What is SEO?
Search engine optimization is a step by step method of affecting the visibility of a web page or a website. It is also referred to as “natural,” or “organic,” results. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a set of methods or activities for increasing ranking position on search engine and traffic to your websites.
How SEO works?
Step 1) In this step, you require to discuss business objective with your clients.
Step 2) You can begin with Initial keyword analysis.
Step 3) Identify the home page and keyword combination.
Step 4) Process and get the approval by the client for Keyword/Landing Pages.
Step 5) Finalize ranking and traffic reports and starts with the SEO process.
Step 6) In this step, you need to do on-site & off-site optimization activities.
Step 7) Detailed recommendation documents.
Step 8) Implement your pre-decided SEO methods.
Step 9) Perform monitoring and optimizing.
Three types of SEO
There are mainly three types of SEO techniques used to achieve the best ranking in search engines.
- On-page SEO
- Off-page SEO
- Technical SEO
Let’s learn, all of these techniques one after another:
On-Page SEO:
In On-Page Optimization SEO method, you need to put the keyword phrase in the title tag and the meta description. You also need to have keywords phrase included inside your main content in all your webs-pages.
This method mainly focuses on website content, keyword usage in titles, headings, site structures along with internal and external links.
Here are some Important On-Page SEO Tasks:
Title and Meta Tags:
- Titles and meta descriptions must be unique for each page.
- The length should be 50 – 65 characters.
- The description tag should not contain more than 160 characters.
- It should naturally include keywords.
The title tag is the single most important tag on your page. Why? It informs search engines what your page is all about and increases the effectiveness of your SEO strategy.
To help you understand this better, we have prepared a checklist that gives out a few
tips on how to optimize your title tags. Let’s go through it:
- Keep your title short: Your title tags should be at a maximum of 70 characters
long (including spaces). - Think of keyword placement: In your title tag you will need to have the most
important keywords first and your least important ones need to be last in the title tag (i.e. from most to least). - Separate your keywords: You can use pipes (e.g. |) to separate keyword phrases – unless your keywords are written in such a way, in which you should avoid using commas, underscores, dashes or any other punctuation.
Pay attention to your wording: Your most important phrases need to be
short and simple while words like ‘and’, ‘if’, ‘but’, ‘then’, etc. should be left out. - Add your company name: If your company name is not one of the keyword
phrases, you can put it at the end of the title tag. In case it’s one of your important word, you can put it as the first words in your title tag. This is important for branding purposes since people will be able to see the brand and click to find out more. - Don’t duplicate your title tags: These should be written in a different way for
every page. Avoid mass duplication of your title tags. - Make it relevant: Your title tags need to be written in a descriptive way so that
they are relevant to the content of your page.
Anchor Text:
- All links made by using anchor text.
- Put a title on anchor text.
- Use broad keywords as anchor text.
- Never used exact keywords as anchor text.
Image Optimization:
- Image filename should be descriptive. You can use keywords in filename.
- All image must have an alt tag. Use can use keyword in the image alt tag.
- Do not use a large-size image.
Internal Linking:
- Create internal links using anchor text.
- Link all important pages to your home page.
- Include two to five internal links per page.
Content Optimization:
- Content on the web site has to be fresh and unique.
- Content needs to be written in small paragraphs and use of using H3, H3, H4, and bold, italics style appropriately.
- Proper inclusion of primary and secondary keywords
- Length on the content should not be too large or too small.
XML Sitemap:
- Create XML sitemap
- Mention all public URLs inside the sitemap.
- Include XML sitemap in the root folder of your site.
Robots.txt:
- Create robots.txt file to authenticate and stop crawler from crawling anything apart from your home page.
Off-Page Optimization:
In this digital marketing method, you need to perform a specific task outside of your web-pages to increase your search engine position.
Off-Page Checklist:
It is the combination of SEO factors that cannot be directly handled by the creator of a website because he has created a backlink, post content in other related and thematic website.
Given below are some important off-page task which helps you to achieve your goal.
- Guest Blogging: Guest blogging, which is also known as guest posting, is the act of writing content for another company’s website. It helps site owners to increase their brand credibility and awareness.
- 404 Link Building: Broken or 404 link build is a white-hat, effective, scalable, content-focused link building method. It allows webmasters to replace broken links with a correct link.
- Resource Link Building: A resource page is a web page on a website that lists helpful links and resources for a particular topic. In the resource link building process getting your site included on the page as one of the resources.
- PDF Links: PDF link are links given in your upload PDF document. You can add links for an e-mail address, web address and reference to other pages.
- Forum or Q & A sites: Q&A sites and forums are an ideal method to engage with your specific community. This activity helps you to build and SEO, develop your business brand, and increase your blog traffic.
- Slide and Video Creation & Sharing: You need to create slides and video related to your website subject or topic. That you have discussed in an important web page of your website.
- Link requests: Sending link requests to search websites which offering free content manually. Moreover, a user also benefits from the information available on your site.
Technical SEO:
Technical SEO is a method of optimizing your website for the crawling and indexing phase. It is known as “technical” because it does not concern the actual content of the website or with the part of your website.
The main aim of technical SEO is to optimize the infrastructure of a website. Famous online shopping portals like Amazon, Alibaba use this method to get the highest search engine ranking.
Here are some important tips/checklist for Technical SEO:
- You need to specify a preferred domain in Google Search Console and WordPress
- Optimize your robots.txt and 404 page
- Optimize your URL Structure
- Rethink your navigation and website structure
- Add schema markup for breadcrumbs
- Add structured data to your homepage
- Add structured data to your posts
- Add structured data to other pages
- Check all your canonical URLs and analyze them with the help of Google analytics
- Submit your XML sitemap to Google and Bing search engines
- Check the loading speed of your website
- Check the mobile-friendliness of your website
- Check your pagination and multilingual settings
Note: Directory submission, social bookmarking, article submission is not recommended off-page methods.
Useful Resources - Grab a Copy
SEO: Design & Layout
Search engines are very smart, but they are software, not human being who can read the content of their interest. So, if you make your site too complicated, then the search engine is not able to understand the content of your site correctly. Lastly, indexing would not be efficient, that may result in a low ranking for your website.
Guidelines for Creating Web Design
Here are a few guidelines that you should know before designing a webpage for your website.
- Some expert believes that keyword density should be 5% and some say it should be 20%. Therefore, you should go with the average, which is 10 %.
- JavaScript drop-down menus help you to stop spiders from crawling anything apart from your homepage. However, if you are still using it, you need to make sure that you should include text links at the bottom of your web page.
- Don’t put anything in the page topic which is not fit according to the subject of your website.
- Try to avoid Flash, Splash, Animated Gifs, etc. Unless it is absolutely vital for your website.
SEO Optimization Techniques
Here are some important SEO optimization techniques:
- You should research keywords related to your business
- Identify your competitors, utilize benchmarking techniques and identify the level of competition
- Add descriptive title tags for each page
- Use appropriate keywords in your content and internal hyperlinks
- Use text links whenever it is possible in the content
- Obtain inbound links from related websites
- Learn more and more about the search engine marketing techniques
- You should avoid JavaScript and Jquery
- Minimizing Loading Time
- Avoid Extensive use of Images Organized Navigation
- Try to use web search on your website
- Implement an equality link building campaign
- Continue checking of rankings/or targeted keywords.
- Leverage Quora to Indirectly Rank Your Content
- Implement a quality link building campaign
- Continues monitoring of rankings for targeted search terms
- You should always look for adding Quality content
What is a Black hat and white hat SEO?
Here is some major difference between black hat vs. white hat SEO:
White Hat SEO | Black Hat SEO |
White Hat SEO is techniques which comply with search engine guidelines are used to improve search engine rankings. | Black Hat SEO is a technique which is not approved by search engines are used to improve SEO. |
You will never be penalized or not have any risk of de-indexing of your site. | This technique may ban your site, de-indeed or you may be penalized by search engines. |
Focused on providing quality and relevant and highly engaging content to the users. | Don’t care about the quality content. |
It is an ideal method for an organization who are looking for a long-term Investment. | An organization looking for a quick financial return uses black hat SEO methods. |
It mainly focuses on optimum use of keywords in title, metatags, and body of content. | Keyword density is increased to get a higher search engine ranking. |
Important Black-Hat SEO Techniques Are:
- Cloaking – Displaying different results to search engines and users with the aim of manipulating Search Engine rankings.
- Bulk acquisition of low-quality links in a short period of time.
- Repeated keyword in a blog post to boost rankings for relevant target keywords or keyphrases.
What is SEO Copywriting?
SEO copywriting is the method of writing text on a web page in such a way that it is readable for the user. It also targets specific search terms. It also aims to rank highly in the search engines for the targeted search terms.
Content marketing also helps you to optimizes other on-page elements for the specially targeted search terms. These include the title, meta description, keywords tags, headings, etc.
Why Is It Important to Have Quality Content?
Here are some reasons why quality content is absolutely essential for your website.
- Duplicate content can be a low-quality indicator from a quality page point of view.
- Boilerplate, which is mostly spun content, is another low-quality indicator.
- Add something unique in your site, so other people suggest it to their friends.
- Quality content inspires another webmaster to create a link of your site on their sites.
- If your site visitor start trusting on your site and they look forward to the next content update and keep repeatedly visit your site.
- Net users mostly click only that page whose content index look unique and interesting.
What is a Search Engine?
A search engine is an internet-based software which helps us to search an index of documents for a certain definition, phrase, or text. It is mostly used to refer to large web-based search engines that search through billions of pages on the internet.
How Does Search Engine Works?
Search engine function in four different parts:
- Crawling
- Indexing
- Relevancy
- Retrieving results
- Crawling – The process starts with crawler, which reads all the information from the webpage in the website.
- Indexing: This method index your web page and its linked pages in search engine results.
- Relevancy: In this next process algorithm, compute the relevancy of website pages in its index to the search string.
- Retrieving Results: In this step, you will get the result of your web pages according to a relevant search query.
Latest Google SEO Updates and Algorithm Changes
What Is Google Panda?
“Panda is an algorithm which mostly applied to sites overall and has become one of the most vital ranking signals. It measures the quality of a site. This update tells Google to take quality into account and ranks it accordingly.
Google Panda updated also aims to rate the quality of your pages and website. It is based on things about your site that Google can rate and recognized your algorithm.
What is Google Penguin?
Google Penguin is another algorithm update that was first announced on April 2012. The update was mainly aiming to
lower the search engine rankings of websites that breach Google’s Webmaster guidelines. This is mostly done by using various kinds of black-hat SEO techniques.
What is RankBrain?
RankBrain is another important machine learning-based search engine algorithm which helps Google to process search results to offers highly relevant search results for users.
RankBrain mainly aims to help Google to refine queries. However, it is also used to help rank web pages.
Important Google updates
- Fred – SEO updated which checks low value and repeated content
- Panda – Check duplicate or thin content
- Penguin-Poor backlinks
- Hummingbird – Search intent, than literal search
- Pirate – This update checks software and digital media piracy and mobile-friendliness
- Pigeon – Check for the preference of the local results
Recent Algorithm Changes
Algorithm changes in 2019 is centered around on reducing the effectiveness of old-school SEO techniques. An algorithm change is usually similar to ‘community service’ for the business impacted negatively.
If your pages were not designed according to recent white hat SEO methods, then Gooogle will identify this and lower your site rankings.
Google will continue to do so until you clean your pages up. However, if Google thinks your links are manipulative and using a spamming method, they want them cleaned up, too.
What is Mobile SEO?
Mobile SEO is a process of designing a website to make it suitable for viewing on mobile devices of different screen sizes which have lower bandwidth.
Apart from all the rules which are an application for the desktop website. However, you need to take some additional care while designing a website for mobile devices.
Important attributes for mobile-friendly websites are:
- A good mobile website should have a responsive design
- The contents of a mobile website should be readable without having to zoom the screen.
- The mobile SEO friendly site should have appropriate fonts, colors, and layouts.
- It should have buttons that can be easily interfaced with the help of your finger.
- The mobile-optimized site should have important links which are displayed on the Home Page so that they get enough visibility.
Myths about SEO
Here, are some common myths about the SEO:
Myths | Reality |
You can pay for traffic to get desired SEO result. | No, In fact, this type of strategy is coming under “black hat” technique, and it is highly recommended to not follow it in any way. |
SEO is not that fast. | Yes, it is true as you need to option to get the desired result in the search engine ranking. |
SEO is just about optimizing Google. | No, today, SEO is not just for Google anymore. There’s a number of different platforms like bing and yahoo, etc. It also depends on your business. |
SEO is a difficult method. | No, that is not correct as once you understand SEO, it is not that hard. |
SEO is not legal. | SEO is legitimate and normal if done in a “white hat” way. Today, lots of companies able to enhance their business by using the correct SEO method. |
Advantages of SEO
Here, are important benefits\ pros of using SEO:
- SEO is the easiest method which helps you to make your site visible
- Various SEO techniques help you to get more traffic on your websites.
- The most effective way for the branding of your product on Google.
- Increase visibility on Search Engines.
- Convert a local business into International Business.
- SEO methods allow search engines to find out what each page is about and how it can use for users.
Disadvantages of SEO
Here are cons/drawbacks of using SEO :
- SEO is a slow process, so sometimes it took months or years to get the desired result.
- Not a very transparent process so there are plenty of things to consider for measuring it.
- There are so many things which are not in your control, so it requires constant efforts & optimizations.
- Combination of skills – tech + content + analytics