SEO or Search Engine Optimization is a common term used whenever someone talks about blogs, articles, and websites. So, What is Search Engine Optimization? SEO fundamentals is a broad subject that aims to improve the visibility of the website in search engine rankings and help increase organic traffic. SEO is often coined as a digital marketing strategy that helps drive traffic to a website and increase sales through e-commerce or to help increase customer awareness and improve branding.
Optimizing a website for search engine ranking involves a complex process of creating engaging content for the website at the same time making sure that the title and meta descriptions are present and the proper header tags are used. The use of keywords that relate with your content is also a major factor in Search Engine Optimization.
Making sure that the website can be viewed by any devices that your target audience potentially uses is also part of SEO. Link building also helps increase traffic by ensuring that relevant content can be easily found by your target audience. Site loading speed is also an important factor in SEO.
How does SEO affect your Website?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an inbound marketing strategy that is more customer friendly and helps the customer engage with your business through the website. There is no concrete strategy on how to implement SEO fundamentals on your website as it largely depends on several factors like target audience, industry and the current trend of the Search Engine Algorithm.
It can be implemented through on-page optimization and off-page optimization that involves taking into account readability across digital platforms like mobile phones, tablets, and PCs. It also involves optimizing content to conform to the standard of the search engine algorithm to improve its visibility and ranking.
SEO helps improve the user experience when visiting the website and improve the company branding. A good experience on the website also improves website traffic through referrals like social media sharing.
How do Search Engines find a Website?
Search Engine algorithm changes from time to time to help improve the relevance of the search results and Search Engines like Google rarely provide in-depth mechanics on how exactly it ranks its results. Google does provide a set of guidelines to help its search engine to find a website.
To get a better understanding of how SEO helps to improve website traffic we must understand first on how a search engine works. Google has three basic steps when pulling up results in a search. The first step is crawling. Crawling is the search engine’s process of looking for new or updated web pages. Google finds new URLs by following links, obtaining info through sitemaps and other methods. Google sends out Googlebot, the search engines crawler.
After google discovers a page it then goes to the next process called indexing. Google runs through the content of the page and extracts the information and is stored in the Google index. Google then ranks the web pages through its algorithm and displays the relevant answers from the Google index. Google has many factors in its algorithm but takes into account the user’s location, language and device platform.
Google Webmaster provides a number of helpful guides for creating Google-friendly websites.
Steps in Creating a Google-friendly website.
Google Webmaster has plenty of resources that websites can use to help build websites that helps website optimize content according to Google’s standard. Google ranks website content higher when they provide a good user experience.
1. Help Googlebot find your website
The most essential step in getting your website rank is to ensure that Google can easily find, crawl and index your website. The first step is to create a sitemap. A sitemap is important because it tells Googlebot about the pages of your site.
2. Optimize your website Across Devices
Providing a good user experience has plenty of factors as discussed like readability across device platforms like phones, tablets, and PCs. Best practices also include easy-to-read text by using the correct fonts and font size, optimizing your website so it loads faster and providing relevant content to your target audience.
3. Create a URL that is Relevant to the Content
The Search engine requires a unique URL per web page to be able to search, crawl and index the content. Google recommends that all website use httpss://. Including key phrases that are relevant to the content in the URL of a webpage can help Google index and improve the rank of the page.
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4. Using Keywords
Keywords are important but should not be your primary basis for creating content. Stuffing too many keywords into your webpage can make it unnatural and may be counterproductive to your goals. Google recommends creating content that provides relevant information to your target audience.
To know how to use keywords properly let us define it with respect to SEO and the search engine. By definition, keywords are what your target audience type in the search engine. Keywords help you target your target audience or customer by targeting they’re most frequently searched keywords.
There are plenty of tools to help with Keywords like Google Adwords Keyword Planner.
5. On-Page SEO
On-page, optimisation tackles the structure of your web pages like the Site Title, Meta Description, HTML Tags, On page content, headline tags, content structure, and navigation. These help improve user experience and at the same time help Google’s crawlers index your site.
Accurate page or site title tells both your audience and the Google search engine the topic of the content of the page. HTML tag helps crawlers determine the title of the page. Snippets of the title should be relevant to the content and should not be misleading. Google penalizes websites the mislead their audiences.
Meta Description helps Google determine the summary of the webpage and display it in the search engine results. Heading tags structure your on-page content and help Google index your content. Site Navigation like sitemaps and breadcrumbs help the crawlers find and index your web pages at the same time improve user experience while navigating your site.
6. Off-Page SEO
Off-page, SEO focuses on links, backlinks, and PageRank. Links come in many forms and help redirect your audience to other relevant content in your website. These links can be internal links that redirect your audience to other pages in your websites or external links the redirect your audience to other websites. Backlinks are links from an external site that direct to your website.
7. Site Performance and Analytics
Analysis of the performance of the webpage is an important part of SEO. Monitoring the performance of individual web pages gives you insights whether your current SEO strategy is improving your website traffic and determine key areas of improvement.
Google’s powerful tool, Google Analytics that helps website monitor their performance and is important in determining audience behaviour like user demographics, what type of device being used and the type of keywords they used to find your page and many more important data.