What is SEO
SEO or Search Engine Optimization is a process of enhancing site visibility in search engines. Owing to the speeding prominence of web pages in favor of general and business audiences, the focus has shifted to competitive pushing of pages to the front and enhancing its visibility.
Suppose, you want to know about the best showroom in your city or how to make a pizza, the first ten results are not the best ten results. They are the ten sites that have well understood the search engine algorithm and have satisfied requisites such as good content, positioning of keywords, and intact links. The domain, pages are periodically and regularly updated, with meaningful and useful contents, avoiding any penalty whatsoever. They have also painstakingly chosen the server proximity for better results.
The website in the 500th ranking may have better content and answers for user queries but have simply failed to catch attention, owing to the negligence in the above-mentioned preparations. One could effort to understand SEO nuances from multiple perspectives. Sometimes it could be an organized study of the domain, page, site, backlink, user behavior such as user interaction and user experience, and brand criteria.
Otherwise, data could be more assimilated such as website loading speed, availability in social media, choice of web host, content compression tools, Embedding criteria, Awareness of redirects and their dangers, On page SEO, off page SEO, Local SEO to name a few.
Targeting SEO audience
Be it SEO keywords, content, or links, understanding and targeting the audience is the prime focus. For example, if you have a restaurant in London and your focus is on a local audience, however deft your keywords, contents, and links are, they lack efficiency if your server is not near London. This is one of the multiple intricate and careful approaches of an SEO provider.
It is easier and more efficient to draw an SEO strategy when the user audience is comprehensive. Poor or inadequate knowledge of the target audience is always a hurdle to SEO preparations, no matter how well-informed your search engine knowledge is.
Studying customer demographics, who buys and how does not result in brand positioning and converts such data to sales. Keyword research and content are developed on such a basis and are accentuated by links positioned accordingly.
Suppose you have a restaurant, you can brand it as a family restaurant or a lover’s hub by weighing the probabilities in each. This is such brand positioning, with which you could select keywords, contents, and links accordingly. End users’ habits inclusive of their lifestyle, purchasing practices, and media presence count while working on SEO initiatives.
When one focus is on your activities, you always need an equal and simultaneous view of your competitor’s SEO activities.
What is SEO in digital marketing
Optimizing the content for search engines help’s your website to get ranked better. This generates traffic and you achieve this through the process of digital marketing. SEO in digital marketing plays a major role in increasing traffic through ranking keywords and search visibility.
On-page SEO, Off-page SEO, and technical SEO are the three SEO strategies employed to gain optimum organic search strategy. (Some might include local SEO, To read further check out ☞ what is local SEO). When SEO is assimilated in such terms, it becomes easier and more efficient to execute SEO plans.
To improve the quality and quantity of web traffic, one needs to boost organic or unpaid visits. For such digital marketing of web pages, the focus is paid on user experience, voice search optimization, mobile feasibility, longer and more informative content, YouTube SEO, and diverse backlinks, to name a few. FAQs are also utilized to draw traffic towards the website. A comprehensive site map and the presence of keywords on the front page are other lucrative features of SEO designs.
Sufficient On page SEO articles must-have title tags, Meta descriptions, targeted keyword phrases in content, internal page link with anchor texts, and Meta keywords. SEO mistakes include slow site speed, duplicate content, outdated content, and lack of the site’s mobile optimization.
On page and Off page SEO
On page SEO includes efforts taken within the website to perform better in page rankings. This includes monitoring content in title and meta descriptions. HTML tags are placed in headlines, title, and images. In the case of off page SEO, page ranking is accentuated by placing backlinks in an external site.
In off page SEO, factors such as guest blogging, publishing articles in industry trade publications, approaching contacts who would consent to share our content, podcast publishing, participating in forums, hosting events and press releases are measures taken to boost website audience.
SEO for website
Since SEO is inevitable for any online business, the optimization tasks start at the construction level itself. The site should be crawler friendly and easily accessed by search engines.
In preparing SEO for the website, it does not stop with just content input but is inclusive of page layout and formatting, site structure, user experience, navigation ease, usage of analytics and optimizing social media benefits.
SEO marketing
While marketing your business digitally, you satisfy the Google algorithm by keeping your page qualitative, trustworthy, and authoritative. If you are selling washing machines, keep in mind that your rival also sells the same. To stand a class apart, add color to your web page, by sharing information on selecting the right washing machine, washing machine maintenance, Comparison of washing machine models, considering water supply in your area while buying semi or fully automatic washing machines, and so on.
Since Google penalizes sites with poor reviews, link newspaper reviews, satisfied partners, and happy customers with your page and adds the credibility of the page.
SEO writing
The extremity of keywords also affects your marketing strategy. If a keyword is either too competitive or poorly used, it is as good as obsolete. A keyword with 50 searches per month is fine if it balances with your product type and leads that it gives.
An SEO writer must be able to initiate keyword searches and must be able to form suitable phrases that are relevant to the article. Crisp, grammatically perfect, focused article, free of errors, with SEO keywords inserted in the most natural possible way, that keeps the reader engaging is what the mission exactly wants.
How does SEO work
SEO or search engine optimization enhances the visibility of a web page. The entire concept is about answering queries in the Google search engine. It is a race or competition among thousands of web pages in providing solutions for those seeking help from Google.
SEO understands Google’s characteristics while helping a solution seeker. It collects the most popular phrases that people use. For example, if you want to buy groceries, people use phrases like buy groceries, buy groceries near me, purchase groceries, groceries at my locality and so on.
The first page is analyzed and contents are made both inside your website and outside, besides having incoming and outgoing links. The authenticity of the website is maintained by updating fresh content and avoiding junk content and penalty of any sort. SEO understands Google crawler that scans millions of pages swiftly based on few parameters. An SEO writer keeps these parameters in mind while accentuating the page’s visibility.
How to find keywords for SEO
Collecting topics relevant to the business is the first step. This is followed by writing articles that are balanced with keywords appearing in moderate numbers in the content. Keywords could be found at provisions such as Rank Tracker, Google Search Console, Google Ads Keyword Planner, to name a few.
Once keywords are collected, check how competitive they are. If they are extremely popular or scarcely searched, either way their chances to improve your site’s visibility are poor. Keywords should be moderately used so that you get leads through them.
Visiting a competitor’s site to track their keywords, is also recommendable. Ubersuggest, Search Box Queries, Google Instant and SEMrush are a few of the free and paid methods to find new keywords. Your keyword’s performance could be supervised by entering your domain name, keywords in Keyword Position Checker. That lets you know your Google Ranking.
How to write SEO friendly content
Keywords are not enough for SEO-friendly content. The keywords are supposed to be used diligently. The content should not be just a compilation of words, but an informative read. Google crawler can decipher junk and not only does it ignore such junk but also penalizes the site.
A well-structured content with a catchy headline, good Meta descriptions, and readable concise paragraphs is result-oriented and SEO friendly content. This is enhanced by SEO-friendly URLs, links and optimized images. Last but not the least, the content should be error-free with perfect grammar and no plagiarism ever. The keyword density should be moderate and should not sound deliberate. The content should be aptly boosted in social media.
What are SEO tools?
There are innumerable SEO tools that assist your endeavors. A few of them are Ahrefs, Google Search Console, SEMRush, KWFinder, Moz Pro, Ubersuggest, Answer the Public and SpyFu.
Such tools help you with analytics, keyword research, links, rank checking, site speed, WordPress SEO, Local SEO, Mobile SEO, and links.
Such tools are inevitable. Mere knowledge to write readable content is not enough. The number of visitors in your page and how long they stay there are facts that Google crawler considers while evaluating your web page. Page redirects and sitemap structures also make a page vulnerable to Google rankings.
Black Hat SEO Vs White Hat SEO
What is Black Hat SEO?
Black Hat SEO are practices that underestimate Google Search Analytics and exploit the same. In simple words, it is trying to act too smart with Google crawler analysis. Such attempts might result in getting the page banned from Google’s search engine. Creating a page and dumping it with keywords that are meaningless and adding irrelevant links makes the page sound deliberate and hence is ranked illegal. In simple words, it is unethical.
What is White Hat SEO?
White Hat SEO is a genuine website, within the bounds of Google’s terms of service, and does not encourage spam of any kind. It improves page rankings and is a good marketing campaign. The links are natural and useful and popular among users.
Though White Hat SEO is cost-effective in the long run, secure, and has consistent rankings, one should admit that it has limited scope and faces competition slowly but steadily. Besides content, the site by itself should be easily accessible in a desktop, tablet, or mobile. The content and page should be updated regularly and be fresh. It should keep users engaged, both on the site and on social media. For instance, guest blogging is White Hat SEO, but Google has its parameters to detect spam here.
Technical SEO
to understand “what is SEO”, You need to understand some technical aspects. Technical SEO is the steps that you execute better access, crawling, interpretation and indexing of search engines in your site and thus optimizing your page. Technical SEO is important because it prompts better ranking. SEO strategy is divided into three parts namely On-page SEO, Off-page SEO and technical SEO. Such distribution of tasks among three parts gives a more focused approach to page optimization. Adding keywords to URL and compressing characters in URL, using hyphens instead of spaces to separate words, using single domain and sub domain are technical SEO strategies.
Technical SEO also mitigates page loading time and removes 404s, broken links, duplicate content, disowns harmful backlinks, and maintains XML sitemaps. To check the viability of a technical SEO, one could conduct an audit, by employing a bot to crawl in the page and review sitemap, and analyze browse able versions of the site. Speed test is conducted and site metrics are compared. Technical SEO optimizes voice search, exclusive design for Mobile, boosts with longer content, explores YouTube SEO possibilities, and employs diverse backlink portfolio, to name a few.
What is schema in SEO?
Schema is a data vocabulary that search engine employs to discern quality content from spam or junk. It tries to digitally comprehend the meaning of your content and its relationship with the purpose of your site.
When you add schema tag to your HTML, it enhances search engine to represent your page in a better position in SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). It is brief text or snippet found under your page title which informs search engines about your activities. When keywords are given HTML tags, the search engine recognizes them speedily. When the snippet gets more clicks and fetches more traffic to the site, it becomes a rich snippet.
Three types of schema are physical schema, logical schema, and view schema. Three types of schema formats namely JSON-LD, Microdata, and RDFa are popular in search engines. Nine schema markups such as organization markup, schema person markup, schema local business markup, schema product & offer markup, breadcrumbs markup, schema article markup, video schema markup, event schema markup, recipe schema markup, and many other schema markups are popular in search engines.
Schema’s cognition and interpretation help SEO users to boost their web page optimization in a more result-oriented way. It manages and groups logical entities in one physical database.
What is sitemap in SEO?
A sitemap is a blue print of the website in which search engines crawl to seek relevance to the content searched for. It also helps crawlers to index a page swiftly.
Sitemap holds information about when the page was last updated, how often the page is changed, and language versions of the page available.
XML and HTML are two types of sitemaps. XML sitemap is not visible to end-user and just informs if the content sought, frequency of updates, prominence of the page. It enhances navigation and is considered as a skeleton setup of the website.
HTML is used to aid users to find the relevance of a page to their search intents.
Mere SEO is not helpful in improving page ranking owing to the tough competition present. Sitemaps promote SEO in searches. HTML is placed on the home page with all pages on it. So a visitor finds information on the home page without the need of navigating to individual pages.
XML however ranks a page more accurately. The robots.txt file in XML, allows crawlers to move more comfortably and is result-oriented.
Crawling in SEO
The process, in which search engines use robots to collect information from the internet, is known as crawling. The robots are also known as bots or spiders. The crawler adds the visited pages in its index and provides the information sought by searchers. While crawling, URLs are tracked and gathered in the index.
Crawler visits a site through hyperlinks and reads links going from the site. The links are important because they make the crawler more navigable. Sitemaps also help crawlers understand sites and provide information to users. Crawler also ensures that the content found in the website is original and not copied from other sites, thus making a check on plagiarism. Besides plagiarism, the crawler checks bad redirects and solves indexing issues. Indexing helps a website owner to manage the page visibility of his web pages.
Robot txt in SEO
If there are two versions for a page, namely one for browsing and one for printing, the crawler omits the printing version using robot.txt, lest the site should be penalized for duplicate content. Robot.txt also does not index sensitive pages which are not supposed to be visible. Such editing increases bandwidth enabling more visitors to browse your site.
Robot.txt is present in the main directory. If it is not present in the main directory, search engines assume that no such thing is present in the website and deem that the site is not indexed and make it eligible for penalty. Thus robot.txt present elsewhere fails its purpose.
How to become SEO expert
To boost your SEO expertise, start with understanding the basics. Building your own websites, familiarizing yourself with topics such as WordPress, Google Analytics, Google Quality Rater Guidelines, Content Strategy could improve your knowledge.
Link-building tactics and following SEO experts in social media are a part of the learning process. It just takes 4 to 12 months to become an SEO expert. SEO profession is almost survival of the fittest where one needs to keep updated in the constantly evolving field.
SEO expert is different from SEO professional. SEO expert knows how SEO works and how to apply SEO and boost rankings. SEO professional on the other hand offers SEO services to clients. An SEO expert understands how search engines crawl, index and rank, and optimize pages accordingly.
SEO expert also develops expertise in Search Engine Marketing (SEM). SEM is inclusive of SEO and paid search ads. SEO comprises of technical SEO, On-page SEO, Content SEO, Off-page SEO and local SEO. Paid search ads include Google Ads, Bing Ads and remarketing search ads.
On a concluding note, we have not spoken all about SEO and if ever we spoke all about SEO, the next day is ready to give surprises and teach us. SEO, as any other discipline, is evolving. What was the fortress of keywords, has now evolved with BERT and is focusing on context of keywords and rich quality of content.
If you think you are smarter than Google algorithm, think again. Google algorithm has evolved and learning everyday is the only way to stay safe.