The Beginner's Guide to SEO

Introduction:

In a fast-paced world of digital media, nobody can deny the significance of internet websites, which are a great source of information for every user. SEO is something very essential to generate traffic.

What is SEO?

SEO is a simple abbreviation for Search Engine Optimization. As the name suggests, it refers to the optimization of search engines by increasing the organic and natural traffic for your website. For that purpose, search engines will crawl or scan meticulously different websites to exactly know what the website content is. In other words, it is the elevation of traffic levels to your site with the help of its ranking on search engines. The better the ranking will be, the more traffic will be generated, and better will be the output of your business.

What is the Example of SEO?

Every website owner strives hard to improve his ranking of the website on the search engine result. There are many search engines like Google, MSN, Yahoo, Bing. These search engines generate original and organic traffic to millions of websites. Internet users utilize search engines to search what they desire to know.

What is a Keyword in SEO?

The significance of a keyword is savagely crucial as these are the specific words used by search engines to rank a particular website. The keywords help connect the visitors with the website. They play the role of bricks in a house's structure. Similarly, keywords help the sites to appear in the search engine list.

What are the Search Engine Basics?

Nevertheless, Search engines are the answer machines to any query over the internet by its users. They scour trillion pieces of information and data and match them with your question to provide you with the best possible results. With the help of "crawling." and "indexing," the search engine locates the exact data and delivers in the form of website links.

Which Searches are Organic?

The traffic generated as a result of effective SEO is called organic traffic, and hence it is not a result of paid advertisements. These days, search engine result pages (SERP) fill with more advertising and more dynamic organic results format, which are called SERP features. The SERP features continue to emerge based on what people are searching over the internet. Some SERP features on Google are natural and can be affected by SEO. It includes feature snippets and many related questions.

What is the Significance of SEO?

Since paid advertisements, social media, and other online platforms generate the right amount of traffic to websites, the most amount of traffic generated by search engines. The organic search proves to be more beneficial than paid advertisements. Hence, SEO has 20X more traffic chances than PPC on both mobile and desktop. Where advertising needs continuous funding to generate traffic, SEO can bring genuinely organic traffic to send to your website. Though search engines are getting smarter, they still need help. Optimizing your website will bring a high output as it will deliver the best information to the search engines so that your excellent quality content can be indexed appropriately. Conclusively, SEO has a great significance when it comes to generating your authentic and organic traffic.

How Does Search Engine Work?

The visibility of your content to search engines is mandatory. If your site does not seek, there will be no way of finding it on the search engine. It is undeniably the most critical piece of the puzzle in SEO. Search engines have three vital functions which are below:

Crawl:

Polish the internet for content that is required by the user or surfer, looking over the code and content of each URL the search engines can find.

Index:

Stores and organizes the content that is previously found by the search engines in the crawling process. Once the page has reached indexing, it is in the running procedure to become a part of the relevant queries.

Rank:

Provide the pieces of content that will be the exact answer to a searcher's question or query. It means that results are in such a form from most relevant to least relevant.

What is Search Engine Crawling?

Search engines have a team of robots who go out on a mission of finding the accurate data matched with the searcher's request. The content can vary from a webpage to a video and an image to a PDF file. Googlebot starts its journey of seeking content by fetching a few webpages to find new URLs. By hopping along the path of finding new data and hence adding it to the index is called Caffeine. It is the massive database of already searched URLs.

What is Search Engine Indexing?

Search engines have indexes in which they save data. You can retrieve this data whenever any query generates. The information is sufficient to cater to the demands of a searcher's query.

What is Search Engine Ranking?

When anybody searches on the search engine, the index extracts the most relevant search in the first place. The least related search follows accordingly. Consequently, the higher the website is ranked, the more concerning is the search result to the query.

Should I Hire a Professional SEO Expert?

Based on your knowledge, you can perform some of the SEO functions; for the rest, you can hire a professional SEO expert or agency to perform the scrupulous functions. It will directly benefit your website and business tremendously.

The Difference between White Hat and Black Hat SEO:

White Hat SEO:

It refers to the rules and regulations of search engines, including the best practices and strategies of SEO. The primary purpose of such kind of SEO is to provide great value to people.

Black Hat SEO:

It refers to the techniques or strategies that can easily spam or fool the search engines and do not abide by their primary rules. It has severe ethical implications and brings a threatening risk to the value of websites resulting in penalized sites. Typically, a  penalized website is due to bankrupt businesses, and it gets removed from search results as a penalty. It is just another main reason to be careful of fraudulent SEO experts and agencies.

Google Webmaster Guidelines:

The underlying basic rules stay the same for all webmaster guidelines. You cannot try to trick search engines as such. Even if you decide to do so, you must follow the instructions in that regard.

Basic Rules and Principles:

·         Create pages mainly for users, not search engines.

·         Don't deceive your users and website visitors.

·         Avoid all those clever tricks to improve search engine ranking. You can only utilize a tactic if it helps your users.

·         Think of the ways to make your website peculiar, unique, intriguing, and engaging.

Tactics to Avoid:

·         Uploading the automatically generated kind of content.

·         Takin part in link schemes.

·         You are creating copied pages with no or little content.

·         Cloaking is the process of showing or misleading the search engine that content is available for the searcher when it is not.

·         Hidden links and texts.

·         Doorway pages are those pages that funnel the traffic to one particular website's page.

How to Represent your Local Business on Google?

In creating and managing these listings, there are certain principles and rules that you should follow or avoid when representing your local business on Google.

Basic Rules and Principles:

·         Be sure that you are capable of the entailing in Google My Business Index. It requires you to provide a physical address for the location of your business. It can be an office or retail store.

·         You need to communicate all the features of your business with honesty, integrity, and transparency of information.

Tactics to Avoid:

·         Misinterpretation of your business location or features. Hiding or molding the exact information.

·         Use of P O Boxes or virtual address instead of a physical street address.

·         The Creation of Google My Business Listing for the types of businesses that are not eligible may prove useless.

·         Inclusion of fake positive reviews.

·         Any other missing information regarding your business details is crucial.

Understand your Website Goals:

Every website is different, having a unique target audience, so take some time to grasp and perceive what the goals of a site are. You need to decide your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) so that you meticulously know the objectives of your website. You must save it in a documented form, for example,  my new KPI for my website is to improve the traffic.

Few Common KPIs to Start with:

·         Downloads

·         Signups

·         Sales

·         Contact form submissions

·         Phone calls or social media response

And if your business includes a local component, further KPIs will be as follows:

·         Clicks-to-calls.

·         Clicks-to-websites.

·         Clicks-for-driving-directions.

Since the KPI does not include traffic increment and ranking, it concludes the purpose of creating high-quality content for the users. For example, if you are implementing a lead generation website, you may come up with two possibilities:

One thousand traffic views but only a few numbers of viewers end up contacting you for sales.

Medium traffic but more and a high volume of viewers end up contacting you. It is a better form of lead generation.

Hence, the primary purpose of your website decides which actions precede first. First, you need to embark on your business goals then apply SEO rules to fulfill your requirements. Setting and achieving your goals is the most crucial step as an SEO expert who fully understands the accomplishment scenarios.

The Concept of Keyword Research:

You need to know what your audience wishes to find precisely. Let's determine which strategic keywords are the next target in your keyword research. You need to analyze what the target audience is looking for in terms of your products and services. Keyword research helps you find answers to the following questions in detail:

1.       What is the search by an audience?

2.       How much audience is searching for it?

3.       In what format, they require the data or information?

Asking Questions before Keyword Research:

Initially, you need to know about business perspectives and goals before implementing SEO optimization. Many people unintentionally skip this step, but it is essential and mandatory. If you bypass this step, then you will stay unclear of your SEO objectives and problems may arise later. The right approach is that what you want to rank for and what your audience is looking for are two widely different things. You must not focus on arbitrary keywords rather than that you should consider the audience's demand. It is a great way to understand the concept of keyword research.

Discovering the Realm of Keywords:

There must be a list of keywords on your mind, so start working on that by picking up that list and putting it in the "keyword research tool." This tool will provide the latest trend of keywords and match them with your inventory in mind. You will know which keywords are most popular with the searchers and how to relate with them.

Once you enter your list of keywords into the "keyword research tool," you will get to know another modified list of suggested keywords. It can raise more questions and answers to them. Let's use the example of an " event manager." Typing the keyword "event manager" in your keyword research tool highly relevant searched items will appear listed below:

·         Event Management

·         Events near you

·         Wedding Events

·         Birthday Events

·         Hiring an Event Manager

As a result, both high and low competition keywords can be beneficial for your website in one way or the other. To get the maximum strategic advantage out of your keyword research is the main idea. You need to decide which keywords to use to get the utmost goals of the business of your website.

Getting Strategic with Search Volume:

1.     Keywords by Competitor:

You will most probably compile many keywords, but you need to know which ones to handle first. The magnificent idea is to prioritize the high-volume keywords. It includes aiming at the keywords your competitors do not know. On the other hand, you can also target the keywords already used by your competitors. In case you want to avail of the opportunities missed by your opponents. It all depends upon your strategy. The former is wise, and the latter is an aggressive strategy planning of keywords.

2.     Keywords by Season:

You can take huge benefits from seasonal keywords like in the event of Christmas or Easter.

3.     Keywords by Region:

Furtherly, you can opt for the keywords based on the specific region. It is another way to narrow down your research of keywords. Geo-specific keywords help your content to be more relevant to the searcher's query.

What is On-Page SEO?

You must use your research to craft your valuable message. Since you know how your target audience is searching for your website, now is the time to learn some more concepts regarding the on-page SEO. It extends to "schema" and "meta tags."

·         How to Create your Content?

·         Applying your keyword research:

·         A simple outline is below to take care of while performing SEO:

·         Survey your keywords first and then unite them with good quality content.

·         Evaluate the SERP for each keyword or a particular group of keywords to decide what type and format you need for your content. You can determine if the content is an image or video heavy and long-form or short-form.

·         You can question yourself how you can add value to your content on pages.

Avoiding low-value tactics:

Your web content design and creation are in such a way to fulfill the requirements of the searcher and bring complete answers to his questions. Excellent quality of content is a must as the content does not mean to bring traffic only primarily. You can take a more in-depth look meticulously into it as we dive more into this topic:

Thin Content:

As per Google's rules, you must dedicate a page for a comprehensive and complete idea of projection rather than weak and similar content on multiple pages.

Duplicate Content:

The content should be ethically plagiarism-free though Google does not take necessary action against duplicate material, but removes it from the list of search engines.

Cloaking:

The HTML code and original content must be the same. There must not be any hidden content for any purpose. When this guideline breaks, cloaking takes place, which is then avoided by Google and other search engines exquisitely.

Keyword Stuffing:

One keyword should come in content, which is called keyword density. The keyword density must be about 2-3 % ideally. The number of times a keyword comes in a content of 100 words determines the keyword density. Over usage of keywords may bring a negative effect on your SEO.

A Better Suggestion:

However, there is no secret magic spell for keyword research; make sure your page is not duplicate, broken, or spamming. Google will reward great content for sure, and you can follow the steps that are given below:

·         Search the popular keywords for your page.

·         Recognize which pages are already ranking for those keywords.

·         Determine what features the page possesses.

·         Create better content each time, improving quality exponentially.

We like to call this suggestion, "10X content." There are no specific length criteria for the content. It wholly depends on the query. Sometimes 300 words are sufficient to provide the answers and sometimes 1000 or even more like a long read of 3000 words.

You can also re-adjust and re-evaluate your content to improve its quality. Also, if you know a high performing article or content, you can share it among different platforms to generate the right amount of traffic and audience.

What is Technical SEO?

Now, the next step involves the readability of your content by search engines apart from human readers. It is a basic necessity to have good professional relationships with your developers to have a good understanding of the website nature and how well it is running. It is "cross-team support." The developers need to work on the following levels and also guide the SEO team:

1.       How does a website operate?

2.       How does a search engine perceive the website?

3.       How human readers interact with the site?

There should be collaborative meetings between the teams of developers, SEO experts, and content writers so that teamwork can flourish, and all remain on the same page aiming for success.

How a Search Engine Reads a Website?

Schema Markup allows the search engines to know what type of information is available on your page. The procedure of structuring up your data is known as "mark up." It is so because you are marking up the data with organizational code. A website makes up of following programming languages:

·         HTML (Content).

·         CSS (Design).

·         JavaScript (Behaviour).

Pieces of Advice for Schema Success:

Here are some pieces of advice for scheme success given below:

·         You can utilize multiple types of schema markup on a page.

·         Don't markup that content that is invisible to the readers.

·         Provide original and updated content.

·         Your page has a reflection of structured markup.

·         Keep the schema markup very specific.

Improving the Experience for the International Audience:

For that, you need to understand and learn "international SEO best practices." With the help of two things, a website can internationalize, depicted below:

·         Language

·         Country

The Conclusive Perspective:

This comprehensive guideline deliberately sheds light on the knowledge and learning perspectives of SEO. It provides a detailed approach that can help you learn the basics of SEO, along with some universal principles and tactics to avoid. Many SEO tools are available in the present market for your ease and comfort.

You can research your competitors and then decide an excellent reasonable SEO tool for yourself so that you can use it for the optimization of your website. Hence, you can replenish your business eventually.