In the context of the contemporary web environment marked by high levels of rivalry as to websites’ popularity and rankings, businesses, web resources, and users attempt to provide the maximum amount of search engine indexing. This visibility can only be achieved by the process commonly known as Search Engine Optimization or SEO. In fact, the knowledge of SEO works for any sort of business, whether you’re a sole trader or a would-be blogger, or a well-entrenched brand – this is the key to making your website visible to people who are interested and who might benefit from the content that you offer. That full name is search engine optimization or SEO, and the best way to describe it is through understanding what it does.
This guide will explain what SEO is, what it is made up of, how it can help your website and what steps you can take towards improving your rank on the major search engines including Google, Bing and Yahoo.
1. What is SEO?
SEO means Search Engine Optimization and it refers to the process of adjusting website factors to achieve a better position on a SERP. The ultimate aim of SEO therefore is to make your site easily found by visitors who are in the process of looking for relevant content or services. SEO makes sure that the search engines have information about your site so that it can easily feature on the search results if someone is searching for keywords that relate to your site.
In simplest terms, SEO is about making changes to the elements of your site that affect its search engine optimization and usability. This is done through several approaches that make your website to be valuable, relevant and useful.
SEO can be divided into three main components: These are On-Page SEO, Off-Page SEO and last but not the least, Technical SEO. It is now time to disassemble all of them:
On-Page SEO
On-page SEO is a process of optimizing your online sales promotion within the webpage itself as well as how you organize it. It covers all the possibilities to opt for the changes at your own internet site that may help it to have a better rank. Key factors in on-page SEO include:
Keyword Optimization: Making an effort to identify the appropriate keywords for your content and incorporating them nearer to serp, title tags, meta descriptions, headings or URL of the page.
Content Quality: Creating relevant, valuable and entertaining content which answers some user’s unknown question and fully meets his/her needs.
Internal Linking: Crossing to other pages in your website to facilitate easy site navigation and enable search engines to crawl your site.
User Engagement: Checking that your content is readable, not overly formatted, includes pictures or videos for users to enjoy.
Meta Tags: Optimizing titles and descriptions that appear on the SERP for better click through rates from the SERPs.
Off-Page SEO
Off site SEO is the optimization that takes place beyond your website including the activities that contribute to online ranking. The largest aspect of off page SEO is link building which is the process of obtaining links from other websites to your site. These backlinks are a very positive signal to the search engine that your content is trustworthy and useful. Other aspects of off-page SEO include:
Link Building: Linking back through getting links from other websites of similar type and standard to your business area.
Social Media: Engaging with your audience through the social media accounts that can help to share your content and make it more popular.
Guest Blogging and Outreach: Sourcing other websites and bloggers with the intention of getting your content on their website and getting backlinks in return.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO refers to those SEO practices that have to do with the website structure, set up, and tweaking in order to help it get crawled and indexed by the search engine, as well as to help with ranking. Some key technical SEO elements include:
Site Speed: Making sure that your website loads quickly because slow loading time is a penalty of some sort.
Mobile-Friendliness: Ensuring mobile website usability as majority of the searches happen online via a mobile device.
XML Sitemap: Submitting an XML sitemap that only aids the search engine crawlers when identifying the site structure and its content.
HTTPS Security: Get help on how to activate HTTPs on your web and gain more rank on the internet to enhance security of your data.
Schema Markup: Applying metadata to subordinate search engines and in this way, assisting them to comprehend the contents of your page.
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