Basics of SEO - Search Engine Optimization

What is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which is the process of increasing your website's page rank on a search engine result page (SERP) or the process of improving your website's pages to increase their visibility for relevant search queries. In other words, SEO is the process of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic to a website or web page from search engines.

SEO seeks to drive organic traffic, that is, unpaid traffic to your pages or website, driving it to the top of the search engine results. It is used to increase traffic by increasing the visibility of websites and content. This is an understanding of what people are looking for on the Internet and the answers to them.

 

Here are the topics covered to help you understand SEO better.

• What is a search engine?

• What is SERP?

• Organic search results and organic traffic

• Why is SEO important?

• Key elements of SEO

• Types of SEO

• White hat versus black hat

• What should be avoided for best results

 

What is a search engine? 

To understand SEO better, you must know what a search engine is. A search engine is a program or software that searches the web, which means searching the world wide web for specific information specified in a text search query. A search engine is a website through which users can search for Internet content. To do this, users enter their desired search phrase (also called a search query), then the search engine crawls its index for the respective websites and displays them in a list. Examples of search engines: Google, Bing, or Yahoo.

 

What are SERPs?

You know what a search engine is, now let's try to understand what a Search Engine Results Page (SERP) is. Search engine result pages are web pages provided to users when they search for something on the Internet using a search engine such as Google. The user enters his search query, after which the search engine presents him with search results.

 

Organic search results and organic traffic 

In web search engines, regular search results are query results that are calculated according to complex algorithms, are independent of the advertiser payments, and differ in the type of results called organic results.

Organic traffic refers to visitors who come to your site as a result of organic search results. Organic traffic is visitors who naturally find your website after using a search engine and are not redirected through other paid ads. It appears at the top of the search results.

 

Why is SEO important? 

One of the most important aspects of SEO is better visibility. This will make it easier for potential customers to find you when searching. The higher you’re ranking on a search engine result page (SERP), the more likely your customers will see and click on your site. The more effective your search engine optimization efforts, the higher your ranking and visibility will be. This is especially important because a quarter of web users don't click outside of the first page of search results. Increasing web traffic is one of the main goals of SEO, and you increase traffic as you increase your visibility and rankings.

 

Key elements of SEO 

There are two important elements of SEO

1. Keywords

2. Contents

 

1. Keyword

The word or phrase that defines what your content is about is called a keyword. In terms of SEO, this is also called a search term that matches your content. It's important to research your keywords, construct them carefully, and use them wisely in your content. Keywords are important because they are the basis between what people want and the content you provide to meet their needs. Your goal is to rank high on search engines to drive traffic from search engine results pages to your website, and the keywords you target determine the type of traffic you receive.

 

2. Contents

Content is an important part of SEO because it is the medium you use to reach and engage your audience. When you think about content SEO, you need to prioritize content. Content is a way to engage, inform, support and entertain your viewers. Creating original and quality content is also important for search engine visibility. It's also worth noting that all types of content can be SEO content (e.g., product pages, landing pages, interactive tools, videos). Google considers CTR to be an important factor in determining the quality of your website, and quality content ensures a high CTR.

 

Types of SEO

1. On-page SEO

2. Off-Page SEO

3. Technical SEO

 

1. On-page SEO

On-page SEO is a way of using individual pages of websites to improve rankings and get relevant traffic from search engines. The page includes both the content and the HTML source of the page that can be optimized. On-page ranking factors can have a big impact on your page's ability to rank.

The most significant on-page factors affecting search engine rankings are:

• URL

• TITLE TAG

• DESCRIPTION

• ALT PICTURE TAGS

• HEADER

• DENSITY OF KEYWORDS

• POWER OF CONTENT

• RELEVANCE OF KEYWORDS

 

2. Off-Page SEO

Off-page SEO is an off-site optimization strategy that is done off-site, not onsite. The main technique used for off-page SEO is backlinking, and high-quality backlinks from external sites to your site give you credibility by telling search engines that your site is important and of high quality. There are many tricks for building backlinks, and some of today's best practices include guest blogging, creating more generic infographics, discussing influencers in your content, and more. Search engines have been working for a long time to find ways to bring the best results to search engines. To achieve this, they take into account several factors that off-page SEO provides an excellent insight into how the world sees a particular website.

 

3. Technical SEO

Technical SEO refers to website and server configuration that help search engine crawlers crawl and index your website efficiently. Search engines provide special handling of search results for websites that display certain technical characteristics.

What you can do to ensure good Technical SEO

i. Use SSL.

ii. Make sure your site is mobile optimized.

iii. Speed ​​up your site.

iv. Eliminate duplicate content issues.

v. Create an XML sitemap.

 

White hat versus black hat 

SEO techniques can be divided into two broad categories.

 

1. White hat SEO

SEO techniques are considered a white hat if they are consistent with search engine recommendations and are not deceiving. This is an important distinction to keep in mind because recommendations for search engines are not written as a set of rules or recommendations. In addition to following the guidelines, white hat SEO also strives to ensure that the content that search engines index and rank later matches what users see.

 

2. Black hat SEO

Black Hat SEO tries to bump up the rankings in a way that the search engines do not allow or is tricked into doing. The black hat process uses hidden text that contains text in the same colour as the background, hidden dividers, or off-screen text. This method of serving the page depends on whether the page was requested by a visitor or a search engine, which is called cloaking.

 

What should be avoided for best results 

• Automatically generated content

• Participation in link exchange schemes

• Create pages with no original content.

• Cloaking.

• Hidden text and links

 

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