SEO: The Crucial Part of Digital World-Part 1
Whenever you search anything on google, it shows thousands of pages, but it offers only ONE page and mostly the top part of it, which the majority tends to click first. Have you ever thought about why this link and this page?
The answer is a great SEO strategy.
What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, one of the top digital marketing strategies that help search engines rank you first, on top of the first page, or help your content be seen by millions of searchers. SEO is the process of tailoring your website and content to the algorithms that give signals to search engines to display your website pages.
SEO helps you gain traction and organic reach. It makes search engines crawl easier to find your content and website. It’s no hidden fact that a big chunk of the world has relied on google search to find anything they need. As simple as that, you don’t have to pay for it, and SEO is the most crucial part of your digital presence.
Why is SEO important?
The benefits of SEO extend beyond improving the ranking and bringing traffic to your pages. It has myriad uses that help you and your business.
Benefits of SEO
- Unpaid ranking
- Organic visitors or traffic
- Quality leads
- Stay ahead of the competition
- Better user experience
- Brand recognition
- Gain traction
- Faster ranking on Search engines
- Referral traffic
- More clicks than PPC
- High ROI
- Enhances domain authority
Components of SEO
There are three main areas of SEO that encompass the whole strategy:
- On-page SEO
- Off-page SEO
- Technical SEO
Each of the components helps search engines to find your website and are related to each other.
Technical SEO
As the name suggests the technical SEO takes care of the technical thing related to your website, making Google easy to crawl.
- Crawler/ spider bots/web spider bots: When google identifies your site and ranks your page by identifying essential keywords and on-site issues. As you make it crawl easier, the search engine will have a better understanding.
Technical areas of SEO involves:
- Clustering
- Website Structure
- Categorization
- Link Structure
- Site maps
- Meta Tags
- Code
- Usability & Friendliness
- Schema
- Image Optimization
- Error 404
- Indexability.
Some parts are done before posting your content, such as meta tags, description, title tags, and image optimization.
Mobile-friendly and well-structured websites have a significant role in technical SEO.
Off-page SEO
Off-page SEO is a link acquisition. It virtually works for building your website’s authority and perception by building a backlink. This part of SEO involves building relationships and creating trending content that people like to share. There are many practices for building backlinks. Such as writing guest posts, analyzing your competitor’s backlink strategy, …etc.
For more, check out the Backlink article.
The image below from inbound marketing inc explains the practices between white-hat SEO and black-hat SEO.
The black-hat strategy may bring results quickly, but it will hurt your credibility and ranking after some time.
On-page SEO
On-page SEO is also known as On-site SEO. On-Page SEO is done on the content of your website.
It is not tricky — instead, it’s just a way to select the keyword and placement. However, on-page SEO is more than keyword placement.
On-page SEO is the process of keyword optimization, which tends to improve your search visibility and of course ranking.
Google Algorithms work on the signals that come from your content that has been optimized through your keywords. Google’s job is to explore and find relevant content with clear signs when someone searches for anything.
Keyword placement and keyword optimization might seem outdated and mundane, but it is tremendously productive. On-site SEO is entirely in your control.
Is Keyword Placement Everything?
Many of you must be thinking, is keyword placement or optimizing your content is everything? No, it’s just the road map to your shop. If the customers do not find appealing, trending, and, more importantly, relevant products, they will move to another shop. The same is the case with your content.
YOUR CONTENT IS KING
If your content is irrelevant and outdated, google will signal it as a ‘spammy post.’ Google does not only focus on primary keywords, but algorithms also work on semantic search.
Tips for on-page SEO
- You need tools to research Ahrefs, Semrush, Ubersuggest, and BuzzSumo are some of the suggested tools.
- You can also install the extension for keyword research that is Keywords Everywhere and Ubersuggest keywords discovery.
- Focus on low competitive keywords- the KGR (The Keyword Golden Ratio) technique works.
- Must include keywords in meta titles, tags, slugs, and permalinks.
- Avoid keyword stuffing.
- Must check keyword density that is taken from your Focused keyword, which is used in the title.
- You can also spy on your competitor’s keywords and produce a better version of them.
The Bottom line
As a beginner, we tend to get confused about our visibility and ranking on search engines. No doubt, many of us are clueless regarding the technicality that works in the long run. I hope this article has served you as a start to understanding how the Google algorithm works and how little mindfulness of this aspect can make a big difference for your upcoming searchability online.
Authored by Afsheen Khan for Fujn
