More precisely the history of SEO dates back to the 90s when search engines emerged for the first time. Probably nowadays, it is an essential marketing strategy and an ever-growing industry. If you want to learn SEO but don’t know where to begin, then read our complete SEO guide for beginners and learn everything you require to know to proceed with Search Engine Optimization on your own effort.
WHAT IS ACTUALLY SEO?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a key process of optimizing your website with the main goal of ameliorating your rankings in the search results and obtaining more organic traffic.
Search engine optimization mainly focuses only on organic search results and does not comprise PPC optimization. Moreover, both SEO and PPC are part of Search Engine Marketing.
The search engines are mostly used by internet users when they are looking for something. In addition, if you want to offer the answer to that something. It doesn’t matter whether you actually sell a product or service; you can write a blog, or anything else, search engine optimization is primarily a must for every website owner. Finally, SEO is all the actions you do to make Google actively consider your website a quality source and rank it much higher for your desired search queries.
ON-PAGE SEO & OFF-PAGE SEO
As soon as you start learning SEO, you’ll come across some general terms that try to categorize its several aspects, namely:
- On-page SEO & off-page SEO
- Black hat SEO & white hat SEO
The terms on-page and off-page SEO primarily categorize the SEO activities based on the process you perform them on the website. It is elaborated that On-page SEO is wholly everything you can do on the website right from the optimization of content through technical aspects.
- About Keyword research
- Towards Content optimization
- Title tag optimization
- Page performance optimization
- Feature of Internal linking
The main goal is to offer both perfect content and UX while illustrating to search engines what the page is all about.
OFF-PAGE SEO
It is mostly about getting quality backlinks to illustrate to search engines that your website has good authority and value. Moreover, the link building might involve special techniques like:
- Guest blogging
- Email outreach
- Broken link building
Off-page SEO is also closely connected to other areas of online marketing, respectively as social media marketing and quality branding, which have an indirect impact on building the trust and good authority of your website. A successful SEO strategy should comprise both On-page and off-page SEO activities.
WHAT IS BLACK HAT SEO
It is a set of spammy practices to ameliorate the rankings of a website. These vast techniques can get you to the top of the search results in a short period of time; however, search engines would probably penalize and ban the website sooner or later.
WHAT IS WHITE HAT SEO
It refers to all the regular SEO techniques which stick to the proper guidelines and rules. They include a long-term strategy in which good rankings are the end product of good optimization, better content, and well thought user-oriented approach. Many SEO experts agree that “white hat” is the one strategy to go.
You also have several opinions on the acceptability of various link building techniques even including link buying.
ESSENTIAL SEO TOOLS EVERY WEBSITE OWNER SHOULD PRIMARILY USE:
- Google Search Console
- a traffic analysis tool (e.g. Google Analytics)
- a keyword research tool (e.g. KWFinder)
- a backlink analysis tool (e.g. LinkMiner)
- a rank tracker (e.g. SERPWatcher)
WHAT ARE SEARCH ENGINES?
A search engine is an online tool that assists people to find information on the internet. One typical example would be Google. Google is also probably the only example you require to know.
HOW SEARCH ENGINES WORK
The key process in which search engines work includes these main steps namely as
- Crawling
- Indexing
- Picking the results
Eventually, it is illustrating the search results to the user.
CRAWLING
It is an important process in which search engines scan the entire internet WebPages continuously. They also use small pieces of programs namely called crawlers or bots to follow all the hyperlinks and discover new pages as well as updates to the pages they actually discovered before.
INDEXING
When a user buys a domain website and once the site is crawled, the information is wholly indexed. The search engines primarily try to analyze and understand the pages, perfectly categorize them, and adeptly store them in the index.
Primarily the search engine index is basically a gigantic library of all the crawled websites with a single purpose to properly understand them and have them available to be used as a good search result.
SELECTING THE RESULTS
Once the user submits a search query, the search engine actively digs into the index and picks out the best results. The list of the results is actually known as a SERP – Search Engines Results Page.
GOOGLE ALGORITHM
More precisely the Google’s Search Algorithm is professionally used as an umbrella term to wholly refer to all the individual algorithms, about machine learning systems and advanced technologies where Google uses to rank websites. To offer the best results, they consider several factors, respectively:
- Meaning of the query – the search engine requires to understand what exactly is the user looking for
- The relevance of pages – the page should be relevant to the search query
- Quality of content – the search engine absolutely try to select the best results in terms of quality of content
- Usability of pages – the pages must also be usable in terms of accessibility, readability, extreme safety, etc.
- Context and settings – the user’s location, settings, and history of searches are adeptly considered
As with any other system, the Google algorithm requires to be updated and informed regularly. Apart from minor algorithm updates that happen on a daily basis, Google generally rolls a couple of core algorithm updates per year.
TEN SEO SUCCESS FACTORS
GO FOR WELL-TARGETED CONTENT
One need to perfectly identify what people search for and develop quality content tailored to their requirements
CRAWLABLE WEBSITE
If people want to rank, then their website must be simple to find by search engines.
QUALITY AND QUANTITY OF LINKS
It is elaborated that the more quality pages link to your website, the more authority you’ll have in the eyes of Giant Google
CONTENT CREATIVITY AT USER INTENT
More precisely SEO is not only about what words you actually use, but also about the kind of content and its comprehensiveness that make your visitor happy and Google would be certainly happy too
UNIQUE CONTENT
You must be careful about using duplicate content on your websites and try always for unique content.
EAT: EXPERTISE, AUTHORITY, TRUST
The E-A-T signals are exclusively evaluated by Google’s Quality Raters so never forget to build and immensely prove your expertise with trustworthiness. Also, write only about topics you are qualified for.
FRESH CONTENT
One must regularly update their content to keep it up to date.
CLICK-THROUGH RATE
Better to optimize your title tags and Meta descriptions to highly improve the CTR of your pages
WEBSITE SPEED
You must make sure your visitors don’t have to wait too long to load the page, otherwise, there’s a good chance they’ll leave before actually visiting it.
WORKS ON ANY DEVICE
It is suggested that your website must work perfectly on any device and screen size since a majority of internet users come through mobile devices.
WHAT IS KEYWORD RESEARCH?
It must be the first step on your SEO journey and equally important in two scenarios namely:
Try to get to know your niche
While starting a new website, keyword research can offer a great overview of what sub-topics are interesting for people in your niche or industry
Searching New Content Ideas
Keyword research could assist you to find the most profitable keyword opportunities and beneficially plan your content strategy.
CONTENT OPTIMIZATION
It is a known fact that most marketers used to think that content & SEO are separate players. They couldn’t be more wrong and must be cautious about the below factors
- About Topic identification & organization
- Towards Focus keyword optimization
- Good Quality of content
- About Content length
- Regular Content updates
TECHNICAL SEO OF ON-PAGE
The Technical SEO of On-page mostly revolves around the below factors.
- About Internal linking
- Inclusion of Sitemaps
- Factor of HTTPS
- Extreme Mobile-friendliness
- About Page speed
- Towards Image alt texts
- Better Title tags and meta descriptions
- About Featured snippets
WHAT IS A BACKLINK?
A backlink is a link from one page to another. If page AA links to page BB, we could say that page BB has a backlink from page AA. Backlinks are one of the most crucial ranking signals. Precisely there’s a direct correlation between quantity and quality of backlinks and rankings. There are a lot of techniques that could assist you to get backlinks while offering value to the users.
ANALYTICS & METRICS
Website analytics is an important part of search engine optimization. By using the right tools to track and analyze your website’s performance would assist you to answer key SEO questions, namely as:
- Like what keywords you rank for in Google
- About what country your visitors come from
- Regarding what channels bring you the most traffic
- Knowing how your visitors engage with your pages
- Like what are your most visited pages
There are three vital analytics tools every website owner should have namely as Google Search Console, Google Analytics and a rank tracking tool.
