SEO Development
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a digital marketing practice to drive amplified traffic to your website through organic search engine results.As Neil Patel says, “No website can stand without a strong backbone. And that backbone is technical SEO”.
SEO is an important aspect for every website or blog now-a-days. This article is the basic guide for understanding the working and importance of Search Engine Optimization. By its end, you’ll have a strong understanding of Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
First of all, what is SEO?
By definition, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is “the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine’s unpaid results.”
In other words, it is the process of optimizing your web content for search engines to display your ad in top results for a specific keyword search.
Certainly, you have a lot about SEO and its connection with your website and also it’s branding. SEO is just a bunch of rules to optimize your website for various search engines. Moreover, it is also important for rankings of your website on different search engines.
Furthermore, making your website, posts, contents, etc SEO optimized improves the traffic on your website and brings in potential customers. Therefore, this increases the quality of your website as whole making it more user-friendly, faster and accessible.
Why is SEO important?
Search engines are accessed by millions users daily for different queries. Therefore, there is a pretty chance for you to serve some of the users with their queries. You have to be visible to them and this is what SEO is done for.
- Make your website appear among the top results.
- Improve user experience and accessibility of your website.
- A business will gain trust if its link appears in the top 5 results in search engines.
- Promote the brand and business socially.
- Increase traffic, conversions and sales.
- Stay ahead of your competitions.
- Furthermore, let’s dig deeper into Search Engine Optimization.
- White hat and Black hat Search Engine Optimization
- Off-page and On-page Search Engine Optimization
White hat vs. Black hat
Are you trying to earn capital quickly?
Or, are you ready for a long drag in your success?
Black hat SEO
Some people tend to have first and some second option. If you choose the first one, you are probably going for Black hat SEO. This SEO focuses only on the search engines and optimization according to them. However, there are rules you can break to get higher ranks in search engine results. These are the chief method to make quick money.
Consequently, these all efforts results in spammy, low-grade pages and banned soon. Therefore, it destroys the chance for future sustenance of your business. You can make huge loads of cash with this way, but it doesn’t last long.
Not only, this is short period, but also very hectic. You always have to keep an eye on the search engines and their updates to modify your practices to sustain.
White hat SEO
In contrast, White hat SEO is a practice for long term stability for your website. You get a prolonged online business and web presence. If you approach with this type of SEO, you do it for your audience. While, Black hat SEO is for business considering only about the search engines and neglecting human audience.
Prefer White hat SEO for a playing long term playing and better outcomes. However, it is not always easy. As it is said, that life is never black and white. Similarly, SEO cannot be confined to White and Black. It does consist something in between of it, Gray.
Gray hat SEO, a bit of white and a bit of black. This indicates that it is not as righteous as White and not as devious as Black. However, you don’t trap people via Gray hat SEO. You just encash the advantage that Black hat SEO offers.
On-page SEO & Off-page SEO
Broadly, there are two categories of SEO- On-page SEO and Off-page SEO.
CONTENT
Bill Gates forecasted that “Content is King”.
You must be wondering why?
Well, a Google search engine user is satisfied when he finds results serving his queries in the best way. It always tries to present you with the best results regarding your search terms. Google seeks the exceptional content to give you ultimate experience. Therefore, this means you have to produce greatest content for your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy.
SEO is not a practice but a skill which requires quite a lot of effort to reach a level of refinement. Let’s look upon the factors that make up a great content:
Quality
Quality is a must in all services, business, blogs, online or offline. Best quality content is the starting point for any prosperous Search Engine Optimization (SEO) effort. However, writing a great content is not easy.
You can always research about your subject and make it long, relevant, better and more meticulous. Or, you can always start with brainstorming to come up with your own ideas for content and other elements.
However, ensure to involve all necessary points and be stuck to the point.
Keyword Research
Quality is a must in all services, business, blogs, online or offline. Best quality content is the starting point for any prosperous Search Engine Optimization (SEO) effort. However, writing a great content is not easy.
You can always research about your subject and make it long, relevant, better and more meticulous. Or, you can always start with brainstorming to come up with your own ideas for content and other elements.
However, ensure to involve all necessary points and be stuck to the point.
Use of Keywords
Your content should be original, authentic and plagiarism free. However, you should post regularly to keep Google up-to-date with your content and freshness. There are numerous methods to adopt for the already published contents.
Keep your posts up-to-date by rewriting or modifying with time and information.
Straight-forward Answers
Google at times provides users with straight answers right on the SERP. If your content is precise and direct for Google to recognize, it will be shown below the search bar directly.
Your content should not be very fancy with big fat words difficult to understand. Make it simple, conversational and it also helps your SEO game.
KEYWORD SELECTION
Keyword is a fundamental part, as discussed earlier. So, let’s discuss it further for more in depth.
It is said that around 90% of SEO encircle around keyword selection. Keywords indicate what the content is about and also describe your enterprise online. They even speak volume about your build links- from strategies adapted to how it is planned to be implemented.
Keyword research is an on-going process for a business online. You make a mistake if you stop researching. Also, make sure to constantly evaluate your existing keywords.
HTML
After optimizing your content marketing it SEO ready, the next attribute is HTML.
Don’t worry; you need not be some high level coder or programmer to handle HTML. However, you just need some basic knowledge of HTML to get going.
There are numerous platforms to approach to for basics in HTML. You need to take care of some parts of HTML to optimize your content.
Title Tags
These are similar to the newspapers’ headlines. They appear in the tab of your browser when you open a page.
Title is the HTML tag used for them. Often, it is the first heading or H1 tag. This heading enables Google to recognize your article with ease and clarity.
Meta Description
These are excerpts which are shown below the links of the search results. When you post content, you are required to fill in the meta description box. Your meta-description box needs to be optimized as well to be recognized by Google.
You can edit this under Snippet editors. It only allows 160 characters to be entered. Therefore, try and making it both informative and appealing.
You can make use of Yoast SEO WordPress Plug-in. It is the best and the most popular SEO plug-in used. There are many other features apart from just optimizing meta-descriptions.
Schema
Schema is the outcome of alliance of several search engines. This is a subset of HTML tags to improve the search engine result page display your web content.
Subheads
Sub headings enables user to get the idea of the following content. Not only this, it can be very beneficial for your SEO game. You can add H2 to H6 tags on your sub headings. However, H1 hold more importance than other subheads. But you should still use it as they matter a lot.
ARCHITECTURE
The last part of On-page SEO is architecture. This part is a bit technical but of equal importance to be taken care of.
Good architecture of your website provides user friendly experience to your visitors. Optimize your website to enhance your search engine experience. As mentioned earlier about creepers of search engines which judge your rank in search results.
Therefore, make your website easy to understand and allow that creeper to produce good results about you to Google.
Try not incorporating copied content in your website. However, it doesn’t mean each and everything has to be unique. You can also repost your content and other guests’ posts on your website again without hurting rankings of your website.
Architecture also concerns with the responsiveness of your website. You have to build a mobile friendly website to not lose your visitor or potential customer.
This aspect covers the functionality of your website. Do you know you can lose your visitor if your webpage takes a lot of time to load? Yes. Web-page speed is very important to engage your visitor on your page. If your page is slow, you hamper your conversions.
Ensure to have a secure website. The security certificates not only keep your website functioning secure, but also establish trust among the visitors.
When your page is not secured, users receive warning asking them to not share personal details on this page.
Off-page SEO
Off-page SEO concerns all the variables Google takes a glance at to enable your website to rank higher in search results. This type of SEO has many aspects to be uncovered for further in-depth understanding.
TRUST
Trust on a brand or enterprise is important for branding and conversions. Google takes into account this factor very seriously. It has heat spammy and out-dated websites on basis on lack of trust.
You have to build a trusted, authentic and legit website to qualify Google’s TrustRank. You can build your trust via four methods- authority, bounce rates, identity and domain age.
If your site has least bounce rates, you are trusted by Google. However, other factors are also considered before declaring you spam or trusted site.
LINKS
Interlinking and back-linking are important areas of SEO game to be managed. You don’t need to rely on others to connect or link to you, make the initiative of asking them.
You can get backlinks by managing the quality of your link. If not paid attention to its quality, you might be regarded as spam or low quality. Try and link from new sites rather than repeating it from existing websites.
Anchor text is a method of incorporating backlinks to your website. For example, terms like “click here
“or mentioning it in your content, etc are anchor texts.
However, you must take care of the amounts of backlinks added to your page. This also concerns with the pages you are creating links for.
PERSONAL
The personal factors of your website affect a certain audience and also the visibility of your link in their search results.
These factors are geographical based – City and Country.
There are various search phrases particular for a country or site. Suppose, when you search “Yo China restaurant”, the results displayed are of nearby location only. Even the open and closing times are adjusted according to your time zone.
SOCIAL
Wide social coverage is also important for your SEO strategy. There are few social factors to be considered for off-page SEO. The social signals by the users allow to attain a higher rank in search engine results.
However, this is not the only reason; there are other influencing factors- Quality and quantity of shares.
Quality of shares matters in Off-page SEO as it enables to be recognized by Google. It adds more worth to your SEO strategies.
Quantity of shares is the number of shares indicating how viral your content is. As it is known there are millions of people posting and millions reading those posts. Above all, there is a huge competition.
Hope, now you have a good understanding of Search Engine Optimization. Worry not if you didn’t start SEO yet or gave up soon or even didn’t get desired result.
Join us today and right now for tailor-made SEO strategy for your business.
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