What is SEO ?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the practice of optimizing your web site pages to make them rank high in the search results of google and other search engines.
Why Your Website Needs SEO ?
- SEO Earns More Web Traffic : The goal of SEO optimization is to improve your site’s rankings in search results in turn it will drive more traffic to your web site.
- SEO Doesn’t Require Paid Advertisements : The biggest advantages of SEO is that it doesn’t require paying for ad space. SEO drives traffic to your website through organic search.
- SEO Builds Trust and Credibility : The goal of any SEO is to establish a strong foundation for a beautiful website with a clean, effective user experience that is easily discoverable in search with thanks to the trust and credibility of the brand and its digital properties.
- SEO Improves User Experience : Search engines ultimate goal is to provide the best possible results for their users. As a result, many of their algorithm updates focus on making sure that they’re directing users to sites that not only provide relevant content, but also a great user experience.
How SEO ?
Now the question comes ... how to optimize the we pages to rank them high on search engines ? Let's understand or learn how ?
SEO Techniques, SEO Methods, SEO Process
- Getting Indexed
The leading search engines, such as Google, Bing and Yahoo!, use crawlers to find pages for their algorithmic search results. Hence the first thing is to indexed your web pages in different search engines. Google offers Google Search Console, though which an XML sitemap can be created and submitted to google search engine for free. Yahoo Search results are powered by both Yahoo and Microsoft. To optimize for Yahoo Search, you'll want to submit your sitemap to both Yahoo and Bing. Visit the Bing Site Submission Page to submit your sitemap.
- Preventing Crawling
Avoid undesirable content in the search indexes. You could instruct spiders not to crawl certain files or directories through the standard robots.txt file in the root directory of the domain. Additionally, a page can be explicitly excluded from a search engine's database by using a meta tag specific to robots (usually ). When a search engine visits a site, the robots.txt located in the root directory is the first file crawled. The robots.txt file is then parsed and will instruct the robot as to which pages are not to be crawled.
- Increasing Prominence
A variety of methods can increase the prominence of a webpage within the search results.- Cross Linking : It is the process of linking between two sites as well between pages of the same website. It can come in handy to get high search engine rankings, by leveraging multiple domains owned by you. Search engines value these links, as they are from relevant sites, with related content- and you stand a chance of getting a better rank.
- Mobile Friendliness: 63% of Google searches come from mobile devices, and that number is growing every year. Given that statistic, it probably comes as no surprise that in 2016, Google announced a ranking boost for mobile-friendly websites in its mobile search results. Google also shifted to mobile-first indexing in 2018, meaning that they now use the mobile version of your page for indexing and ranking. You can check if your web pages are mobile-friendly with Google’s mobile-friendly testing tool.
- Page Speed: Page speed is how fast your page loads. It’s a ranking factor on desktop and mobile. Once again, Google wants to keep its users satisfied. If their users are clicking on search results that take too long to load, that leads to dissatisfaction. To check the speed of your web pages, use Google’s Page speed Insights tool.
- Search Intent: Google is interpreting the motive behind the query and showing results the user wants to see. How do you optimize for this? Look at the top-ranking pages and ask yourself questions to identify the “3 C’s of search intent.”
- Backlinks :In simple terms, this interprets backlinks as votes. Generally speaking, pages with more votes tend to rank higher. There are tons of link building tactics but if you’re new to the game, aim to build links to your best informational content (e.g., a blog post or a free tool).
- Page Authority: Not all backlinks are created equal. Some carry more weight than others. Generally speaking, backlinks from high-authority pages are stronger than those from low-authority pages. For that reason, when building backlinks to your content, you should prioritize the building of links from strong pages over weak ones.
- Content quality : Google wants to rank the most reliable and useful results—always. To do this, they look at content-related signals like expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. Collectively, these are known as EAT.