Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Here is everything you should know about Search Engine Optimization in digital marketing

What is Search Engine Optimization / SEO in digital marketing ?

In simple terms, SEO is ranking a website in one or more keywords on a Search Engine Result Page [SERP].

What is the importance of SEO ?

The main objective of marketing is to introduce or display a brand or business to the right audience. People are spending more of their time on the internet. People rely on the internet for almost everything. Which platform do people use for gathering information ? Google ! So the audience is already there; we just have to reach out to them. SEO follows an Inbound Marketing strategy. It's so much easier to promote a thing when people are searching for it, right ? That's how SEO works and that's how important this is.

Benefits of SEO

1. SEO brings organic traffic to the website
2. Creates brand awareness.
3. Increase website traffic.
4. SEO makes a website more credible and trustworthy.
5. It's a free 24*7 promotion.
6. It can display a brand to the targeted audience.
7. SEO statistics are easily trackable.
8. It helps in lead generation
9. It generates a long-term success

What are the different methods of SEO ?

SEO can be done in 3 ways. They are :

1. White-Hat SEO

2.Black-Hat SEO

3.Gray-Hat SEO

 

White-Hat SEO

It's the method of performing SEO by strictly following the Guidelines and Protocols that Google introduced.

White-Hat SEO is a time taking process.

 

Black-Hat SEO

Black-Hat SEO is like taking a shortcut to reach your destination, but once Google identified that you are performing SEO without following the guidelines and protocols, the website will be banned and will removed permanently.

 

Gray-Hat SEO

Gray-Hat SEO is a mixture of both White-Hat and Black-Hat SEO.

 

What are the SEO algorithm ?

There are many algorithms which affect SEO ranking, the most important ones are :

1. Panda

2. Hummingbird

3. Penguin

4. Mobile

5. Rankbrain

6. Bert

 

PANDA

 

 

This algorithm deals with duplicate content, content plagiarism, keyword stuffing etc.

HUMMING BIRD

 

 

Keyword stuffing and low-quality content.

PENGUIN

 

 

Link spamming, irrelevant links. 

MOBILE

 

 

User experience in mobile, mobile page speed.

RANKBRAIN

 

 

It's a machine learning algorithm, which means the algorithm introduced by google for the bots, and crawlers to understand the content on the website.

BERT

 

 

it's all about the quality and relevance of content present on the website.

How does SEO work?

SEO works mainly in 3 steps, which are:
1. Crawling
2. Indexing
3. Ranking

Crawling
Indexing
ranking

Every Search Engine has its own bots, like Google bot or spider or crawler, Bingbot for Bing, Slurp for Yahoo and so on. These bots visit and download pages from the website to collect information about the content on the website. The process of visiting is known as Crawling.

 

Once the crawler visit ( crawling ) a page it collects and stores the data and contents from the website, this process is known as Indexing.

 

After the crawler or bot inspected a website and the contents will be stored, then when someone searches a query the bot goes through every data and content to display relevant content to the user, this process is known as Ranking.

 

What are the types of SEO ?

 

 

Types of SEO

There are mainly two types of SEO :

On-page SEO

Off-page SEO

 

1. On-Page SEO

These are the practices and activities carried out on a website page to optimize the page for better ranking.
a. SSL certificate :

SSL stands for Secure Socket Layer. It is used for a secure connection, keeping user data secure, prevent attacks from malware. HTTPS:// denotes that website has an SSL certificate and the connection is secure, if a website only has HTTP:// then it indicates that the website does not have an SSL certificate.

b. Page speed :

a website with a faster page speed will rank higher. How to increase page speed? here are some tips :

  • Remove unwanted plugins.
  • Optimize and compress images.
  •  Select the best web hosting platform.

check page speed now: https://pagespeed.web.dev/

c. Mobile friendly test :

As per Google protocol, a website must be mobile-friendly since most of the users are mobile-oriented.

Check it now: https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly

If a website contains broken links it will affect its ranking.

Check for broken links: https://www.brokenlinkcheck.com/

f. Image optimization :

Optimizing images on the website increases the page speed, improves user experience, and helps crawlers to understand better which contributes to the SEO ranking.

How to optimize an image? Here are some tips to do so :

  • Resize an image.
  • Give a proper title to the image.
  • Use proper alt tags. Alt text means giving alternate text to images and it will be visible when the image failed to load.

g. Content optimization :

Optimizing Content present on a website plays a key role in SEO ranking.

Here are some of the methods used for content optimization :

  • Check grammar
  • Keyword frequency
  • Keyword density
  • Use proper headings and sub-headings.

h. Header Tag optimization :

Header tag optimization means giving proper tags to your headings, like giving an H1 tag to your main keyword and giving H2 tags to the main heading according to the relevance.

j. Title :

Giving a title to a website helps users and Google bots to understand what this website is all about.

A perfect title should have the following details :

  •  580 px length
  • Primary keyword
  • avoid stop word
  • Action words: get, take, let .

k. Description :

Giving a description of the website or page will help in ranking.

The length of the description should be 990 px.

m. Linking :

There are mainly 3 types of linking structures:

Internal linking: linking between pages of the same website.
Outbound linking: linking given from our website to another website.
Inbound linking: linking from another website to our website.

2. Off-page SEO

These are the practises and activities performed outside of the website page to optimize it for better ranking.

Backlinks are inbound links which means advertising a website in other words or giving links from a website having higher traffic to our website. This makes Google trust our website more. 

There are three types of backlinks:

  • Social bookmarking
  • Directory submission backlinks
  • Classified submission backlinks

b. Guest blogging :

Writing blogs about the topic related to the website and giving links to the website on that platform helps to boost ranking.

What are the ranking factors of SEO?

There are many factors which affect SEO ranking. But if you follow these tips you’ll get ranked higher :

  • Optimization: This means a website should be well optimized, like on-page and off-page SEO, the things that I pointed out above.
  • Page Speed: This includes both mobile and desktop page speed.
  • User experience: If a page is not user-friendly then users will leave the page ASAP, this will affect your ranking.
  •  Keyword optimization
  • Inbound and outbound links
  • Backlinks
  • Social book markings
  • Domain authority
  • page authority
Frequently Asked Questions FAQ
Do you have a question? The most frequently asked questions by our customers are answered here. Do you have a question? The most frequently asked questions by our customers are answered here.
What’s the Difference Between On-Page and Off-Page SEO?

Everything you do to optimise your own website, including the content, meta tags, and back-end code, falls under the category of on-page SEO. Off-page SEO is more difficult to manage. Off-page SEO refers to everything that happens outside of your website that is directly related to it. This can include domain authority, backlinks, and other factors.

 

How do SEOs choose keywords?

SEO professionals select keywords using a variety of tools. Google Search Console, Ahrefs, Moz, and Ubersuggest are some of the most popular. We may also make recommendations based on what a client wishes to rank for.

 

Why does SEO pricing vary so much?

There are numerous search engine optimization (SEO) strategies to apply. Some are quick and easy, but have a big impact. Some require a great deal of effort and could take several days or even weeks to finish. SEO costs, like many other services, are determined by the experience of your SEO agency and the extent to which you want your optimization to be.

 

Is SEO Necessary for My Business?

Yes, your company should spend money on SEO. Search engine optimization allows you to increase traffic without having to pay for each click.
When you use PPC advertising, you will be charged for each and every click that comes from that source to your website. However, if your website ranks high in organic search results, this traffic is essentially free (at least in terms of a cost-per-click). Of course, ranking a website on the SERPs necessitates an investment in skills and resources.

 

Why Doesn't My Website Show Up in Google Searches?

There are several reasons why your website may not be ranking on Google. But first, go to Google and perform a search for your website.

You can tell if your site is indexed if you can see the web pages listed. Reasons your website may not be ranking include:

  • Because it is new, your website lacks the authority needed to appear for popular search terms. You must prove that you are deserving of ranking before you can launch a website and expect it to rank for your target queries immediately.
  • In comparison to the webpage that rank for such queries you're searching at, your content doesn't meet the searcher's intent, appears to lack in-depth analysis, or is of lower quality. You must make sure that the pages you serve are at least as excellent as, if not better than, the ones that are already ranking.

If none of your website's pages are listed, this indicates that it has not been indexed. Possible explanations include:

  • Your website either forbids crawling by search engines (typically in your robots.txt file) or advises them not to rank it (generally using noindex tags). If you remove these blocks, your site should be indexed.
  • Your website just went live a short while ago (a few days), and since you haven't submitted it to Google or created any links to it elsewhere, it has not yet been indexed. Create a Google Search Console account and ask for indexing.
  • Due to a violation of Google's Webmaster Guidelines, your website has been subject to a site-wide manual penalty. This is unusual and improbable. To achieve this, however, you would have had to employ some serious black-hat SEO techniques.

 

Why is my organic traffic decreasing?

To know whether the organic traffic to your website has decreased suddenly or gradually over time, you must first make that determination.

If this occurred suddenly,

  • Examine your website to see if noindex tags were accidentally added. When website developers transfer a site from a test environment to a live one without removing these, this can occasionally happen. These will result in the de-indexing of your website if they are left in place. If you use WordPress, make sure to:

Settings > Reading > Search Engine Visibility
This box must not be checked.

  • To find out if your website has been banned from the SERPs because of malware, check Google Search Console. You might discover that this typically occurs if your site has been hacked if Google believes that it may be harmful to users. You can learn more about requesting a review after you've resolved the issues by clicking here.
  • It's possible that a manual action affected your site, though it's unlikely. In Google Search Console, navigate to Security & Manual Actions > Manual actions to view the manual actions report.
    If you see a problem listed, this could be the cause of your site's traffic loss. If there is no issue listed, you can be confident that this is not the case.

If this has occurred gradually,

  • Google may have implemented a core algorithm update, which has resulted in other sites gaining traffic and ranking higher than yours. According to Google, "There's nothing wrong with pages that perform poorly in a core update. They have not violated our webmaster guidelines, nor have they been subjected to manual or algorithmic action, as can happen to pages that do. In fact, no specific pages or sites are targeted in a core update. Instead, the changes aim to improve how our systems evaluate content in general. These changes may cause some previously under-rewarded pages to perform better." The recommendation here is to look at what the top-ranked sites are doing that you aren't.
  • The more likely explanation is that your competitors have surpassed your organic visibility because they are implementing a more aggressive SEO strategy than you are. In other words, they deserve some of the positions you previously held. In this situation, it makes sense to thoroughly analyse your competitors' strategies in order to identify areas in which you can excel. To assist you with this, you can make use of the SEMrush Backlink Gap Tool and Keyword Gap Tool.

 

When Will I Start Ranking on Google?

It depends, as is the response given by many SEOs.
The times when you could launch a website, optimise your title tags, and start ranking within a few weeks are long gone. Launching a website and expecting it to rank for difficult search terms over night is unrealistic. A website can only perform naturally over time as Google only ranks relevant sites with established authority.

 

Should I run PPC advertisements, SEO campaigns, or both?

A common question is whether a company should invest in SEO, PPC, or both. It's the age-old debate between SEO and PPC.

In an ideal world, a company would balance multiple marketing channels to avoid becoming overly reliant on any single source of traffic (and conversions). However, budgeting is frequently a challenge, particularly for smaller businesses, and resources must be allocated efficiently. Money isn't limitless.

Even in this case, a long-term SEO strategy must be balanced with a small but targeted PPC campaign.

 

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