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What is SEO and how it works? Looking for an SEO tutorial?
Search Engine Optimization is a way to get visitors from search engines like Google to your website. It is one of the most cost-effective marketing strategies available.
Through Search Engine Optimization or SEO, you can improve your website’s organic search engine ranking, thereby enhancing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website.
Websites that have a high organic ranking have a larger number of visitors as well.
Additionally, organic results are those results where you receive traffic that you do not have to pay for.
The effectiveness of SEO can be grasped by testing the quantity of traffic, quality of traffic, and the number of organic results.
Just ask yourself how often you use a search engine yourself.
If you want to find any information where do you go? You go to Google, right?
For example, if I want to find out about Java courses I will go to Google and will type “best java courses“.
Now I have visited Google because I have a problem and I am actively looking for a solution.
Now If we go to Facebook I am not looking actively for a solution, I went there just for timepass and I am not actively searching for the product.
So this makes traffic from search engines like Google very important.
The first result in Google will get almost 33% of the search traffic.
Google is promoting this website like a sales agent and promoting that website 24 X 7 365 days for free.
How Does SEO Work?
Search engines like Google and Bing might seem simple on the surface-level, but its internal mechanism is actually quite sophisticated.
For example, Google has a very sophisticated search algorithm that focuses on the quality of website content as well.
It is a very good idea for SEO experts to focus their efforts mainly on Google because it is the most used search engine in the world.
It will not shock you to learn that Google processes more than 2 trillion search queries on a yearly basis.
The actual functioning of a search engine’s algorithm is not public knowledge.
However, SEO experts can make very educated guesses with the help of data analytics.
Some factors that affect the performance of a search engine algorithm include social metrics, domain-level keyword usage, link features, etc.
What are the benefits of SEO?
Here are some of the biggest benefits that a Search Engine Optimization strategy will afford your website.
Primary Source of Leads
Inbound marketing strategies are the most effective method of generating leads.
They perform consistently well in a number of formats – including Business to Business (B2B), Business to Customer (B2C), and non-profit organizations.
It has been definitively proven by reliable research that inbound marketing techniques like search engine optimization, social media optimization, and content marketing provide consistently better results across all other platforms.
Higher Conversion Rate
The conversion rate of a website is a key performance indicator, using which one can test the website’s effectiveness.
The conversion rate is simply the percentage of the total visitors to a website who makes a purchase.
For example, out of 100 total visitors, if 40 makes a purchase, then the conversion rate is 40%.
In the long run, a concentrated SEO effort will improve your website’s organic ranking drastically.
Research has shown that this improved organic ranking will increase your website’s conversion rate.
Cost-Effectiveness of SEO
In the digitized world of the 21st century, it is very important to have a robust digital marketing strategy in place.
Search Engine Optimization is one of the most effective and economic digital marketing strategies out there.
An inbound lead generation technique like SEO can actually lower overall costs by 61% when compared to an outbound marketing technique.
This is because SEO lowers advertising costs such as Pay-Per-Click and banner ads.
Overall, a robust SEO strategy can greatly optimize your digital marketing expenses as well.
Now that you know the benefits of SEO, here are some helpful tips that you can use to get started on your website’s optimization process.
How to do SEO (Search engine optimization)?
To bring our website to the top of search engines you need to do 2 things correctly which are:-
- On-page Optimisation
- Off-page Optimisation
On-page optimization is a really important process for all kinds of websites and webpages.
Here are the 7 things you need to do onsite optimization
1. Starting with Keyword Research
A keyword is a phrase for which you want to rank up on search engines like ‘best earphones‘, ‘online digital marketing classes‘, ‘best online guitar classes‘.
A keyword can have a one-word phrase or a multiple word phrase whoever keywords having only 1-2 words are called broad keyword and keywords having 3 or more than 3 words are called long-tail keywords.
Understanding the difference between Broad vs Long-tail keywords
Let’s say a user searched in google for the keyword ‘phones‘. Here you will get a lot of wide results about what is phone, types, and a lot of irrelevant results. This is a broad keyword example.
However, if the user searched for ‘best mobile phone under 10000‘, this is very much specific what the user is looking for. This is a long-tail keyword example.
So which one you should focus on rank for?
The answer is long-tail keywords as they are easy to rank for compared to broad keywords.
Broad Keywords will bring high traffic but there will be a high competition too.
Whereas long-tail keywords will have medium-low traffic but the competition will be medium-low.
Broad keywords are only suited for websites that have higher domain authority.
For e.g. if you type ‘best phones’, you will see all the websites ranking on the 1st page of google which is having high authority.
You need to make an excel file with all the long-tail keywords which you want to rank for along with the search volume and competition.
You can use various tools to find the search volume of the keywords.
Check out this article on Best Keyword Research Tools
For e.g. you can use Keyword Everywhere chrome extension to find these details.
For this go to google and type Keyword everywhere chrome extension
Click on Add to Chrome
After installing the plugin, you will get an API key on your email.
Now click on Keyword everywhere icon at the top right-hand side of chrome and click on Settings and enter the API key.
Now click in Purchase Additional credits and purchase the credits.
Once you have purchased the credits go to Google and type any keyword. You will see stats like Volume, Competitions and related Keywords.
Try to find the keywords whose search volume is more than 1000, competition less than 0.4 and have at least 3 words.
2. Strategic Placement of Keywords
This was a very important element of SEO earlier.
In the 90s and early 2000s, keyword frequency and backlink spamming was the major strategy implemented by SEO experts.
However, since the Penguin Upgrade to Google’s algorithm, it has become much more sophisticated than before.
Keyword frequency isn’t as important as before. However, that does not mean that they are unimportant.
Strategic placement of keywords in the meta description, title tag, and H1 tags is extremely important.
By using and placing the relevant keywords in the proper place, your site’s organic ranking will improve considerably.
You should place your keyword in the h1 tag, 1st paragraph, and try to front-load the keywords.
Pro tip: Try to add 1 H2 heading for every 150 to 200 words.
3. Add Images With Alt Text & A Meaningful Name
The images that you host on your website can be optimized to attract traffic to your website from Google Image searches.
One of the most effective and easy ways to optimize your images is to add keyword-laden descriptions to your images’ alt text.
Adding well-written alt text to your images will make your website’s blog focused and well-targeted.
As images also create engagement as they can be shared externally on social media platforms, you should set a really good image title as well.
Strategically placing keywords in the name of the image is also an extremely effective idea.
4. Optimize the Per-Post Word Count
Data analytics have established that blogs that have an insufficient word count generally perform much worse than blogs which have a proper word count.
Search engines rank blogs with more words higher because they are statistically “more informative”.
For generic informative blog posts, you should post at least 1200 to 1300 words.
While creating content, it is always a very good idea to research the topic thoroughly and provide good information.
The quality of your content can play a huge role in your SEO strategy if you are dealing with highly competitive keywords.
5. Add Internal Links
By adding internal links, you can improve your blog’s ranking on search engines drastically.
By adding internal links to your other blog pages, you can increase the time an average viewer spends on your blog as well.
While interlinking, it is also recommended that you use your keywords as the anchor text.
However, you are advised to do this in moderation and not add too many links in the same blog.
Adding links to videos/content relevant to the material of your blog will show search engines that your content quality is up to scratch.
Make sure to only add links to content that are relevant to your blog’s niche.
6. Add External Links
Apart from internal links, external links can be massively helpful as well. You should be very careful about linking though.
Adding a blog’s link to websites/blogs that are not connected to your blog’s niche can be treated as spam by the search engine’s algorithm.
If done in moderation, linking out blogs/websites to relevant websites can improve the organic ranking of your website.
Make sure that you do not link out to sketchy or predatory websites.
By using do-follow and no-follow tags, you can keep tabs on your external links on trusted websites and sketchy websites respectively.
External links on respectable and relevant forums will increase the credibility and ranking of your website hugely.
7. Add meta title and description
To add meta description in WordPress you can install a plugin called ‘Yoast SEO’.
For this Just go to plugins-> Add new plugin -> Search for Yoast
Install and activate the Yoast plugin
Once Yoast plugin is installed you can go to your existing post and optimize it for search engine.
Go to post -> All post -> Edit your post-> Scroll down to the bottom of the post and you will find Yoast SEO box.
You need to enter your keyword in the focus Keyphrase field and click on edit snippet to enter the Meta title and description.
Yoast will automatically generate suggestions for you as what needs to be improved from an SEO on-page optimization point of view.
8. Use Short and Descriptive URLs
Instead of using long-winded and complicated URLs for your important web pages, you should use short and descriptive URLs instead.
Short and descriptive URLs that give the website visitor an idea of what your page contains will be treated preferentially by the search engine algorithm.
Searchers are also most likely to click on the link that closely resembles their search queries.
That is why a short and descriptive URL will attract potential customers to your website.
Aim for short and sweet URLs that are as descriptive and informative as possible.
Also, change your permalinks setting for optimized URL by visiting
Settings -> Permalink and save Post Name.
9. Optimize Your Page Speed
Google handles more than 86% of worldwide mobile search traffic.
Since most customers today use their smartphone to do their online shopping and browsing, you should optimize your page so that it loads very quickly.
Search engine users have very little patience and will stop browsing even the first-ranked page if it takes too long to load.
Apparently, 53% of users will leave a page if it takes more than 3 seconds to load.
That is why Google reportedly treats page loading speed as a ranking factor.
Ensure that your website design is minimalistic and streamlined in such a way that it loads immediately.
This can be achieved by compressing image sizes and minimizing unnecessary HTML components.
10. Keep the Content Simple But Elegant
This is probably the most underrated but important piece of advice.
All of the above tips will prove to be useless unless you curate your website’s content to be simple, readable, and elegant.
It is also an excellent idea to incorporate as many infographics and diagrams you can into the content.
Actually, infographics increase traffic by 12% because you can embed links inside them.
Additionally, they can be shared externally on social media platforms as well.
11. HTTPS
Google considers https as a ranking signal. Https is encryption, which is important for sites dealing with payment.
You can add an SSL certificate from your host and make the website secure.
With the help of these tips, you can start doing your website’s on-site optimization yourself.
That’s all for on-page SEO optimization.
Learn off-page optimization from here -> Link Building guide 2020
Final thoughts
Apart from what’s mentioned above, you should optimize your website content in a way that improves indicative statistics like dwell time and external sharing.
Once on-page SEO is done properly, you can move to off-page optimization.
Comment below your thoughts.