SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization. It is a process designed to optimize a website for search engines. SEO is useful for:
- Designing and developing a website that is Search Engine Friendly.
- Optimizing the volume and quality of website traffic from search engines.
- Knowing how search algorithms work and what your target audiences might search.
Why SEO important?
- To help gain more visitors: majority users click on only the top 3 to 4 web pages that appeared in search results, so it’s very important for a website to appear in the top results of a search engine.
- Creating a Better Visitor Experience: SEO doesn’t focus only on improving search results but also on improving the user experience and usability of a website so that a website is more appealing to a user.
- Important for social promotion of a website: if a website appears in top results of a search engine for eg. Google, Bing, etc. then it achieve instant popularity and to some extent trust of a user.
- It improving the business of a commercial site: if two websites are selling the same product, then the site having better position in search result of a search engine has chances of getting more users as compared to the other.
How Search Engine Works?
Different activities that a search engine performs are:
- Crawling: The process of fetching all the web pages linked to a website. This action is performed by a software, called a crawler or a spider (or Googlebot, in case of Google).
- Indexing: It creates an index for all the fetched web pages and keeps them in a giant database from where data is retrieved. Indexing identifies the words and expressions that describe your page.
- Processing: It involves the processing of a search request by comparing the search string in the search request with the indexed pages in the search engine database.
- Calculating Relevancy: Since more than one page could contain the same search string, relevancy calculation helps in checking the relevancy of each of the pages. The latest SEO tutorial includes all the necessary information that is required to calculate relevancy.
- Retrieving Results: The last step is retrieving the best-matched results. This refers to the data that is retrieved based on the keywords entered by the user.
What is On-Page and Off-page SEO?
On-Page SEO
It includes optimizing your content, adding the right keywords at the right places, using relevant keywords, using an apt title for every page, etc. Some on-page optimization are adding relevant directory submissions, backlinks, quality content writing, Google Page rank, etc. On-page Optimization includes:
- Keyword research with Google Keyword Planner.
- Select domain name.
- Using the right page title {URL Structuring} and folder naming.
- Image name, Image title, and ALT tags creation.
- Meta tags like description, keywords, author, country, etc.
- Redirection tags, headings tags {h1 to h6}, content writing, anchor text, link title.
- Robots.txt file use and creation, HTML Sitemap creation, ML Site Map Creation, ROR text sitemap, etc.
Off-Page SEO
Off-page SEO refers to the external factors that can help improve your page ranking. It depends on link building, social networking, increasing link popularity via submitting content to open directories, doing a link exchange, etc. A successful off-page SEO includes the following concepts:
- Creating content that people want to share.
- Improving social presence to increase interaction with the audience.
- Networking and partnering with influencers to direct more traffic to your website.
- Guest blogging on related sites.