All about Search Engine Optimization — SEO
When it comes to making an online business successful, the company uses SEO approaches. SEO strategies focus on bringing as much quality traffic as possible to the website by placing it at the top of the search engine results. To put it simply, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the process of making improvements to a website to bring in quality traffic through organic search engine results. Companies often employ SEO specialists to introduce these SEO techniques to improve organic traffic. Organic traffic naturally arrives on the website and not as a result of paid search efforts, such as pay-per-click, and hence leads to longevity of the business.
How does Google work?
A crawler or spider is a Google search engine robot that travels the web from one site to another, reads the webpage, and records the content through a process named scraping. Google extracts all the text from a website, which is called the indexing of web pages. It uses various algorithms to rank these web pages to return the most relevant information of your query.
Two types of search results
The organic search results are the unpaid natural results displayed on SERP (Search Engine Results Page). The ranking of these results depends upon various factors such as user experience, quality content, etc. The paid results are those that an advertiser pays to display their website on top of organic search results. Paid search results don’t require the business to optimize its website for ranking.
SEO Types
There are two kinds of SEO: Black Hat SEO and White Hat SEO. White Hat SEO is the list of strategies that follow the guidelines of search engines. It is a strongly advised approach, whereas, Black Hat SEO is considered a shady method to fool search engines to rank higher in SERP. This method risks your website to get penalized and can also lead to excluding the website from google search results. Some of the Black Hat SEO practices to avoid include cloaking, keyword stuffing, buying links, etc.
Ranking Factors to consider:
Ranking a website in a higher place is possible after considering various factors. Keywords are one of those many factors. Keywords, both the short-tail or long-tail keywords, are the words or phrases used by users to find relevant content. It takes time and works to determine which keyword will help to achieve objectives. Keywords must be included in the content and must look natural. Forcing the use of keywords will do no good and hurt the ranking of the website.
Another factor is HTML tags. Title tags are the online headlines that show up in the tab when you open any new page. It becomes an h1-tag when it comes to blogging. Meta tags and descriptions display below the title of the webpage. It describes what the page is about, and it is where its recommended to optimize for keywords for SEO. One should also consider anchor tags, alt tags, etc.
Another factor is mobile friendliness. Google has released new additions to search-level metrics after noticing a growing mobile trend. Nowadays, people prefer everything on the go, that is why one must make their website responsive to result in higher search quality by Google. User experience, content type, and its depth, domain authority, HTTPS, Keywords in URLs are other factors to be considered.
SEO Tools
Popular SEO tools available in the market are:
1. Google Analytics
It is a free tool that helps to analyze the performance of your website by understanding the behaviors of the visitors on the website. Google Analytics helps to gather information such as how many users visited the page, what they browsed, the type of devices visitors use, etc.
2. Google Search Console
It helps to gather precise information on what users searched on Google to find your website. It is also a free tool by Google to check the health of the website in the eyes of Google.
Apart from these free tools, Moz, SEMrush are some of the paid tools used to analyze and get insights on your website.
Conclusion
SEO is not an option nowadays when everything is going online. It is a must. Hence, knowing the methods right with time and effort is the key to stand out in millions. Once you improve your SEO, it will last for the long term, i.e., the results won’t stop tomorrow if you stop your SEO activities today.