In this guide, we’ll learn the SEO basics and how your website site can benefit from this. SEO has become an essential part of online business success. And if your website doesn’t even fulfill the SEO basics, it’ll be hard for your rank on the search engines. That’s why we decided to write a short and easy-to-understand guide for beginners who are unaware of the SEO basics.
But, before we learn about the SEO basics, let’s find out what SEO actually is.
What Is Search Engine Optimization?
Search engine optimization is a process that increases your website or company in Google and other search options. SEO allows your website to be discovered by users searching for something relevant on your website. Instead of paid advertising and promoting your website through social media platforms, SEO is an organic method to increase the quality and quantity of the audience to your website or brand if you have a business.
How Does SEO Work?
When you know what SEO is, the next step is to know how it works. Search engines crawl over the web with the help of bots to collect information about those pages then store and organize them in the index to show them on results of the searcher’s query. Google will rank the pages based on their relevancy and those that are the best answers to the searcher’s query.
What Does Search Engine Crawling Mean?
Search engines use crawlers or spiders (mechanical bots) to visit sites to find updated content and additional pages in those sites. The content can be videos, images, or articles. After finding content, crawlers store and organize them in their indices to be shown in search engine result protocols when a searcher is seeking that content.
What Is a Search Engine Index?
A search engine index is a database that Google uses to store and organize all the content that is discovered by the crawlers to show on the SERP.
Search Engine Ranking
Websites are ranked on SERPs from most relevant to least relevant as answers to the search query. If you have content that is most relevant to what people type to search in the search bar, your website has a greater chance to be ranked near the top.
Google Ranking Factor
Google uses hundreds of factors to determine which site deserves to be near the top. But the main and most common factors are:
- Other sites provide a link back to your website. These links are called backlinks. The more links back to your site, the higher ranking you will have on Google.
- Your website must have the content that a searcher wants. You want to keep your content fresh and helpful to someone. Length of content matters but relevance matters more.
- Include clear, keyword-rich titles, Meta descriptions, H1 tags, and URLs. These factors tell Google that your site is relevant and helps it rank.
If you optimize your website while keeping these factors in mind, it can help your page rank higher in search results.
Importance of SEO
SEO plays an important role in digital business marketing. It allows search engines to find your website or brand more easily and rank it in search results if your content is relevant to the searcher’s queries.
SEO is the primary and organic way to increase your website’s traffic. It is a cheaper alternative than paying for advertising for your site’s promotion. You have to spend some time on SEO for your website. SEO is a fundamental part of digital marketing if you have a business. People often search for commercial information about products or services. So, in that case, SEO helps you to rank your brand higher in search engine results.
On-Page SEO and Off-Page SEO
The factors Google uses to determine the ranking of your website can be divided into two categories: on-page SEO and off-page SEO.
On-Page SEO
On-page SEO includes the factors that you can control and make them better to tell the search engine that your website is what the user seeks.
To improve the on-page optimization of your website, you should improve the technical setup, the speed of your website, and ease of use. You should understand what the users need to know if they visit your website. If your site is slow, and people can not understand how to find something on your site or if your website is difficult to use, the people will leave your site. They should be able to find what they want in a heartbeat. Your website should be user-friendly website.
Websites that rank highest in search results are largely based on the content of your website. That’s why your content should be informative, easy to read, and focused on the right keywords that your audience uses. You have to understand what the user will search for and explain a good and quality answer in your content, right keywords are also a part of on-page optimization. Think of keywords that somebody will search relevant to your website and make your site more relevant to the user’s mind. Keep these factors in mind while improving your on-page optimization.
Off-Page SEO
To do off-page SEO, you take actions outside your website. In simple words, the changes you make on your website are called on-page SEO. On the other hand, off-page optimization is about telling search engines what other sites think about your website.
Off-page SEO contains factors like link building, content marketing, social media, and reviews. To increase the chance to rank higher in SERPs, you should have quality content and get backlinks from sites with a strong reputation because if reputed and bigger websites have links to your website, Google will be sure that your site has good content that people need. Not only having good content is important, but building links is also important.
If you know how to combine on-page and off-page SEO, your website/business is sure to rank higher in search results.
