What is SEO?
In this post, I will tell you what is SEO and how to do SEO so that you can rank your blog in search engines.
If you want to bring traffic to your or client's website from search engines like Google, Bing, or Yahoo, then for this you should have knowledge of SEO.
In this article, I will try to explain SEO to you. I will tell you what is SEO, how many types are there and what are the steps to do it.
What is SEO?
There are many definitions of SEO. Google, Wikipedia, and Moz give their own definition of SEO.
“SEO is a process in which a web page and its content are optimized in such a way that the search engine can understand that page and more and more traffic can be brought to the web page from the search engine.”
Definition of SEO according to Wikipedia Read: SEO (Wikipedia)
What is the full name of SEO?
The full meaning of SEO is Search Engine Optimization. We can divide Search Engine Optimization into two parts.
One is search engine and the other is optimization.
1. Search Engine
Search Engine is a tool that helps you in finding information available on the World Wide Web on the Internet.
Like - Google.
2. Optimization
Optimization refers to the process of making your website or online content more convenient and attractive to search engines like Google. The goal is to improve your website's visibility and ranking in search engine results when people search for relevant keywords.
Simply put, SEO optimization involves making changes and improvements to various aspects of your website so that search engines are more likely to understand, index, and rank your content. This can include optimizing the content on your pages, using relevant keywords, improving website speed, ensuring mobile-friendliness and getting high-quality backlinks from other reputable websites. The idea is to make your website more attractive to both users and search engines, ultimately leading to better visibility and more organic traffic from search results.
What is Search Engine and how does it work?
SEO is done keeping any search engine in mind, so for this, it is very important to know what search engines are and how they work.
What is Search Engine?
Search Engine is a tool that helps you in finding information available on the World Wide Web on the Internet.
A search engine is a program that finds web pages on the Internet with the help of algorithms.
Google is the most advanced and famous search engine today. Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, and Yandex are other search engines that are not very famous.
Next, we will learn about the working mechanism of search engines.
How does Search Engine work?
The working method of any search engine is very complex and it is even more difficult for people who lack technical knowledge to understand it. I will try to explain it to you in simple words.
There are three stages of working of any search engine which are
- Crawling
- Indexing
- Ranking
Let us now understand each step.
1. Crawling
This is the first step in the functioning of the search engine. In crawling, the search engine visits different web pages and analyzes them.
There are billions of pages on the Internet, which is why humans cannot do this work. That is why search engines get this work done by crawlers.
What are Crawlers - These are computer scripts that access webpages, analyze them, and send the necessary information to the search engine database.
Search Engine crawls only those pages that give it permission to crawl.
Like search engines cannot crawl images and other content of a private Instagram account.
2. Indexing
After crawling comes the turn of indexing.
Indexing means storing the information about the crawled page in the search engine's database.
If a web page allows crawling and indexing to the search engine and if the search engine feels that that web page can be useful to someone, then it indexes that web page.
3. Ranking
After crawling and indexing, the search engine has come to know about the web pages, on which URL that web page is, and what it is about.
Now comes the matter of ranking. Google has to rank pages for every keyword.
Google ranks pages using many ranking factors and algorithms.
Google may have millions of web pages for any keyword, but Google shows only selected web pages as results for any keyword.
Relationship between SEO and Keyword Research
Keyword Research is not directly related to SEO but it is difficult to do SEO without keyword research.
Keyword Research gives you a direction to do SEO. That is why we can say that keyword research is a part of SEO.
What is Keyword Research?
Keyword Research is a process using which keywords are found. At the same time, important data related to those keywords is studied.
Keywords are those questions and terms that the user searches in the search engine.
Such as - who is Bear Grylls, how to make a cake, Bill Gates's net worth, and anything else.
How to do SEO?
After knowing about SEO, it is important to know how SEO is done. SEO is done in 4 steps which are
- SEO Basics
- Technical SEO
- On Page SEO
- Off Page SEO
1) What are SEO Basics?
SEO Basics is a part of SEO that is not directly related to SEO but is very important to do.
In this post, I will give you information about SEO basics. I will tell you what SEO basics are and how to do SEO basics.
We do many things by doing SEO basics. After doing the basics, we setup several tools on the website which gives us various types of data which is very important from an SEO point of view.
So without any delay let me tell you how you can do SEO basics.
1. Setup Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a very useful SEO tool. This tool tells you how your website is performing in Google.
This tells you which page on your website is getting traffic from which keyword. Google Search Console also gives you other data related to traffic.
Along with this, you can find out what problems are there on your website with the help of Google Search Console.
Many times there are performance, indexing, and crawling issues in the website which you can find out from Google Search Console.
With the help of Google Search Console, you can also manually index the pages of your website. Apart from this, you get many tools in it.
Google gives penalties to sites that do not follow Google's guidelines. If your website gets any penalty then it is known from Google Search Console.
2. Setup Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a traffic analysis tool.
While Google Search Console only gives you information about the traffic coming from Google, Google Analytics also gives you information about direct, social, referral, ad and organic traffic.
Google Analytics tells you about the behavior and location of traffic coming from a variety of sources.
Along with this, Google Analytics also gives you live data which tells you how many users are live on your website at this time and what is their location.
3. Setup Bing Webmaster Tool
Bing Webmaster Tool is exactly like Google Search Console.
The only difference is that Google Search Console gives you information and tools related to Google Search Engine, whereas Bing Webmaster Tool gives you information and tools related to Bing Search Engine.
Even if Bing is not popular and the website does not get any traffic from Bing, it is still important to do this because in it you get other tools which you do not get in Google Search Console.
4. Setup SEO Plugin
WordPress users get a huge benefit from SEO plugins.
SEO plugin is a tool that gives you access to many SEO settings which you cannot normally do in WordPress.
With its help, you can do meta setting. You can create a sitemap and change its settings. You can set up redirection.
SEO plugin also gives you SEO assistance. Whenever you create a post, the SEO plugin gives you SEO suggestions.
Which can be very useful for a new person.
Apart from this, the SEO plugin gives you many features.
2) What is Technical SEO and how to do it?
Technical SEO is a very important part of SEO. In this, you prepare your website according to modern technology.
Technical SEO means optimizing your website according to crawling, indexing, security, delivery, and design.
You have to do many things to optimize in terms of crawling, indexing, security, delivery, and design. If anything is not done then its bad effects will be seen.
No matter how well you do on-page SEO and off-page SEO, if you mess up in technical SEO, then forget about the ranking of the web page, your web page will not even be indexed.
So to do technical SEO you have to do these things.
1. The website should be crawlable and indexable
It is very important for a website to be crawlable and indexable. If something in your site prevents or stops search engine crawlers from crawling and indexing, the page rank is very low from a page rank point of view, it won't even show up in Google.
There are many things in the site that can block crawlers such as robots.txt and robots meta tags.
Robots.txt and robots meta tags tell any search engine whether to index the page or website or not.
If you do any mistake in this, your website and its pages will not be indexed or even search engines like Google will not index.
2. Website navigation and structure
Crawler is a web bot that moves forward by following links. The crawler will be able to crawl the website which has easy navigation more effectively.
Creating a good structure of a website is not difficult but if the pages of your website are already disorganized then it can be a problem.
A website in which sub-pages/topic pages are linked to the home page and article pages are linked to them.
We will call this a good structure. Silo structure is a good site structure.
3. Use SSL certificate
SSL certificate enables https on the website. Meaning if your website has http then it will be converted to https.
HTTP means hypertext transfer protocol. And HTTPS is also the same where s means secure.
HTTPS increases things like the security and privacy of the website.
Any website that uses http appears in the browser with not encrypted. This has a bad impact on the visitor and also increases the possibility that he will quit the page.
If your hosting provider does not provide you SSL then you can move your website from http to https using Cloudflare's free SSL.
4. Increase website speed
A fast website has many benefits. A fast website not only gives you an advantage in SEO but also increases your website's earnings.
A website that is slow and whose delivery of files is not optimized degrades its core web vitals, increases bounce backs, and causes other direct and indirect losses.
If you want your website to be fast then you should use fast hosting, CDN (like Cloudflare), cache plugin.
Along with this, you should optimize HTML, CSS, and especially JavaScript and also optimize their delivery.
Image is the biggest part of any webpage. It is important that you keep their file size and aspect ratio low.
5. Have an XML sitemap of the website
A Sitemap is a file which contains a list of addresses of the pages of the website.
Sitemaps are mainly in two languages: HTML and XML. XML sitemap is for search engines.
When the search engine reads the sitemap, the search engine gets information about the pages, images, videos, and other content present on the website.
With Sitemap, the crawler gets the list of pages of your website, which makes crawling and indexing easier for it.
6. Fix broken links
Broken links harm the website in many ways. This spoils SEO, backlinks are not of much use and user experience also deteriorates.
There are two types of links on any web page: internal links and external links.
If any link gives 404 error then it is a broken link. And 404 error comes on the url which does not exist.
Many times we change the URL of the page, delete the page, or we write the URL wrong while adding the link, then in this situation that link can be a broken link.
It is very important to fix these.
You can detect broken links with any broken link checker tool.
7. Use SEO friendly URL structure
There are many types of URL structures which can include date, author name, post title, post ID, category, and other things.
It is not necessary that the permalink containing these is bad.
The structure of permalink is chosen according to the type, size, structure, and other things of the website.
Post name permalink structure which is made up of only the name of the post is considered the best.
If you do not understand much about URLs then you should use a post name permalink structure.
3) What is On Page SEO and how to do it?
On-page SEO, also known as on site SEO, involves optimizing the content of a particular page.
In On-Page SEO we target a particular page. The SEO done here does not affect other pages of the website.
To do On-Page SEO you have to do this.
1. Optimize Title Tag
Title Tag is a very important part of any page.
The title itself appears in any search engine result. It is very important that you choose the title correctly.
It is advisable that you use your focus keyword in the title tag. Besides, you can also increase CTR by using some powerful words like best, top, recommended, etc.
2. Optimize Description Tag
The description tag has to tell about the web page. The introduction of the web page has to be given using only a few words (around 160 words).
There are many factors to write a good description like attractive, position of keyword, powerful words, etc.
3. Write Quality Content
It is not necessary that every content be quality content.
Content that is unique, optimized as per search intent, and does not have grammatical problems will be quality content.
At the same time, images and videos further increase the quality of the content.
Overall, such content which the reader will like.
4. Link Resources
Many topics are very big and it is very difficult to explain them in one post.
In this way, we expand our content by linking other resources to our page. Like giving outbound links, giving links of videos, giving references of any research, etc.
5. Do Internal Linking
If a page of a website has a link to any other page of the same website, then it is called an internal link.
Internal links are very important, they increase crawlability and extend the benefits of backlinks to other pages.
You can link your web pages and use them as resources.
7. Do Image SEO
If there are many images in the web page and the SEO of those images has not been done then it can be very bad for on-page SEO.
You have to do these things inside Image SEO
- Choose the right image format like PNG, jpg, webp, gif, or SVG.
- Give alt text to images
- Give the correct file name to the images
- Optimize the aspect ratio of images according to the layout of the web page
- Compress the file size of images
8. Use SEO friendly URL
URL is the address of your page by which someone can reach that page. The cleaner the URL of your page, the better.
The general advice is that you should use your foucs keyword in the url which is also correct.
You should use a short and simple URL.
If there is any random word, number, or mark in the URL then that URL will not be SEO friendly.
4) What is Off Page SEO and how to do it?
Off-page SEO is very important for any website and if the web page wants to rank for keywords where there is a lot of competition, then off-page SEO is very effective.
Off-page SEO means those tasks that are done for a web page on another web page. Mainly off-page SEO means link building.
To do Off-Page SEO you have to do these things
1. Link Building
Link Building means creating backlinks is the most important part of off-page SEO.
When a web page is linked to a webpage of another website, it is called a backlink. Creating backlinks is not easy.
There are many ways to create backlinks such as
- You can ask for a link from the author of a website.
- You can give yourself links by creating a webpage and writing quality content on it.
- You can exchange the backlink. (Doing it wrong can harm SEO)
- You can guest post.
To know more about backlinks read: What is a backlink?
2. Social Media Promotion
In social media promotion, you not only do off-page SEO but it can also bring visitors to the web page.
For social media marketing, the web page is promoted on platforms like Facebook page and Twitter etc. If you want, you can also run an ad campaign in this.
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