Search engine optimization is essential for the success of any online business. Every webmaster needs to understand what SEO is, how it works and what potential traffic it can generate for all types of sites.
In this SEO guide you will learn:
- What is SEO?
- Why is SEO important?
- An introduction to SEO for beginners
- Best way to learn how SEO Works
- SEO and Digital marketing
- Key Learnings
What is SEO?
SEO means search engine optimization. This is a set of rules for optimizing your website to achieve higher positions in organic search engine results. This is a process that must be followed in order to increase the visibility of your website in search engines and get more traffic. SEO has two main goals. The first is to help you understand what online users are looking for so that you can create high-quality content that meets their purpose. The second is to help you create a website that search engines can find, index, and understand.
In addition, following SEO best practices is a great way to increase the quality of your site by making it user-friendly, faster, and easier to navigate.
The most important SEO tasks concern:
- Identify what users are looking for in relation to your products and services
- Create content that delights users
- Provide the right signals to search engines and search engine algorithms using a variety of SEO techniques
SEO can be considered a complete framework because the whole process has many rules (such as guidelines), many stages and a set of controls. In today's competitive market, SEO marketing is more important than ever.
Why is SEO important?
Search engines serve millions of users every day to find answers to their questions or solutions to their problems.
Whether you have a website, blog or online store, SEO can help you get free targeted traffic from search engines.
SEO is important because:
- Most search engine users (over 70% - see chart below) are more likely to click on one of the top 5 suggestions on search engine results pages (SERPS). To take advantage of this and get visitors to your site or customers to your online store, your site must appear in one of the leading positions. SEO is not just about search engines, but good SEO practices increase the user experience and usability of the site.
- Users rely on search engines and have a leading position for the keywords the user is looking for, thus increasing the site's trust.
- SEO is great for socially promoting your site. People who find your site by searching on Google or Bingo are more likely to promote it on Facebook, Twitter or other social media channels.
- SEO is important for the smooth running of a great website. Websites with more than one author can directly and indirectly benefit from SEO. Their direct benefit is to increase organic traffic and their indirect benefit is to have a common framework (checklists) that can be used before publishing content on the web.
- SEO can get you ahead of the competition. If both sites sell the same, a search engine optimized site is more likely to have more customers and generate more revenue.
An introduction to SEO for beginners
For beginners in SEO, the above definition may sound complicated. Simply put, search engine optimization is a way to improve your website so that it appears closer to the top positions in the search results of Google, Yahoo, Bing or other search engines.
When you perform a Google search, the order in which the returned results appear is based on complex algorithms.
These algorithms (also known as search engine ranking factors) consider many rules before deciding which website is in the first position, in the second position, and so on.
What are the main stages of the Search Engine Optimization process?
By optimizing your site for search engines, you gain an advantage over non-optimized sites and increase your chances of ranking higher.
As I stated above, SEO is not a static process, but a framework with rules and processes. For simplicity, however, SEO can be divided into 3 main types:
Technical SEO: With technical SEO you can ensure that search engines can crawl and index your website without any hassle.
On-site SEO: Rules for your site and content to be search engine friendly.
Off-site SEO: Ways to promote your website or blog to rank higher in search results.
Technical SEO:
The first phase of the SEO process is called technical SEO. As the name suggests, technical SEO has nothing to do with the actual content of the site or ways of promoting the site. This is related to the settings you need to configure to speed up search engines. Usually, once you master your SEO technique, you don't have to deal with it again.
On the other hand, if you're having trouble crawling and indexing, it can negatively affect your rankings.
On-site SEO:
The second stage is On-Page SEO. On-Page SEO has to do primarily with the content and other elements found on a page.
Unlike technical and off-page SEO, the main focus of on-page SEO is to provide search engine crawlers enough signals so that they can understand the meaning and context of your content.
Remember that search engines don’t read a page like a human so they are looking for signals to figure out what a page is all about.
It is at this stage that you will deal with website structure, SEO keywords, title optimizations, headings, internal links, image SEO, structured data markup, and other techniques that can send the right signals to search engines.
If followed correctly, on-page SEO will also improve the usability and credibility of a website or blog.
Note that content optimization is part of on-page SEO but sometimes this is referred to as Content SEO.
Off-site SEO:
The third phase is Off-Page SEO.
In addition to the changes you can make to your website (on-site SEO) to rank higher in the SERP, another way to improve your site's ranking is to use off-site SEO techniques. .
In general, when a user enters a search query, search engine algorithms check their index and try to find the best pages that meet the user's intent.
Sites with good candidates appear in the top positions in search results.
One of the factors that determines the position of the site in the results is the number of inbound links (backlinks). Backlinks are a signal of trust and, depending on where the links come from, can affect your rankings.
If the links come from well-known and trusted sites, this will have a positive effect on your rankings.
Whether it's paid links, links to article directories, link placement, or an exchange result, your rankings may be negatively affected.
Getting links in this way is a violation of Google's guidelines and is likely to result in sanctions from Google.
What can you do to get more links?
This is a very good question and I am sure that if you search for this sentence on the Internet, you will get hundreds of different answers. You can read this article on how to approach linkbuilding, but your main focus is not on how to get links, but on how to create quality content for your site.
Good content will provide you with natural links, which in turn will ensure you high rankings and traffic.
If you try to buy links or get them quickly, you may have temporary success and then see that your website disappears from the main pages until the next Google update.
What is the best way to learn how SEO Works?
The best way to find out how SEO works is to practice SEO.
In addition to learning different concepts and theories, the only way to find out if what you have learned will work is to use various SEO techniques on the web and check your results. If your rankings and organic traffic increase, it means you are in the right direction. If not, you need to change your SEO strategy and action plan.
What is the difference between SEO and Digital marketing?
Some people always ask me, "Is SEO the same as digital marketing?" The simplest answer I can give is that SEO is one of the tools available in your digital marketing arsenal.
SEO can be part of your overall digital marketing campaign, which usually includes other things like social media promotion, PPC, content strategy and more.
Good content is still the most important success factor with or without SEO
Before concluding this introduction to search engine optimization, you should be absolutely sure that SEO will not help you if you do not have good content. In other words, if you are trying SEO on a site that is not very well integrated, your chances of success (in the long run) are minimal.
On the other hand, a website with good content can be good with SEO without it. SEO only adds extra motivation to the site.
Post a Comment