Definition: SEO is the abbreviation for Search Engine Optimization. It is the process of optimizing websites so that they rank higher on search engines like Google and generate more traffic. To be more specific:
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a set of practices designed to improve the appearance and positioning of web pages in organic search results.
Moz
SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the practice of including content on your site that has the potential to improve your site’s visibility to search engines and their users – in other words, it can help your site show up more often in relevant searches.
Google
Overview
In a race, we only remember those who come first. The same rule applies to Google Search Results. We only click on the links which we see on the very first page. The traffic gets distributed among the Top 10 search results. We optimize our Website to make it both Search Engine and User-Friendly and this process is simply called SEO or Search Engine Optimization. It is not something to be learnt but it requires awareness or to be more specific – It requires Self Awareness. Google rolls out search engine updates every month and one learning SEO must never miss any such updates.
Can SEO alone rank my website on Google?
The Answer to this question is simply No. SEO is a sub-division of SEM, i.e, Search Engine Marketing and in order to learn how to rank on Google, one needs to completely understand and apply SEM on their websites.
Should I hire an Agency for SEO Optimizing my Website?
No matter how technically trained a person is, it is always hard to manage a website where he/she is working solo. Ranking a website on Google requires a team, a team for writing articles, a social media marketing team, a Search engine optimization team, and a team to record the overall progress of the website including analytics and Webmasters. If you can alone manage these tasks consistently for at least a year or two, you can ignore hiring an agency otherwise a digital marketing agency like Abnoq is a must.
Understand this and you are half-way done!
Suppose you own a clothing shop. One day, a customer comes and puts a demand for a formal dress. What would you show them, torn jeans or causal single-colored trousers? Of course the trouser. No matter how designer your torn jeans are but you will try fulfilling the demand of the customers first. This is how search engines work. Their aim is to show as many relevant results to the users as possible.
For example, when you search for ‘‘Learn English’ keyword, the search engine will first analyze your need. The Learn Keyword will guide the search engine to show the results of the website/video which contains the English tutorial.
Now, what if we ignore the ‘Learn’ keyword and simply search for ‘English’? Try yourself. (Hint: It will show the URLs giving information about English Language and not the tutorials)
Hence, one thing is sure – Keywords Play an Important Role.
There was a time when we just needed to repeat the keywords in our article and google used to blindly rank them on the search engine. Google has rolled out thousands of updates since then and now it is almost impossible to fool Google’s algorithms.
The Ultimate Guide for On-Page SEO
What is On-Page SEO?
It is also known as on-site SEO and it refers to the practice of optimizing web pages such that they could be simply understood by both the search engines and the users.
On-Page SEO includes optimizations to visible content and the HTML source code.
Ahref
Suppose you searched for an essay on the topic “Education System in India”. You come across two websites. One website contains headings and one doesn’t. In first website, the paragraphs are short and broken at certain intervals, while the content of the other website is written in a single paragraph. Which website would you prefer to read the essay from? Of course, the website with headings and small paragraphs. Why? Because it is easy to read from the first website while the second website might cause frustration.
Since the article on the first website is properly divided into certain headings and paragraphs, can we say it is On-Page Optimized? It might or might not be. There are few known and other unknown factors to be taken care of while doing on-page Optimization of the website. Let’s discuss them:
1. Relevant Content:
Google or any other advanced search engine categorizes the websites into News, Entertainment, Sports, Health and Fitness, etc kind of niches. Now, what if the website categorized as a Sports website suddenly starts posting health articles? It would be similar to showing torn jeans to the customer who came to buy formal pants. Hence, one must post relevant content to maintain the trust of both search engines and users.
Q- How does Google Categorize my website?
Search Engine Categories websites based on their content and user behavior.
Q- I have a News website and I post almost articles on Every niche. Is it bad for SEO?
It is not bad for SEO as long as you have divided your content into categories. (As shown as in the below example)
2. Keywords and Keywords Stuffing
Choose keywords that people search for. You can choose any free or paid keyword research tool to find optimum keywords for an article. There are different kinds of keywords one can choose from:
- Short Keywords: Short Keywords with less ranking difficulty are easy to rank than those with higher percentages of ranking difficulty. These must be chosen for writing articles that are not already present on the Internet (Yes, there are topics that Internet hasn’t found yet). How to check keyword difficulty? SEO Tools like Semrush, Ahref or Keyword Finder can be used.
- Long-Tail Keywords: Long-tail keywords are easy to rank as compared to short keywords. For example, the long tail keyword for ‘Learn English’ could be ‘Best website to Learn English Language’.
What is Keyword Stuffing?
Using a keyword or its synonym again and again repeatedly with intention of fooling the search engine is called Keyword Stuffing. Google and other advanced search engines have already developed algorithms that can detect whether the keywords in your article have taken birth naturally or you have inserted them artificially. You can read more about Penguin Update here.
Keyphrase Density is the number of times your Focus Keyphrase occurs in your copy, compared to the total text of that page. So if you have a text that is 100 words and 5 of those are your focus keyphrase, your keyphrase density is 5%.
Yoast SEO
You must try and keep the keyword density not more than 2.5% at any cost.
3. Meta Description
What do you see inside the yellow box is called the Meta Description of the webpage. It provides a brief summary of a web page. With this meta description information, search engine crawlers can briefly guess the content of a web page. Make sure that you fill meta description for each webpage on your website. Include the Focus Keyword (The keyword you want to rank for ) at least and at most one times in the meta information.
Meta information is the first impression of the web-page on search engine and hence it should be catchy and it must be written in a way that forces out the user to open the link. Although, it should not include content reflecting click-bait.
4. Title, Title Tag and Focus Keyword
Relevant titles must be put on the articles. The title should use <H1> HTML tag. It should have a focus keyword present into it. The title must not be very short or very long. They must reflect the content type. Title is shown on the search result page and hence it should be eye-catching. Search Engines use title to guess the content and its type.
Poor Title: This is how you can earn 25000 Rs Per month sitting in your home online
Good Title: Earn money from home using these 5 Techniques OR 5 Ways to earn money online from Home
Should I change the Slug?
Slug is nothing but the URL of the web-page. Yes, the slug should be changed. It must be short and must contain the focus keyword.
5. Image Optimization
Image must be optimized before adding to the Post. If not optimized properly, it could lead to the Slow Page Speed. There are various tools available on the Internet to Optimize your images for absolutely free. One such tool is Image Compressor. If you are using CMS like WordPress, you can use WordPress Plugins to Optimize the images of your website. One must not ignore optimizing the Images because High-Quality PNG images takes time to load and hence could cause frustration to the users when their Internet is slow. Which means users will quit browsing your website as soon as they see that the website is slow. This will increase the Bounce Rate which is a negative thing for our rankings. (We’ll know further in this article why).
What is Alt-Text? Should I fill it?
<img src="abnoq.jpg" alt="Company Logo" width="500" height="600">
In the above HTML code, the bold part is the alt-text.
Alt-Text stands for Alternative Text and it describes the nature of the image. If the picture does not load due to some reasons, these alt-texts are displayed such that the user may know what image was placed there. Since search engines cannot understand images on their own, they use the alternative text to understand the images.
6. Outbound Links and Inbound Links
- Outbound Links: It is a link that exists on our webpages to redirect users to different websites. These can be used to put references. For example, You might be writing about cricket and your article contains the name of Sachin Tendulkar. Now, you don’t want to write much about Sachin in this article and hence you can give outbound link to Sachin’s WikiPedia page such that people can read about him. This also increases the trustworthiness of your article.
- Inbound Links: Inbound links are the links that redirect the user from your own website to another page of the same website. This is also called Traffic Juicing. Doing so increases the traffic of others pages which are not ranked higher on the Google and hence results in increasing Page Authority. Hence, add atleast one inbounding link to each of your web-pages. Maximum depends on the length of the article.
The Complete Off-Page SEO Tutorial
What is off-page SEO?
“Off-page SEO” (also called “off-site SEO”) refers to actions taken outside of your own website to impact your rankings within search engine results pages (SERPs). Along with on-page SEO, these include several of the factors of basic SEO that help a site to rank.
MOZ
There are various ways of Optimizing the website off-site. For example: Page Speed, Mobile Responsiveness, Link Building, etc. Let’s understand these all one-by-one:
1. Mobile Responsiveness
Mobile Responsiveness: Earlier when there were no smartphones, all the websites were designed for a specific desktop size. But years passed and people started surfing the Internet on different devices like Tablets and Mobiles. According to a recent survey, 58% of the Internet traffic comes from mobile, 46% from desktop, and 2% from other devices. It simply means that if your website is not mobile responsive, you will miss a lot on your traffic.
How to check if my website is Mobile Responsive?
- Type ‘Mobile friendly test’ on Google.
- Enter the URL of the website to be tested.
- Press Run Test.
After the completion of the test, the report will be shared with you. The report states whether the website is responsive or not. If you are using CMS like WordPress, you can buy responsive themes from themeforest.
2. Page Speed
Page Speed is one of the most important ranking factors on search engines. If your website is slow, people will come and exit your website without waiting for it completely open. Why? Because there are tons of other websites available that have the same information and those which opens faster. This would result in High Bounce rate. It will directly signal the search engine that people are quitting your website because of its poor or unusable content. Thus, search engine will never rank your content.
How to Increase Page Speed?
- Use minimal Javascript.
- Compress and Optimize images before using.
- Do not overload your website with non-necessary plugins.
How to check Page Speed?
- Type ‘Check Page Speed’ on Google.
- Open any URL (Pageinsights, Gtmatrix or Pingdom)
- Enter the URL of the website whose speed you want to Test.
- Save/Download the Report.
3. Backlinks
When an outbound link on someone’s website redirects the users to your website, that URL is said to become a backlink for your website. The more number of backlinks you have, the more authority your domain will build, and hence it will become easier for the search engines and users to trust your content. The backlink coming from an already-established website is more useful than a newly created website. Domain age and Backlinks are two important factors reflecting the Domain Authority.
How to check my Domain Authority?
You can use tools like Moz or Ahref to check the domain authority of any website. The more is the authority of the domain, the more are the chances of it gaining higher traffic.
Following are the different types of backlinks:
- Do-Follow Backlink: Search Engine Crawls such URLs.
- No-Follow Backlink: Search Engine Ignores such URLs.
- Comment Backlink: Such backlinks may either be Do-Follow or No-Follow based on the Owner’s discretion.
4. Social Signals
Social Signals are nothing but the likes and shares a certain URL gets on the various social media. The more a content is shared on the social media, the more it is considered to be important and hence search engine treats them as likely, and the chances of ranking higher on the search engine increases. But this had a negative side as well. Suppose you share your article on the social media in a place where people are most interested in Hollywood movies but your article is about Cricket.
Now there are two scenarios possible:
- Nobody will click on the URL to read the article as nobody is interested. This will lead to negative social signals.
- People will open and instantly close the article due to irrelevant content. This will increase the bounce rate which will negatively affect the SEO of the website.
5. Social Media Marketing & Brand Building
Social Media platforms have over billions of users active on the daily basis. You should not miss creating your website’s page on all the available social media platforms. Keep uploading the content on regular basis and run regular Ad campaigns. Soon your website will start getting recognized as a brand. If done correctly, people will not come and search for you on Google. It is more powerful than SEO but it requires a higher budget as well. A dedicated team can make the task easy and less hectic.
The Basic SEO Rules:
- Submit your sitemap on all webmasters like Google, Bing and Yahoo.
- Keep checking for the Error messages on the Google Webmaster.
- Keep checking for the Errors on the Robot.txt file.
- Exclude the admin pages from Indexing on Search Engine.
- Do not use multiple plugins to create a sitemap for a single website.
That’s all for the SEO in 2022. I’ll keep updating all the new updates incoming from Google and other Search Engines.
Summary
Things we learnt from the above article:
- SEO alone cannot rank a website on the Search Engines. Search Engine Marketing plays an important role in rankings.
- On-Page and Off-Page SEO must go hand-in-hand. One alone is not sufficient to rank websites on the Internet.
- Hiring a team increases the chances of success by 95.5% than working alone.
Hope you found this article useful. Looking for a team to rank your website on google at an affordable cost? Contact us today!
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