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New to SEO? Tips & Tricks to understand Search Engine Optimization

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results.

This video provides an overview of SEO.

Source: Video is taken from http://searchengineland.com & the video was created with Common Craft, http://www.commoncraft.com/

The following points explain well about SEO:

  1. Quality of traffic: Quality traffic is an outcome of providing the right content for your visitor.
  2. Quantity of traffic: Once you have the right people clicking through from those search engine results pages (SERPs), more traffic is better.
  3. Organic results: Ads make up a significant portion of many SERPs. Organic traffic is any traffic that you don’t have to pay for.

 

The things that affect SEO rankings and search engine visibilities are:

  1. Crawling
  2. Indexing
  3. Mobile Friendliness
  4. Page Speed
  5. Search Intent
  6. Backlinks
  7. Authority
  8. Content Quality

 

How does SEO work?

It’s been said that; “Content is King but engagement is Queen, and the lady rules the house!” — Mari Smith

When you search for something in Google (or any other search engine), the algorithm works in real-time to bring you what that search engine considers the “best” result, including the words of your query, relevance, and usability of pages, the expertise of sources & your location and settings.

The weight applied to each factor varies depending on the nature of your query – for example, the freshness of the content plays a bigger role in answering queries about current news topics than it does about dictionary definitions.

If you want more organic traffic to your web pages, then you need to understand and cater to Google’s algorithm

 

How to optimize for Google?

Google ranks web pages, not web sites.

Just because your business is all about dog walking service doesn’t mean that every page on your site should rank for the query, “dog walking service”.

You can rank for different keywords and topics with different pages with the most relevant keyword suiting your business.

 

The things that affect rankings and search engine visibility are:

a. Crawling in SEO:

Crawling is a process by which search engines crawler/spiders/ bots scan a website and collect details about each page: titles, images, keywords, other linked pages, etc.

Source: Image taken from www.digitalgenx.com

Search engine crawler scans a web page from top left to the bottom right and it collects each link (internal as well as external) on the page. These links are added to the next page to visit the list. It goes to the next page in its list, collects the links on that page, and repeats. Web crawlers also revisit past pages once in a while to see if any changes happened.

Users can block search engine crawlers with the help of Robots.txt file with the help of google search console. Google never accepts any type of payment to crawl the website more often.

Some things can block Google’s crawlers, they are as follows:

  • Poor internal linking: Google relies on internal links to crawl all the pages on your site. Pages without internal links often won’t get crawled.
  • Nofollow internal links: Internal links with nofollow tags won’t get crawled by Google.
  • Noindexed pages: You can exclude pages from Google’s index using a noindex meta tag or HTTP header. If other pages on your site only have internal links from noindexed pages, there’s a chance that Google won’t find them.
  • Blocks in robots.txt: Robots.txt is a text file that tells Google where it can and can’t go on your website. If pages are blocked here, it won’t crawl them.

 

b. Indexing in SEO:

Search engine Index process everything which is found on a webpage like keywords, images, headings, links, etc. Google search Index compiles all the words it sees on a web page and their location on each page and stores it in a database of billions of pages.

The stored words of web pages interpreted by search engine algorithm to measure importance compared to pages similar to it. After this, search engines decide to rank a page for given keywords and how it should be found in their search results.

 

c. Mobile-friendliness:

Most of the Google searches come from mobile devices, and it is increasing every year by a certain percentage.

You can check if your web pages are mobile-friendly with Google’s mobile-friendly testing tool

d. PageSpeed:

Pagespeed is how fast your page loads. It’s a ranking factor on desktop and mobile.

To check the speed of your web pages, use Google’s Pagespeed Insights tool.

e. Search intent:

Google is interpreting the motive behind the query and showing results the user wants to see. This is a search intent in action.

Look at the top-ranking pages and ask yourself questions to identify the “3 C’s of search intent.”

  • Content type: Are most of the results blog posts, product pages, category pages, landing pages, or something else?
  • Content format: Is Google mainly ranking how-to guides, list-style articles, tutorials, comparisons, opinion pieces, or something entirely different? (Note. This one applies mainly to informational topics.)
  • Content angle: Is there a common theme or unique selling point across the top-ranking pages? If so, this gives you some insight into what might be important to searchers.

 

f. Backlinks:

Google’s ranking algorithm is based on something called PageRank.

In simple terms, this interprets backlinks as votes. Generally speaking, pages with more votes tend to rank higher.

 

g. Authority:

Not all backlinks are created equal. Some carry more weight than others. This fact is built-in to the way PageRank works
Generally speaking, backlinks from high-authority pages are stronger than those from low-authority pages.
Term: Page Authority scores range from one to 100, with higher scores corresponding to a greater ability to rank.(100 is the best possible score, 0 is the worst possible score)

 

h. Content Quality:

“Content is the KING” in SEO. Other things you can do to increase the perceived quality of your content might be:

  • Stick to a 7th or 8th-grade reading level.
  • Use short sentences and paragraphs.
  • Link to useful resources where appropriate.
  • Avoid big walls of text: Break things up with images, quotes, etc.

 

There are two different categories in SEO

Part 1: On-page SEO 

Part 2: Off-page SEO

 Note: Stay tuned, we will cover the above topics in the upcoming blogs.

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