What is search engine optimization?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a process that helps your website to rank higher and become more visible in organic / natural search results when users search for something that is relevant to the information available on your website.

If the SEO of your site is excellent, the content for which you rank will be placed on the first search results pages, increasing the number of visitors to your site.

Of course, you can pay to list your website on the first search results pages so that your content is visible to them when you enter the keywords that you paid for in search engines. That can be very costly, however.

We must first understand how search engines work in order to fully understand what SEO is.

How do search engines work?

Just imagine if people were searching for their required info on the web and no one was there to tell them about it. What would happen? They have to visit thousands of sites by writing the names of each site or blog in guesstimates or on the basis of their previous knowledge.

But thanks to the search engines, they have made the job quite easy and already know which information is available on which websites and blogs. When a person searches for something, they quickly tell the searcher about the relevant data he needs. How quick it is, and you may believe you know how to do SEO on your blog.

Search engines generally comprise robots, called spiders, which go through billions of pages, documents, files, media, and news etc on a daily basis. They visit each website and go through the content contained on every page and then report back to the search engine about the nature of the page. Then it is the algorithm which a search engine utilizes that determines where to rank that specific page.

Providing answers to search queries

When a user searches online, the search engine retrieves thousands of pages stored in its database and does two things:

First, they draw out pages that are useful and relevant to the search query, then, in terms of the relevance and popularity of the websites that provide the content, they rank the results.

It is therefore important to note that significance and relevance are what the SEO mechanism is intended to impact.

main search engines

There are many big and small search engines. But the big ones are five. They almost do 92% of the searching jobs on the internet. Google is the biggest one, with almost 70% of the search role.

Google

Bing

Yahoo

Ask

AOL

How To Approach SEO Strategy

The best way to create an SEO strategy is to divide it into three categories: Technical SEO, On-Page SEO, and Off-Page SEO.

On-page SEO includes the process you can do within your website to make your website more suitable for crawling and indexing by search engine spiders.

Off-page SEO is all about things that happen to pick up quality inbound links outside of the website.

Let us go through these factors one by one.

Technical SEO

It refers to taking any steps and measures that could improve the overall structure of the site technically and make it more visible to search engine crawlers.

It includes lots of practice, like setting site schema, adding webmaster and analytics tools, optimizing htaccess and xml sitemaps, and providing instructions to crawlers through the robots.txt file regarding which directory or file to crawl and which to skip. Google and Bing provide a webmaster tool to track any activity on a site and provide information about any sort of issues the site currently has.

On-Page SEO

In the On-Page SEO process, you can change the settings on your website to make it more convenient for spiders to crawl and index it. There are lots of elements in it which could be set in order to make the rankings much better. I am highlighting some of the most important elements here.

Content is really the King:

Good and problem-solving content always gets attention from users and search engines. Search crawlers and bots do process and index the sites, but at the end of the day, there are real people who are using these search engines to solve any of their problems or to get the answer to any questions they may have.

Whenever it comes to that website content or article effecting SEO, I would say ‘Yes’. As many of us know, quality content is very important for any website. Content is not only the King, but even ‘Content is the Father of the King’. It is a very crucial part of engaging the audience, and you need to update regularly with fresh and quality content. So always focus on creating content that is readable and valuable so your readers may engage. Don’t try to fool search engines’ algorithms, otherwise your website will be punished by the Search Engine’s Slaps and Kicks.

The ranking factor is determined first on the basis of how your content solves a problem lots of people may have. The rest of the SEO factors come after this.

If the first point of making the problem solver content is missing, then you should not hope to get any better rankings for this page from search engines.

Don’t copy paste the whole content from the other websites. That is never going to bring you traffic. Google has a very good eye for finding out duplicate content. Avoid keyword stuffing and other black-hat SEO tricks.

URL Structure:

Make sure your website page URLs are well structured. You should use all lowercase for the URL and use dashes (-) instead of underscores (_). The search engines treat all words separately and also together when a dash (-) is used in URLs. So you must use the proper structure and also maintain the primary keyword in this.

Along with structure, an SEO optimized URL is descriptive, short, and concise and doesn’t have stop words.

If you are using WordPress, it is quite easy to change the structure of site wide urls. You have to go to SETTINGS PERMALINK SETTINGS and choose a format that suits you. Slug or alias can also be changed by going to a blog edit page and here you can provide a short and meaningful slug for the URL on which this page will be loaded.

A good practice is to always include the keyword in the slug in which the whole article is optimized. The major purpose of logically structuring the urls is to make it easy for crawlers to better understand the page.

Image Optimization:

A single image can demonstrate tons of information that would otherwise require a whole article. Optimized images are now an integral part of the SEO process and they also make the page more attractive to the user.

Now, what is an optimized image? The answer is simple. It is an image which is in a proper compressed format and has the right file type, like jpg, png, svg, or any other. Along with that, it should be properly declared with title and alt tags, giving a proper insight to search engines about what this image contains and how it should be interpreted by crawlers.

While selecting images for your post, always follow copyright rules and don’t pirate an image file. You can either pick from free resources or give credit to their source. If you use an image without the permission of its owner, you may get penalized, so always take care in the selection of an image. After uploading an image to your post, put the keyword in the alt-text option in the Control Panel of the image up-loader. It tells Google bots that the image also relates to the same post under its search.

Title Tags, and Meta Description

Title Tags are clickable links that appear on the result pages of the search engine, while Meta Description is below the title tags. The title must be relative and the key phrase Keywords must be present in the title. And in length, it is better to keep it between 40 and 65 characters.

While writing Title Tags and Meta Descriptions, ensure that they are web page descriptive and contain keywords. This strategy means a user can see and decide if the site comprises what he was looking for or not.

Internal Linking

While writing blog posts, it’s helpful to refer to old blog posts to help highlight the point you’re trying to bring across. You can do this by adding links to old blog posts using text/link anchors.

Just as with keywords, Google uses both your outbound and internal links to relate to what your blog post is about. When a post links to other content, the linking pattern creates a semantic relationship that helps associate the post with a particular keyword.

A warning word: avoid using meaningless text links such as click here. Please identify your connection texts.

For example, if I needed to direct you to a web page on my blog that has the specifics of Technical SEO, I’d use Technical SEO as the reference text, so I’d have something like this: Technical SEO.

What is the role of Keyword Analysis and Keywords?

Keywords are the phrases or terms which users search for, and the search engine lists websites which are related. Yes, keywords are very important for any website listed on SERP. But before choosing appropriate keywords for a website, it is really compulsory to do keyword research and analysis. Because it is the‘search terms’ by which your website is going to be shown. So think about your keywords as‘search terms’ and how someone would search for this information.

It is advisable to use your important keywords in the page header and title tags. These are the most important spots for putting your keywords. So be strategic in planning your key terms. Don’t put a ridiculous number of keywords on your web page. The Search Engine crawlers treat it as spamming called ‘Keyword Stuffing’. So try to analyse your search terms as well as possible.

Proper 301 Redirects:

Make sure you have 301 redirects for your website to redirect the non-www URL to the www URL, otherwise search engine crawlers will treat it as a duplicate and will count 2 domains. Of course, this is not good for SEO.

Install the proper Web Analytics Tools:

Install Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools on your website and keep an eye on all these aspects. If you find any crawl errors, don’t take much time and quickly resolve them.

Off-page SEO

It can be a little harder to manage.

It builds relationships with other websites through the creation of content of better quality and access to other websites. This relationship building process is called the link building process.

It’s called off-page because you can’t control what’s going on outside your website.

Link Building

When building links, your first concern should be “Who’s linking you?” Believe me, you don’t want adult sites linking to your site.

It is always a good practice to get links from those sites that are within your niche. This will tell Google and other search engines that the linked web page is useful and relevant within the niche for other users.

Linking your website with other popular websites is an easy way to derive direct traffic to your website. You should personally ask the webmasters of well-reputed sites if they will include a link to your website on theirs. And yes, return him a favor, because you know nothing is free in this world. Make sure his/her website has a good reputation, because sometimes linking could bring you down, and yes, buying links will surely get you down when it comes to SEO, so take care of all major aspects before linking.

How to get backlinks

Broken link building is my favorite link building technique. Here, on a broken link checker app, you run a website in your niche, find broken links and then contact the website owner with the specifics and alternatives, which are actually links from your own websites.

Other methods of link building include:

Social media promotion

Sharing posts on social media networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Linkedin may also impact the search results of a page rank. Search engine crawlers see pages with large numbers of social shares as significant, relevant and helpful sites. And they’re ranked higher.

You all know social media is a great platform for connecting people. The same applies in SEO terms. Now only having a business website is not enough. It’s time to explore social media to achieve your desired goals. When you share something on your social media group, it gets viral and yes, you may get the targeted audience for which you are looking for. It may be a great source for generating direct traffic on your website, and most importantly, all people will come with only interest; nobody is forcing them to use your site. Some of the popular Social Media sites are:

Keyword optimization

Now you have your keyword, I guess the next step is to plaster your keywords all over your post, right?

Wrong.

How many keywords do you need to add to your post in order to optimize your search engine? Where did you place them in your post?

Optimal positions for your keywords include the title, the URL, the first paragraph and the last paragraph of your post. You should also use it as an alternative text to the main image.

I need to add a word of caution, though. You need to be smart about implementing your keyword placements. Don’t compromise your blog post readability for the sake of keyword optimization. If it sounds false, it’s probably wrong.

Use LSI keywords to make your post read more naturally to balance things out. To get LSI keywords for your primary keyword, enter your primary keyword as the search term in the Google keyword tool and check the associated keywords that are displayed.

Keyword-rich blog name

The blog name should also directly or indirectly reflect the keyword that is highly searched by people.

For example, “Smart Passive Income” is the name of one of the famous money blogs in the world. Everyone wants income without doing much. So “passive income” is the rich keyword that perfectly fits into an income blog’s name here.

Keyword rich description/tagline of your blog

A description or tagline is written to tell the search engines about your website. It’s a smart idea to add a rich keyword in the blog post title to inform the search engines about the niche of your site.

SEO is a process of getting traffic to your website from search engine search results for “natural,” “earned” or “organic.” Generally, the website that is ranked higher on the search results page in the search engine and, as a result, the website appears over and over in the search results. Then, the website will get a lot of traffic from search engines. This SEO (Search Engine Optimization) can target different search types, such as image search, local search, video search, academic search, and news search. This is all about the basics of SEO.

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ABOUT CODINGACE

My name is Nohman Habib and I am a web developer with over 10 years of experience, programming in Joomla, Wordpress, WHMCS, vTiger and Hybrid Apps. My plan to start codingace.com is to share my experience and expertise with others. Here my basic area of focus is to post tutorials primarily on Joomla development, HTML5, CSS3 and PHP.

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