g. if you need more youtube video views then you will have to cater the youtube’s algorithm and if you want to be visible on the first page of google search engine then you will have to optimize the way google’s algorithm works and to be honest no one knows how the algorithm of search engine works but we have some tips that will help you to rank your website.

Ways to optimize your website for Google.

By On-Page SEO

On-page SEO

Source: Alexa Blog

On-page SEO is the act of optimization that we do on our webpage content as google ranks web pages, not websites e.g. if you are in the apparel business and someone searches for sneakers then google will only show its visitor page of sneakers only not your whole apparel line business.

Optimizing your content

As you know the search engine works for its visitors and tries to give the best and most relevant result possible and to rank your webpage you will have to show the algorithm that you have the most relevant content by optimizing your content in many ways.

Keywords

The first one is to search for the better keywords with low competition and add them in your content and don’t add too many keywords as that will be a big red flag from google, as google doesn’t entertain black hat techniques like keyword stuffing so 2-4% of keyword to content ratio is considered as good.

Tags

The next way to optimize your content is to add tags like title tag, alt tag, meta tags, and many more. If you know a little bit of HTML then it will be easy otherwise it is recommended to hire a professional as SEO is something that takes lots of time to see results.

Unique & detailed content

The other way to make your content stand out from the rest is to make sure that your webpage has unique and detailed content. As Google loves to show its visitors the content which is unique and in detail and also content will always be the king when it comes to helping your webpage to rank.

Plagiarism-free content

As I mentioned above that google only entertain who entertains its visitors. So make sure that your content is something worth viewing or reading and also your content must be plagiarism free or you can say that it should not be copied from another website as google is very strict about plagiarism it has an algorithm that can detect if your content is original or copied.

Off-Page SEO

Off-Page SEO

 

Source: Hire SEO Team

Off-Page SEO is the way to optimize your webpage without doing any work on the page or you can say anything that we do to rank our webpage which is not directly related to our webpage. It is like you are promoting your website with the help of other online resources.

Link building

It is the way where we share our website link to other online platforms and websites from where people notice our website and they get redirected to our website and if the search engine’s algorithm sees that people are getting attracted to your webpage then it provides better visibility as the main priority of algorithm is to find best and relevant content which can attract its visitor.

The most important factor for link building is Backlinks. Your website listed on some other website pages will be an added advantage. You can approach these websites for backlinks:- DesignRush, BizSugar, GrowthHackers, etc. You also submit website to different directories Blue Sparkle, etc.

We can do link building from social media, directories, guest posting, forums, etc. it is recommended that the website that you are linking with your website should be of high quality, relevant, high traffic, and high domain authority.

Local SEO

Local SEO or Google My Business is a platform by Google, people also know this by Google map. Local SEO is also a part of On-Page SEO it is the same as what we do in link building but here the visitor can get more exposure about your business from timing to exact location of your offline store it can provide very good details to your audience. If you provide offline services then this can be a very good option for your business.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO is the act of improving our website’s technical aspects like website speed, structured markup, indexation, etc. so making it easy for the crawler to crawl, understand, and index your website.

Crawlability

Before a search engine ranks your webpages it first needs to know that your webpages exist and for that first thing you can do is submit the sitemap of your website to Google Search Console(GSC) formerly known as Google Webmaster and this is for google and for bing and yahoo you will have to submit to their consoles.

Sitemaps and Robots

Sitemaps are an XML file that helps search engines to understand your website when the crawler crawls it helps to understand your website pages and their priorities and exactly where each page is. You can create your sitemap with any third-party sitemap generator website or plugins.

Robots.txt files help website owners to prevent any unauthorized page to visible on the search engine so that the privacy of the visitors can be maintained.

Website Speed

 

As people are living very busy lives so they don’t have time to wait for your webpage to load in 10 seconds, people are getting impatient and they don’t want to wait. In the study of 2016, research showed that more than 53% of people leave the webpage if the page is not opening within 3 seconds.

As the search engine is becoming very smart they know that if the page speed is very low then that means the webpage offers a less optimal experience for its user. Therefore they prefer a webpage that loads faster. So, a slow web page also ends up further down in the SERP.

To make your website speed faster you can do many things like using low size photos in your webpage instead of very high-quality photos, you can also use a very low size theme for your website if you are using CMS like WordPress, Wix, etc. You can also make sure that your hosting is of high quality and provide speed to access the data.

Responsive Design

A responsive website design or website which is mobile friendly means the website can adjust itself automatically so that it can be viewed on any device or in any orientation. Google is also very clear that If your website will have responsive design it gives a very good signal to google’s algorithms.

Most web designers or developers develop website laptops or desktops but more than 60% of search engine visitors use mobile to access the data. So it is not very hard to guess why the search engine is giving priority to the responsive design.

Secured Website.

You can use SSL for the security of your website. Security Socket Layer (SSL) is a security technology that helps in creating encryption between server and browser. You can also check if any website is secure or not just by seeing its link if the website is starting with HTTP: instead of HTTPS: which means it is not secured. Directory submission  designerlistings.org’s.

In 2014 Google also announced that they will prioritize secured websites over non-secure ones in the search result. So if you don’t have SSL then it is highly recommended to install an SSL certificate as most of the hosting providers provide SSL certificates by default.

Summary

In this blog I have mentioned all the aspects of SEO from the basics of SEO to every detail of SEO and also I have mentioned all the techniques that you can use to rank your website. You don’t have to be an expert to do website optimization but you will definitely have to have the patience to rank your website. As the ranking website is not that easy especially when you have very high competition

And also make sure that you don’t use any black hat techniques to rank your website on the search engine you might get ranking fast but it will not last forever as search engines algorithm is very strict about unethical techniques.

Aimsmark  is a SEO agency in Thane and we provide SEO services. If you find anything difficult to rank your website or to do digital marketing in a world where everything is going digital. Please contact us we would love to help you with our experience

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