SEO IN A NUTSHELL

You have been lingering around the 2nd page on a search engine, haven’t you? Worn-out by searching on how to increase your page rank, drained by hearing the jargon of SEO, having no clue what SEO is? This article will be an attempt to distill relatively complex SEO topics into understandable bits.

The article mainly consists of

• What is SEO? How does a search engine work?
• Why do I need SEO for my website?
• On-Page factors affecting SEO
• Free SEO tools to get you started.

WHAT IS SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization which is a process of getting pages to rank higher in search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. Ranking higher results in an increase of organic traffic to a website. Thus, in a nutshell, it helps in improving the quality of a website or web page from search engines.

HOW A SEARCH ENGINE WORKS?

Try to backtrack your queries/searches, how did you end up here? Searching for what SEO is? or How it works? or wanted to know about on-page and off-page factors, anyway, we are glad you are here, using whichever search engine you used. However, the search engine didn’t just pop the pages out of nowhere. There must be some algorithm used.

When a user enters a query in a search engine, it will look at millions of entries available to show the most relevant match. Each search engine has its algorithms however the basic principles remain similar consisting of crawling, indexing, ranking.

CRAWLING:

This is the process where search engines send out bots known as spiders or crawlers to scour the newly updated content on publicly available web pages.

INDEXING:

This is the process where search engines organize and store the information they find in an index. Indexing builds its index with every significant word on a web page found in the title, heading, meta tags, alt tags, subtitles, and other important positions.

RANKING :

This is the process through which the search engine decides which indexed pages should be showcased first for a particular search query.

Why do I need SEO for my website?

There are several reasons why you should optimize your website. Let’s state some of these.

GROWTH

The most essential reason why you may require SEO is to increase your growth and reach your target audience which will help build your brand while staying aligned to the quality of content you may want to provide to your audience.

TRAFFIC

At face value, SEO is for increasing your page ranking, however, it is integral for increasing the traffic on your web page which also paves the way for customers and more revenue.

AHEAD OF THE COMPETITORS

SEO puts a person ahead of its competition. For example, if two websites are trying to sell a laptop, the one with the search engine optimized website is likely to have more customers and greater sales.

USERS

A user’s experience is improved by SEO which may also lead the user to trust the credibility of a website.

On-Page factors affecting SEO

SEO can be considered a continuous process and should be maintained regularly. It can be divided into two techniques: On-Page SEO, Off-Page SEO.

On-page SEO:

On-page essentially focuses on the content on the site and how well it is optimized for relevant keywords and how it provides a good user experience.

Off-page SEO:

It refers to the page ranking factors that occur off your website, such as backlinks from another site. It also includes your promotion methods, taking under consideration the quantity of exposure something gets on social media.

Some of the on-page techniques you can implement easily yourself are:

TITLE TAGS and META DESCRIPTIONS:

Title tags define the title of the page whereas metadata is the brief description of the page that shows up in search engines. There are many practices one can follow for writing an effective title tag such as limiting title tags to 50–60 words and meta description to 150 words.

CONTENT:

The content should be of quality that may be of use to the users visiting your website. The content shouldn’t contain any grammatical errors, it should be engaging without plagiarism and misleading titles.

URL STRUCTURE:

A proper URL structure means that the link is as readable as possible. Put keywords into your URLs if possible. However, do not go changing all of your current URLs just so they have keywords in them. You shouldn’t change old URLs unless you plan on redirecting your old ones to your new ones

SITE SPEED:

Google wants to assist its users to find what they’re trying to find as quickly as possible to supply the simplest user experience. Therefore, optimizing your pages to load faster helps your site rank higher within the search results.

Free SEO tools to get you started.

There are a ton of free tools one can use to optimize a website. This is a list of some free SEO tools one might use to get started with SEO

1)GOOGLE ANALYTICS

While it’s not purely for SEO, it’s still a helpful tool to trace if you’re getting traffic from organic search. You can’t ignore Google Analytics. Virtually all the actionable and important data about site visitors, traffic, etc., comes from this critical source.

2)ANSWER THE PUBLIC:

This tool finds questions that people ask on forums, blogs, and social media and it turns those questions into keywords. Just type in a keyword and it will give you a laundry list of questions people are searching for related to that keyword.

3)KEYWORD.IO:

Keyword.io is a tool that helps you find a list of keywords related to the topic of your choosing.

4)UBERSUGGEST:
Uber suggest is considered as all in one SEO tool as it can be used to find keywords and assess the competition of these keywords by giving insights on CPC (cost per click), volume, PD (Estimated competition in paid search, the higher the number, the more competitive it is), SD (Estimated competition in organic search, the higher the number, the more competitive it is).

5) Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test:

You might have heard that Google recently made a big change to their algorithm. This change is officially called “Mobile-First Indexing”. If your site isn’t optimized for mobile devices, you’re in big trouble. Fortunately, you don’t need a full-time developer to make your site mobile-friendly. All you need to do is run your site through the Mobile-Friendly Test tool. And it tells you whether or not Google considers your site mobile-friendly.

To conclude, SEO tools are important for a website to increase its quality, providing users with a better experience and quality content. Hope this article helps you to gain a basic understanding of SEO and encourages SEO beginners to dive deeper into these tools and create a highly optimized SEO website.