What is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)?

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is a way of getting highly targeted traffic to your website through organic search engine traffic. Different techniques and methods are used to rank a website in the search engines’ top search results. SEO is a completely free way (but tedious way) to drive massive traffic to your website, but in order to do that, you need to understand SEO and how it works.

How do Search Engines work?

Before moving to the details of SEO, let’s first understand how search engines like Google work. When a user searches something on Google, an algorithm works behind it and it seeks to find the most accurate result based on search intend. Google tries to match your search query with billions of webpages indexed in Google, and seek to show you the most relevant result. Now the question here is: How does google Find Accurate Results?

Here are the 3 key points in simplified terms:

Relevancy

Relevancy matters the most. If a person searches for “flowers” on google, he does not expect to see “vehicle tires”. It shows you the pages that are most closely related to your search query.

Authority

Authority is simply a way to determine if the content of a website is trustworthy and accurate. To check whether a page is authoritative or not, there are many factors influencing authority; namely:

• Site’s security
• Site’s content quality and relevancy
• Site’s crawlability
• The number and quality of backlinks referring to the site

Site’s Value / Usefulness

Your content should provide value to the users and should be useful for them. According to Google, there is a difference between useful content and high-quality content. Useful provides value to the readers, and they love to read it. High-quality content is just according to SEO guidelines and written perfectly, but it does not necessarily provide value to the readers.

How Does SEO Work?

In SEO, you optimize your website according to the search engines’ guidelines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. As a markteer, or if you are offering SEO services to companies your job here is to make sure that your website is optimized for Google crawlers and for users.

Why is SEO Important?

If you own a business website or a personal blog, you will aim to get as many visitors on your websites as you can. There are some paid methods to get instant visitors to your websites, like PPC ads and social media campaigns. But when you are just starting up, you can’t afford paid ads in the beginning.

 So, SEO is the best way to gain massive traffic for your website in the beginning. It helps you to make a strong online presence at just a fraction of cost. You don’t have to pay a single penny to make your website SEO optimized, but if you don’t know how to do SEO, you will need help from a digital marketing agency or SEO service provider.

SEO in 3 categories:

Typically, SEO is categorized into three different types. We will discuss each of the following types one by one.

• On-Page SEO
• Off-Page/Off-site SEO
• Technical SEO

1. On-Page SEO

As the name suggests, it includes methods to optimize every page on your website. There are plenty of factors included in on-page SEO such as

• Content Creation: Creating high-quality content based on focused keywords.
• Title Text & Meta Descriptions: Featuring your targeted keywords in your page’s title text and meta description
• LSI Keywords: your content has to be linked to your targeted keywords
• URL configurations: how your urls are configured (the neater the better)
• Sitemap: blueprint / summary of your website structure to help search engines crawl your website
• Alt Tag: image tags to describe the image for search engines to understand 
• H1, H2s, H3s: Your page headers and titles, which helps search engines understand the context of a page   

So, basically, content is the main focus of on-page SEO. It helps search engines to understand that what kind of content do you have on your website and how much value does it provide to the readers.

2. Off-Page/Off-Site SEO

Off-page/off-site SEO helps you build your website’s authority and strengthen your relationship with other websites. It includes ways to build a website’s authority and reputation. These factors help search engines to know how reputable, reliable, and trustworthy your website is.

The majority of off-page SEO is related to building backlinks. When plenty of links from relevant and high-authority websites are pointed towards your website, then the search engine thinks that your website is also valuable and start showing it in the top search results. There are various methods for link building like Guest posts, Comments, Forums, etc. There are plenty of link building strategies also which you can follow. But you have to take care of the relevance and quality of links.

3. Technical SEO

Technical SEO is related to the non-content elements of your website. It includes methods to improve the backend structure of your website. It strengthens your website’s foundation. It helps to improve your website’s readability and provide a good user experience to your website visitors. The following are the things that are addressed in technical SEO.

• Website loading speed
• Mobile Friendliness
• Website Indexing
• Website Crawlability
• Website Schema
• Website Security (SSL)
• Website Architecture.

If you want to get prominent and early results, then you have to use all three types of SEO in a balanced manner.

What are some SEO Best Practices?

SEO best practices are basically methods and tasks designed to help you improve your website rankings in the search engines. There are thousands of methods and strategies that are specified to improve your rankings in the search engine. We are going to discuss only a few of them.

1. Include Your Main Keywords In The Start

Try to include your main keyword as early as possible in your content. The first line or the first paragraph of your content should contain your main keyword. Search engines focus more on the terms that are included at the start of your content.

2. Write Unique Content Including Titles And Descriptions

You must know that all the search engines hate duplicate content. If your content is duplicate, then search engines won’t give any value to your website. Try to write unique titles, descriptions, and content as it is one of the most important practices in SEO.

3. Optimise Your Website Loading Speed

If your website takes too long to load, it does not serve the user nor the search engine crawlers.

4. Track Your Performance With Google Search Console

If you are not tracking your website’s performance with the google search console and haven’t added your website into Google search console yet, it means that you are walking on a track blindly. Google search console provides you with a lot of features that you need to track the performance of your website. If you want to know more about Google search console, then you can check official google search console help.

5. Use Internal Linking

Internal linking is one of the easiest methods to improve your SEO. In internal linking, all you have to do is to add a link to one page of your website on another page. It helps the search engine spider crawl your website pages easily, especially those that are newly created, and they are indexed much faster.

6. Write High-Quality Content

“Content is King” is one of the most heard quotations when we talk about website content. Make sure to write excellent quality content on your website. Your content should be unique and original, and it should provide value for your target audience.

7. Build Quality Backlinks

Backlinks are important to build your website’s authority, but make sure that you only build quality backlinks. If the backlinks on your website is low or spammy, then Google may penalise your website. So make sure you build high-quality backlinks to boost your website rankings.

These are some of the best SEO practices that you can do to improve your rankings. When trying out on SEO, make sure that you don’t use any black hat methods to get instant results because they won’t benefit your website in the long run.