Menu

What is SEO? Ultimate Guide to Search Engine Optimization

What-is-seo?-ultimate-guide-to-search-engine-optimization

Search Engine Optimization, or simply SEO, is one of the best methods for marketing your idea or product. If you can properly SEO your concept, you can sell it easily. But what is SEO? How can you do it to promote your business? Let’s find out.

 

Table of Contents

1. What is the Full Form of SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is the combination of the following three words;

  • Search: This is what we do on any search engine when we need an answer to something we don’t know about.
  • Engine: It is the site where the search process is done, like Google.
  • Optimization: You must do these things to rank your content on the first page of Google.

2. What is SEO?

SEO involves all those practices we need to do to get our website to the top of Google search results. It includes optimizing our blog content and website to increase our position in Search Engine (Google, Yahoo, or Bing) Result Pages (SERPs).

“SEO is defined as a set of practices that are done to improve the appearance and positioning of web pages in organic search results of Search Engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing.”

3. Basic Concept of SEO

Let’s discuss the concept behind SEO with an example:

  • Imagine the entire internet is a library; the books inside are individual websites. If you want to go to the library and pick up a book on gardening, you would probably search a database. This database would organize the millions of books in the library based on how related they are to your search query and how good they are. So, the top suggestion for the right book would be related to gardening and highly rated. This is precisely what Google does as well.
  • When you type a query to a search engine like Google, it exhibits the best answer. So, how do you get your website to rank at the top of Google and be suggested as the best answer? That is basically what SEO is all about. You optimize your website for the search engine, and by doing this, your website will get featured at the top of Google. When it is featured at the top of Google, it will get much more traffic. It will be the type of traffic that is highly related to the topic you are writing about.

4. Why is SEO important?

  • We all have a habit of going to Google for everything we need. This can be to get some information about a topic, solve a query, get an idea about the product we need, or do anything else that comes to mind. When we search on Google, it displays billions of results, but the first page has only a few results. 
  • Mostly, we don’t go beyond the first page. The pages beyond Google’s first page get only 5.59% clicks. So, coming on the first page is essential if we want people to see our idea, product, or other thing. And how does that happen? With Search Engine Optimization. Doing proper SEO on your website is the only way to rank your content on the first page of Google. This is why SEO is needed for your business.
  • SEO also matters because the website with the first rank on Google’s first page has an average CTR of 39.8%, whereas the website with the 9th rank on Google’s first page has an average CTR of only 1.9%.  

5. Types of SEO

The following are the different types of SEO:

5.1 On-Page SEO

The first type of SEO is internal or on-page SEO. This SEO deals with modifications to your website. You optimize certain aspects of your website so that it is more likely to be suggested to the public. Your goal here is to increase your website’s chances of being chosen by a search engine for a query. 

Examples of good practices with on-page SEO are:

  • Keep title tags between 40 and 60 characters.
  • Keep meta descriptions between 40 and 60 characters.
  • Use relevant keywords in your title tag, meta description, introductions, and H1-H6 headings.
  • Use HTML headers with relevant content.
  • Have content that’s high quality.
  • Use meta descriptions with your website to increase your website’s ranking.
  • Use internal linking techniques between different articles on your website.
  • Use your website’s content to guide visitors to other content on the website itself.

5.2 Off-Page SEO

The second type of SEO is external or off-page SEO. Off-page SEO deals with external factors that affect your website’s popularity.

A few examples of off-page SEO are:

  • Use other traffic sources to get people to your website. For instance, writing a valuable article and posting it on a forum to get people to view it.
  • Reach out to a famous influencer and have them shout out your website.
  • Build backlinks to your website from your social media and have people follow those backlinks to the blog.
  • Have other blogs link back to your blog, especially if those blogs have high levels of authority. Authority means how much the search engine respects the blog.

5.3 Technical SEO

The third type of SEO is technical SEO. Technical SEO talks about the structure and organization of your website. Some examples of technical SEO are:

  • Ensure that your website is logically built.
  • Improve your website’s user interface.
  • Speed up your website’s loading time.
  • Make sure that your website is adapted to mobile users.
  • Optimize your links and URLs.
  • Avoid repetitive content.

5.4 Image SEO

Image SEO involves optimizing the images on your website so that they appear in the top results when a query relevant to that image is made.

Some examples of Image SEO are:

  • Reducing the size of your images so that it does not compromise website loading speed.
  • Write image descriptions (alt text) so that Google crawlers and people understand what the image is trying to show.
  • Ensure that the images are not blurry and visually appealing so that readers understand easily what they are about.

5.5 Video SEO

Video SEO is optimizing your videos on search engines like Google and YouTube to appear at the top of search results. Some examples of video SEO are the following:

  • Searching for relevant keywords and adding those keywords to the video title and descriptions.
  • Adding Schema markup to the embedded videos so that Search engines understand what the video is about.

5.6 Local SEO

Local SEO involves strategies to improve your business rankings in location-based search results. In local SEO, Google Business Profile (Some examples of local SEO are the following:

  • Encouraging people to give reviews about your business.
  • Adding your website to online directories.
  • Publishing location-based content on your website.
  • Use your site’s HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) to keep it secure.

6. How Does SEO Work?

Let’s discuss working on SEO. How does Google select pages to display on its first page? How does Google rank web pages? It involves three steps:

6.1 Crawling:

The first step involves crawling. Google has bots, spiders, or crawlers that scan billions of web pages automatically. Whenever new content is published, Google crawls that content. The bot follows the links and your site structure and tries to find all the pages you have published on your website. You should follow the tips below to make all your pages easily findable for the Google crawler.

  • Use the Robots.txt file to block the crawling of pages you don’t want to be crawled.
  • Use the XML site map to categorize all your pages and submit them to the Google Search Console (GSC).
  • Update your content regularly.
  • Use descriptive URLs and indicate what the page is about.
  • Remove and update broken links.
  • Use internal linking.

6.2 Indexing:

The second step is indexing. After all your web pages are crawled, Google stores them in a massive database of billions of web pages, which is known as indexing. When indexing your pages, they appear on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) when the user searches on Google. Follow the tips given below to improve the indexing of your web pages:

  • Don’t post duplicate content so that Google does not get confused.
  • Use main keywords in your headings.
  • Use meta tags and meta descriptions.
  • Use Image Alt text.
  • You can request indexing of any specific page through GSC if Google does not index that page.
  • Do On-page optimization.

6.3 Ranking

The third and final step is ranking. Google ranks web pages according to multiple factors, but the main ones are three:

  • Relevance
  • Quality
  • User Experience

Follow the tips given below to improve the ranking of your web pages:

  • Ensure high-quality content on your web pages.
  • Use relevant keywords.
  • Write an in-depth article pertinent to a topic.
  • Build backlinks to your website from high-quality and high-authority websites.
  • Ensure your website loading speed is fast and mobile-friendly.

6.4 EEAT

Google focuses on EEAT to check the web page’s relevance, quality, and readability.

  • E: Experience, which indicates the writer’s personal experience relevant to a topic.
  • E: Expertise indicates the in-depth understanding and knowledge of the topic.
  • A: Authoritativeness indicates that the site is reputable and has authority relevant to the web page’s topic.
  • T: Trustworthiness, which is the credibility of the site.

7. How To Do SEO? Best SEO Practices For Beginners

Follow the step-by-step guidelines given below to do SEO:

  • SEO starts with finding the keywords for your topic. Find relevant keywords with high search volume and low keyword difficulty, but don’t ignore keywords with low search volume and low keyword difficulty. 
  • Create content and publish it on the website. The content must be informative, relevant to the topic, and tailored to the audience.
  • Do on-page SEO, which includes keyword-rich meta titles of the topic under 60 characters, catchy and keyword-rich meta descriptions under 160 characters, descriptive URLs including keywords, images with ALT text, keyword-rich subheadings (H2-H6), and embed videos and infographics.
  • Build backlinks from high DA (Domain Authority) and DR (Domain Range).

8. Takeaway

Search engine optimization (SEO) is necessary in today’s world to market your business most cheaply and effectively. You build your audience over time, and they eventually become your customers. With the help of SEO, your audience starts trusting your business and products. If you are writing informative blogs, you can make a huge audience that you can utilize in many ways.