What is SEO and how does it work A comprehensive guide

What is SEO and how does it work A comprehensive guide

Learn about SEO completely and in detail

What is  SEO  and how does it work are two of the most frequently asked questions. SEO is one of the sub-categories of digital marketing that you should study if you are active in the online world. Having a beautiful website is not enough anymore. 

Online shopping is incredibly competitive - so you need to make sure that your website ranks high in the search engines.

You've undoubtedly heard these (or similar) phrases a lot:

• "You should invest in search engine optimization."
• "If you're not on the first page of Google, your online presence is pointless."
• "Why not partner with an SEO to handle the task of optimizing your site for search engines?"
• “Thanks to a combination of tactics, the site… appeared on the first page of Google when you search for the phrase… These methods are referred to as SEO.
• We can move you to the top of the search engine results pages. Make sure this is the investment that makes the most sense for you.

The definitions of SEO in the appendix were not created with the purpose of educating practitioners, instead, our primary goal is to educate the visitors of our digital platform ( website ) about the basics of SEO and some basic techniques. 

So they can manage the marketing activities for their website or blog and if they are interested they might write an article series and learn more about SEO for you.

What is SEO?

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is an acronym for search engine optimization . “A set of activities and actions in which the ranking of an entire website or a page of a website is optimized for one or more keywords, and such ranking improvement results in increased incoming traffic from search engines,” is the definition of search engine optimization (SEO). 

A higher position of the company's website pages in Google search results will cause more people to visit those pages and learn more about the brand, which will attract more potential consumers and boost sales. 

On the flip side, you will lose a lot of customers if your website does not appear on the first page of Google search results for relevant terms.

Let's analyze the basic components of SEO for a better understanding of it:

• Key words. These are common search terms and phrases that people make while searching for information online. They may be used by marketers to reach potential customers who are interested in the things they are selling.
• content. It consists of useful content that you provide to your audience via your website or other channels. Website materials, blogs, videos, podcasts, and social media posts are all examples of content, but they are not the only ones.
• SEO is off the page. The component consists of the off-site optimization strategies used. Basically, building backlinks is the main goal.

In general, digital marketing and search engine optimization are effective for both large companies and medium-sized companies. Explore the SEO benefits listed below to understand why small businesses need the tool so much.

What is a search engine?

Users can use keywords to search for materials on the Internet using search engines. There are many search engines available, despite the fact that few control the market. 

A search engine results page (SERP), which ranks retrieved pages in order of relevance, is returned when a user types a query into a search engine. It varies by search engine how this ranking is done.

To improve user experience, search engines often modify their algorithms (the programs that rank results). They want to provide consumers with the best possible response by understanding how they search. This entails giving first consideration to the most relevant and high-quality pages.

In general, search engine performance includes four phases:

• Crawl : View and scan website pages, which is called crawling.
• Indexing : indexing the pages displayed in the database.
• PageRank  : Ranking of results based on the keyword entered by the user and ranking factors.
• Display results to the user on the search results page.

Why is Google the best search engine?

You may be familiar with Google, which has more than 1.6 billion monthly users and is sometimes referred to as the most visited website in the world. On the other hand, Google receives more than 70% of all site views from search engines, which is something to consider.

With a share of just 7%, Bing is the second most popular search engine after Google. As a result, you should follow Google's guidelines in your website's design and content strategy.

Since Google is undoubtedly the most effective search engine, the majority of the SEO principles and building blocks of a successful website can be found in Google search results. So you must understand that in order to succeed online, you must first get to the first page of Google search results, and then go through the top links.

How does SEO work?

Crawlers, often known as bots or spiders, are used by search engines like Google and Bing to gather data about all the content they can locate across the Internet. The crawler automatically scans both a site's internal links and its external links after starting from an indexed webpage.

The internal links and content on those pages help the crawler understand the semantic relationships between each page and other pages in the search engine's database. While you wait, the bot indexes the pages it crawls and finds no technical issues with them, ensuring that they appear in the user's Google searches.

Key factors for SEO work

Here are the main factors:

Content  - One of the most important SEO variables is content. Content is king, a phrase that should be familiar to everyone who has heard of digital marketing. Yes, Google has said time and time again that it prefers websites with excellent content. Therefore, you may want to focus on their content if you want to do better than other sites in terms of SEO.

Considerations for a willing content section include readability, use of H1/H2 as necessary, and control over the use of negative and repetitive language.

On-page SEO  – If you want to outperform your competitors, you need to work on your on-page SEO.

Meta description and keywords  - Pay close attention to your meta description and keywords. Pay attention to both internal linking and content. Add relevant titles, optimize all your images (use the alt attribute), mix in some H1's, H2's, sub-headings, add LSI keywords while keeping your keyword density in check.

The length and/or description should reflect the difficulty of the keywords. To get a higher score, your information should be increasingly accurate as the difficulty level increases. Also, please be sure to get the basics correct.

Backlinks  - It is crucial to build backlinks at the highest level if you want to increase your website's reach and page authority. In addition, you should focus some of your efforts on building enough backlinks of excellent caliber. The majority of this should be achieved through producing engaging content since the better the material you provide, the more likely other websites will link to your site.

Stay with relevant links because irrelevant links will have a negative impact on your Google results. It should only be produced using ethical practices and appropriate backlinks (white hat strategies).

Website speed (page load time) and user experience  - Google rewards websites with speed. It places the most emphasis on user engagement. You say the foundation of the site needs to be in place. Consider your website speed (page load time).

In Google's latest speed upgrade, this is made clear. You need to adjust/arrange properly. Work on user engagement metrics like clicks and total impressions, too. To fully understand it, pay close attention to bounce rate, page and session views, and all of these indicators. In short, "faster on site, better results".

Mobile friendly  – ​​Search engines routinely change their algorithms, as we covered in the previous section of the article, and Google’s latest algorithm update has proven that the more mobile friendly a site is, the better its page rank.

Thus, your SEO efforts are affected by mobile friendliness. Check if your website is mobile friendly or not. If not, it is imperative to make it a top priority.

Domain Age, URL, and Authority  - Important SEO criteria include website age, URL, and DA/PA (Domain Authority and Page Authority). With a variety of tactics, including backlinks and internal links with high-quality content, your DA/PA will increase.

Optimizing Images  - All of your website's images should be optimized as it increases your chances. All images must have appropriate alt tags and titles. Dramatically improves the value of image search results.

Social Signals  - Mentions or links on social media are an important component of your search engine optimization (SEO) tactics.

These are bookmarks that increase your exposure while at the same time building links through social signals. On social networking sites, one may post their location to increase mentions. The best is the most.

Structured data  - The structure of your web pages must be fully consistent, so you have to pay attention to it. Update the sitemap. The fact that user interaction cannot be ignored means that you must, in the end, think in terms of the user.

What is an SEO search engine optimization strategy?

To increase organic traffic with a high conversion rate, you need three types of SEO strategies:

1. On-Page SEO
2. SEO Harji (Off-Page SEO)
3. Technical SEO

It will be much easier to organize and implement your optimization strategies if you break down your approach and visualize SEO as these three areas. 

Trying to choose between technical SEO, internal SEO, and external SEO is like choosing just one primary component while building a house — as if you could only use the foundation, walls, or roof! 

There are no options in online business; If you want to raise your website ranking, you should try them all!

What is On-Page SEO?

Your website elements play a role in determining page rank. On-page SEO is among the elements that directly affect where your website appears in search engine results. 

These variables include both technical factors (such as the speed of your site and the quality of your code) and content-related variables (such as the way your website is organized or the level of copywriting on it). All elements of internal SEO are things you can improve on.

Sites that consistently provide SEO content get 350% more traffic than those that don't invest a lot of time or energy into content marketing.

The relationship between internal SEO and content

Your website content is referred to as internal SEO. The standard of information provided affects your ranking no matter what text, photo, video, etc. you publish on your website. In this case, SEO will benefit the content! Multiple visits to your pages will result from SEO mixed content.

How to improve content with the help of SEO

There are several basic SEO basics to consider before you start playing with HTML tags and title tags. 

Researching your target users is the crucial first step. It is crucial to consider the demographics of your audience, as well as their culture and taste. In addition, knowing things like your geographic area or your age and gender will be very helpful to you.

On the other hand, a keyword refers to a term that you should pay close attention to on every article or page of your website so that Google becomes more familiar with your material. Google can then display the material to those who are interested in it. We will look at these two cases in more detail in the following sections.

Find users and audiences

You are undoubtedly familiar with the personalities of your customers if you run a website or an online business. We use user data for more reasons than just making sure we make the items they want. 

An essential component of your content marketing and SEO strategy  is affected by this information. You must provide content on the topics your customers are searching for to be successful in SEO. It is practically difficult to understand the kinds of things your target audience is looking for until you are aware of who they are.

Search for keywords

It's time to move on to the next stage, which is keyword research , now that you have enough knowledge about your consumers. Specific words and phrases that users enter into the Google search box are checked at this point.  

In the early stages of SEO, you might search for keywords on the Google Keyword Planner , Google's search engine displays commonly searched terms associated with a search query when a user searches for that term.   

In this case, you might get the idea to incorporate keyword terms into your text using Google autocomplete.

To find out more about the keyword or title of your article, use Google's related searches, which are displayed at the bottom of the results page. Free tools that Google and other websites now offer, such as Google Search Console, have now built into SEO.

internal linking

Internal links are those that link to pages within the same domain. Internal links, for example, can be found in the main menu of any website, but in this case, we are talking about links within the content of the page.

To find material on websites and rank them in search results, Google follows links. Google makes use of internal links on articles and pages in two different ways. 

• First, take into account these types of pages that contain good information. 
• Second, internal linking allows Google bots to easily crawl (or, to use the technical term, index) and access your other sites.

What is Off-Page SEO?

Your ranking is affected by a number of external Off-Page SEO elements as well as your website's internal SEO considerations. 

These elements include social media interest, links from other websites, and other marketing initiatives that happen outside of your website. Changing off-page SEO elements can be more difficult, while not impossible.

Competition in your specific site area is another external aspect that affects SEO. It is very difficult to rank in certain categories more than others. Therefore, the level of competition in the market has a significant impact on your chances of ranking.

High-quality backlinks  are the main focus of off-site SEO. Search engines recognize the value and reliability of your website when there are many links going to it from reputable and relevant websites.

backlink

The quantity and standard of backlinks, sometimes referred to as links back to your site, are the most important off-page SEO factors. 

Backlinks are seen as a sign of quality content approved by other websites by search engines such as Google and Bing. Pages may rank higher in the SERPs if they have more backlinks.

• Backlink with example

Wouldn't the credibility of an unknown person be enhanced if someone from your acquaintances told you that a certain person was trustworthy? What if a number of people praise this individual? Even if you don't know this person, he or she will gain credibility with you. 

The reason for this credit is that you know people who you trust and you gave that person credit. Link building from websites that have a good reputation with Google is an example. Google believes in the safety of sites it knows and will consider ranking higher for you.

If your site receives backlinks from high-quality websites related to your industry, you are sending strong signals to Google that your site is an authority in your industry.

Types of backlinks in search engine optimization

However, not all backlinks are equal. Your website's credibility will be affected differently by different categories of backlinks. For example, the Nofollow backlink value is the lowest.   

On the other hand, UGC links are important hyperlinks that people post in forums or article comments. Other types, such as malicious or sponsored links, are outside the scope of this page.

social networks

Are you trying to learn how to include social media in your content strategy so that it ranks higher in Google searches and SEO? Do you want to use social media to increase your SEO campaign? It is essential to improve your SEO techniques as it will raise your ranking in Google. 

But it is difficult because of the intense competition to be included in the search results. According to WorldOMeter statistics , content marketers create nearly five million blog articles per day.  

How does social networking affect search engine optimization?

Although social media does not directly affect your SEO results, the links you post on social media sites increase the visibility of your business.

Presented by some interesting results from CognitiveSEO research  , after looking at nearly 23 million social media posts on a few different sites, they found a mysterious relationship between social media and SEO.  

Google and other search engines use shares, likes, and comments on your content as important ranking factors for your website.

Life Marketing points out that although social media does not directly affect SEO, it does have a positive impact on search engine results indirectly.

What is Technical SEO?

Websites with certain technological characteristics are given a higher rank in search results by Google. Technical aspects such as secure connection, responsive design, and fast loading are vital for search engines. 

To ensure that your website will not experience technical issues in these scenarios, you should use a combination of technical SEO strategies.

One technological element that we will go into in more detail in upcoming articles is Core Web Vitals . Before doing that, we will discuss the two most important technical SEO factors (speed and responsiveness): 

• The effect of website speed on search engine optimization

Search engines prefer sites that load quickly: page speed is an important ranking signal. There are several ways to increase website speed:

• Provide high-speed and stable hosting or hosting service

Your SEO efforts will be greatly successful if you offer a reliable website hosting solution. For this reason, you must be aware of the many types of hosting and choose the best and fastest one for your website. 

There are two operating systems available today for web hosts: Windows and Linux. In addition, website owners can access optimized hosting, such as WordPress hosting , Joomla hosting, etc.  

Pay attention to the following:

• Use a fast DNS provider
• Minimal use of scripts and plug-ins
• Optimize the size of photo/video files
• Web page compression
• Minify Codes - Get rid of any unnecessary spaces, line breaks, or leading spaces in your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (see Google's Minify Resources page for more information on this).
• Response

It is important to have a mobile friendly website! Since the majority of consumers undoubtedly use mobile devices, having a slow and unresponsive website can hurt your rating.

Technical SEO includes considerations of mobile compatibility. As mobile users will not face any issues if your responsive website template is configured effectively. Website responsiveness is another issue that needs to be configured technically. All of your information should be available on mobile devices as well as on desktop.

Security, sitemap, and bot text file are some of the known SEO technical requirements. Referring to essential web vitals will not be without grace, as we said before.

Familiarity with popular SEO methods

You may have heard of black SEO or white SEO. These terms refer to two well-known SEO tactics, one that can grow your site and one that can do it! As a result, we think it is necessary to provide a brief explanation of these SEO strategies:

What is white hat SEO?

White hat SEO is a word used to describe search engine optimization tactics that adhere to standards and guidelines set by users and search engines. This entails using methods to raise a website's position in search results without using strategies designed to mislead search engine algorithms.

Black Hat Instead of using more spammy practices, including copying material optimized exclusively for search engines, SEO strategies place a greater emphasis on providing readers with high-quality, relevant information that enhances the user experience.

“It's cool to know that the names white hat and black hat used in SEO are derived from American movies that refer to respectable people (white hat) and con artists (black hat) respectively. Black hats were to deceive and deceive people just as much as white hats for the people!”

What is black hat SEO?

By contrast, examples of black hat SEO include buying links or using questionable methods. Black hat tactics are those that are perceived to be misleading or harmful to users. 

Black hat strategies are very risky and are becoming less effective as Google's algorithms advance. As a result, "Black hat SEO" is a set of activities used to enhance the visibility of a website or web page in search results using methods that deviate from the search engines' terms of service.

Why do I need SEO for my site?

Google displays a list of results when performing a multi-page word search. SERPs, or "search engine results pages," are what they're called. You should optimize your website for search engines if it is not visible on the first page of search engine results.

As a result, many people are wondering what SEO is and how it is done. This is where search engine optimization (SEO) comes into play. 

Simply put, SEO is the phrase used to refer to all the activities that need to be performed on your website in order to improve its rating. The best website design, an effective content strategy, and producing quality content are some of the most important actions you must take for your website.

By optimizing your web pages, you can achieve a high ranking in Google or other search engines. Improving ranking in organic (non-paid) search results is the goal of SEO. If you have a website and want to increase traffic, SEO should be part of your marketing plan.

What makes SEO so useful?

In today's challenging business environment, search engine optimization (SEO) is more important than ever. Millions of people use search engines like Google every day to find answers to their concerns. With a website, blog or online store, SEO may help you reach your goals.

For this reason, SEO is crucial, and if you want your website to appear among the top Google search results, you must adhere to SEO principles and procedures. Therefore, you should consider SEO if you want to build your brand, reduce marketing costs, and focus on consumer discovery.

It's not a bad thing to be aware of:

• The top three SERPS offers are likely to be clicked on by the majority of search engine users.
• Because they searched for a phrase related to your company, the Google visitors who find your website are actual customers and users.
• In fact, if you run your own SEO website, you won't have any expenses. Affordable search engine optimization.
• If you have a high search engine ranking, users will have more confidence in your website.
• Far more people discover your website through Google or Yahoo search than people do it using social networking sites like Instagram, Telegram, Twitter, etc.
• If two websites offer the same goods, a website with strong SEO will receive more traffic, which will lead to more sales. By reading this, you will fully understand what SEO is and its purpose.

Important SEO benefits for online businesses

SEO must be expensive! Since cost is not the only expense, you must spend time and effort on it. So, before you decide to use SEO, you must first evaluate whether its advantages will help you make the decision. The following list of SEO benefits will be examined in this part of the article:

1- The ability to attract the target audience

Your ability to connect with your target audience is the main advantage of SEO. In fact, it is an indication that customers are looking for that site when they are searching for the phrases they need.

If your website appears at the top of Google, you can now plot your company's target market. Thus, it is advised to create content relevant to your industry so that you can be confident that the users you are pulling are members of your target market.

2- Increase your conversion rate

If you create content related to your business and use SEO to rank first in Google, you will attract your target audience. In this case, you can offer your goods and services to them. Users will buy your items if they are in good condition and they need them.

This will increase your conversion rate and, as a result, help your business grow. Conversion rate can, of course, correlate with more people signing up on the site; It doesn't have to be just about sales.

3- Promote the brand and increase credibility among competitors

For online businesses, branding is essential! Many people visit the website frequently in an effort to rank high in the Google search results. 

Websites that rank high in Google have more credibility than those that run frequent online promotions. Getting to the top of Google can greatly increase your brand's visibility.

4- The economics of search engine optimization compared to other advertising methods

Users sometimes refer to SEO as "free". At first glance, it may seem like SEO is free, but if you look closely, you'll see that SEO comes with a price. Everything, from writing content to creating links, costs money.

But SEO is much less expensive than other cost-effective strategies, and you'll always get your money's worth. Of course, SEO is an ongoing process that you need to keep up with to maintain your higher rankings.

Final conclusion

Conclusion of the above in What is SEO ? It can be said that the search engine optimization (SEO) method helps to improve the website and its content in the Google results. As a result, when someone searches for anything, search engines like Google display it at the top of the results page.   

 The important techniques (Types of SEO) are taken into account for this article and all the procedures that you have to work on to raise the website ranking are under the basics of SEO.

Creating quality content while also optimizing it for search engines is now the biggest issue, apart from technical and off-page SEO, which follows certain procedures.   

A small part of an SEO professional's concerns include researching keywords, producing thematic materials that meet the demands of online visitors, and providing a plan for distributing this information in a way that boosts a web page's ranking.

As a result, training is essential before working on SEO. Your success in this field will be strongly influenced by your ability to apply what you have learned, gain experience, and keep your knowledge current.