What is Search engine optimization???
When some random person searches for any product or service of your niche, it’s obvious you always want your website to be on the top of SERP (Search engine result page). And you want more and more traffic toward your website.
What makes your website to be on top? What are the things you need to do to drive more traffic towards your website???
That’s where the SEO- Search engine optimization comes into the picture.
Optimizing your website is the most important aspect of digital marketing. Search engine optimization drives the traffic since it increases visibility.
It’s obvious to have competitors in every niche. Consider you have
a competitor selling the same product with the better price offer, how can you
still be ahead of your competitor in terms of traffic/sales.
Search engine optimization will help you out in this situation.
If you have optimized your website well, you will get more traffic and hence sales as compared to your competitor.
In simple words, we can define SEO as a process of increasing organic or natural traffic towards the website.
Why Search Engine Optimization is important??
- If you are at top of search results, your website visit number may not be as you expect. SEO plays a very vital role in getting you on top.
- An optimized website always gets more traffic.
- Content marketing and SEO together creates a great chance to build and trust credibility with customers in the early phase of research.
- Once we start with SEO, user experience also gets improved.
- Measuring the results after SEO is easy, as we have many tools for measuring performance.
For optimizing the website, we need to focus on 3 main areas:
- Technical SEO
- On-page SEO
- Off-page SEO
Technical SEO
Technical SEO refers to the process of optimizing your website for the crawling and indexing phase. With technical SEO, you can help search engines access, crawl, interpret and index your website without any problems.
It is called “technical” because it has nothing to do with the actual content of the website or with website promotion. The main goal of technical SEO is to optimize the infrastructure of a website.
The motive of technical SEO is to optimize the infrastructure of a website; it has nothing to do with the content.
For your website to rank, firstly, the search engine should find your pages on the web.
Secondly, the search engine must crawl them to understand what the page contains and what are the keywords phereses.
Finally, the search engine must add those pages to its index- a database where all other content on the web is stored. When the query is submitted, depending on the relevancy, the search engine finds the indexed pages, and displays it as a result of the query.
Seems very easy?
Unfortunately, it’s not because the way we see any webpage is different than that of what the search engine sees.
It reads everything as text. Search engines can see only text and links. As a result, even if the page contains an image, the search engine can read the only name associated with it. Here comes the technical SEO into the picture.
Technical SEO ensures that the search engine finds, craw, index, and render your webpages and website.
To conclude, we can say, technical SEO is a method of ensuring that all the technical requirements of search engines will meet to get a good ranking.
6 Things to consider to improve Technical SEO:
URL structure: Search engines do not like complex URLs, hence the URL structure should be short and simple.
Duplicate content: Same or quite similar content on the pages push the search engines in confusion. Hence, duplicate content is considered as a negative factor and also can punish it by penalizing.
Canonical tags: Specifying a canonical URL for all the webpages of the website is considered a good practice. You can check whether the rel is set to canonical in the page view source.
XML sitemaps and Robots.txt: An XML file with the list of all the URLs of your website is XML sitemap. This helps search engines to understand your website and help in knowing what content should be crawled and indexed.
On the other hand, the Robots.txt file helps the search engines to know what content they can skip crawling, such as policy pages that you don’t want to read.
Page-Speed: Page speed an important factor considered as an indicator of quality. The time taken to load the result for the requested query should be very short.
There are many tools to check and improve your page load time. Such as Google page Speed Indicator
404 Pages: When anyone tries to visit a page that does not exist will result in a 404 page. Hence it becomes important to optimize the 404 pages such that
- Visitors should be told in friendly language that the page they are looking for is no longer available.
- Relevant alternatives should be suggested
- Visitors should not find it difficult to go back to the previous page, or your website homepage.
Digital Marketing is a booming concept and producing many millionaires and billionaires. It is always important
On-Page SEO:
Most people prioritize the off-page SEO considering it to be the main reason for getting a good rank and traffic towards the website.
If you are also missing the on-page SEO and prioritizing only off-page SEO, you are skipping the important factor for achieving a good rank.
On-page SEO includes publishing high-quality content, optimizing your HTML tags- title, meta and header, headlines, and images.
On-page SEO mainly starts with keyword research.
Keyword research
Keyword research is an essential step in on-page SEO, as it gives us the idea of what and how people are searching in the search engine, meaning what are phrases or words are being typed in Google or any other search engine to get the result.
SO, before you start writing content, it very important to know what are people looking for and what are expressions or keywords/keyphrase have the most search volume.
So, we must choose keywords with higher search volume and lower competition. Plenty of tools are available for keyword research like Google keyword planner, Keyword sheeter, Rank tracker, etc.
Google search engine is also one of the best places for collecting the best keyword for your niche.
Here we searched for cake recipes, we got suggestions from google at the bottom of the result page.
Factors that Google consider
E.A.T : Stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. This is the framework used by Google to assess the content creators, webpages, and the entire website.
The high-quality content will be rewarded with better rankings and get good visibility, and the low-quality content gets less visibility.
Meta description and Title Tag: Meta description is not a direct factor that helps us to improve our website ranking but it is a factor that helps to increase the chances of a user clicking on your result.
It gives a short description of what is inside the webpage or website.
As shown below with the arrow, the paragraph below shown is meta description. It tells about the online cake delivery service by Ferns and petals.
The Title tag is an HTML tag that exists in the head section on every webpage. This factor provides the context of the content of the page it is on.
This is the first thing that attracts the user who searches for any niche in the search engine.
Optimizing the title tag is a must to do work. We should never miss the title or use a duplicate title tag as it creates a negative impact on SEO results.
Image file names and ALT tags:
In most cases, we skip the alt attribute when we upload images to the content. ALT tag specifies what the image is all about.
Google cannot read the images, so to tell google about the image we have added, we must specify the alt tag which actually increases the chance of our image appearing in image search.
The image below should have an alt tag as alt=”rainbow cake”. When the crawlers read the image they get to know that the image added here is a rainbow color cake.
Schema markup
Schema markup gives a more attractive appearance to our search results. This helps in adding the customer’s ratings, star rating images, and much other helpful information.
Schema is preferred by most of the search engines.
Off-page SEO:
As mentioned above, the on-page SEO is very important that doesn’t mean we can skip the off-page SEO. Without off-page SEO ranking for the difficult search term is a great struggle.
Site authority is a factor without which we can not outrank the sites that already have higher authority. As Google considers the content from higher authority sites than those with lower authority we must work on this.
Links are one of the three factors that are considered by Google to rank the website.
An off-page strategy that doesn’t include link building is unlikely to drive traffic towards the website.
Off-page SEO is not all about getting a link to your site from just anyone; it’s about getting a link to your site from the correct website. It is important that if we are getting the link from a site we must get link juice from the backlink too, which is possible with only do-follow backlinks.
The other type of backlink is a no-follow backlink. These links don’t contribute to passing the link juice to our websites.
Off-page SEO activities
Guest Author: There are a number of blogs open for guest posts. We must identify which is correct for us and get an opportunity to write for them and get a do-follow backlink.
For this, we need to identify the right keyword and search for opportunities in search engines.
Following are the example of some footprints by which we can search for the guest post openings of your niche.
- Keyword + “write for us”
- Keyword + “become a contributor”
- Keyword + “contribute”
- Keyword + “guest blogging”
For Example
If your domain is related to water treatment and you are searching for guest post Opportunities in this domain
you can search as
Keyword+”Write For Us”
Water treatment+”Write for Us”
Link Building: Links are the first things that all SEO specialists look to improve. Link building is the process of getting links from other websites to drive referral traffic and build the site’s authority.
Why build links?
The backlink tells the search engine that “This content here behind the link is valuable and useful”. It acts as a positive vote for our content and website. Higher the votes, more chances of getting better ranks in search engine result pages.
Google’s algorithm for ranking the webpages doesn’t remain the same all the time, but backlink is never missed from the list.
Trust
Off-page SEO includes trust, which is an important factor for getting customer’s votes.
Page Authority (PA) and Domain Authority (DA) are two important indicators of how search engines see your website You should check your PA and DA, and also your inbound links’ with a site explorer tool.
SSL(Secure Socket Layer) is used to build safety between website and user. This provides the belief that the data being passed between the web server and the browser stays unharmed and safe.
Users trust a site more when they see that their data is secured by this encrypted link when entering private data such as credit card numbers, usernames, and passwords, or any other sensitive information.
One way to build and check your users’ trust is to make sure you get business reviews. You can start by asking your present customers to check your rating section and leave a contribution there.
It’s important to let them know how and why it’s important that you need their opinion on your services, all expressed and posted publicly. The more customers you’ll have, the more reviews you should get. Especially if you’re having a Facebook page where people can stay up-to-da about and connected to your business, and leave reviews.
Social Bookmarking
Social bookmarking is one of the best ways to get visitors instantly. However, there is a long debate to use it or not. StumbleUpon, Delicious, Digg, and Reddit are a few of the top social bookmarking sites. If you are going to use it, be sure to write an eye-catching tagline with quality content inside to get a boost in your article.
To warp up
On-page, off-page, and technical SEO all have their own importance. Off-page is considered to be more important but we cannot forget the on-page activities. Without on-page SEO, getting ranked in SERP is a bit difficult.
Very informative blog post, really love to read it. Keep up the good work.
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Keep writing!