What is SEO ? | Beginner’s Guide to SEO

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is the process of increasing the visibility of your website on search engines. There are many kinds of SEO, but most fall into two broad categories: On-Site and Off-Site.

On-Site SEO is when you optimize the content and structure of your website to help search engines understand what it’s about and rank you accordingly. Off-site SEO is when you promote your site to help humans find it.

This article covers some basic tips for boosting your site’s performance in search engines, helping them understand what your site is about, and encouraging them to crawl it more frequently.

 

What is SEO?

SEO is an abbreviation for “search engine optimization.” This is the process of using unpaid (also called “organic”) search engine results to boost your website’s visibility and traffic in quality and quantity.

SEO is more about people than Search engines, as the name implies. This involves knowing what people are searching for on the internet, the answer they wish to get, how they ask their questions, and the article that best answers them. In short, it is called “Searchers Intent.” You will be able to connect with the audience and prefer them a solution if you understand the searcher’s intent.

There are two sides to SEO. One is knowing the searcher’s intent. The second one is the ability to deliver this intent in a way the search engine will crawl and understand where best to place them.

This article will explain how you can learn both sides of SEO.

 

What are Search engines?

Search engines are machines that give the audience an answer. As the name implies, they search lots of content and determine different factors before coming up with content that will give an answer to your question on the web.

They discover and scour available content – from web pages, images, PDFs, videos, etc., on the internet through a process called “crawling and indexing.” The search engine then arranges it in an order that matches your query through a process called “ranking.”

 

How do search engines work?

As mentioned earlier, there are three different ways through which search engines function:

1. Crawling
2. Indexing
3. Ranking

 

What is search engine crawling?

This is a process whereby search engines sends bots known as spider or crawler to scour for new and updated content on the web. Content can be of different forms; it can be either a webpage, a PDF, a video, an image, etc. Not minding the form of the content, they are all discovered through links.

The bots sent out by the search engines start by checking a few web pages and then following the links on the web pages to get new URLs. The web spider will be able to find new or updated content through this process and then add it to their index page known as Caffeine. Caffeine is like a warehouse that stores discovered URLs so as to be retrieved later when a searcher is seeking a piece of information that matches the stored URLs.

 

What is a search engine index?

This is a process where contents of different forms have been crawled and then stored in a warehouse that stores discovered URLs. These discovered URLs are seen to be good enough to answer the searcher’s query.

 

Search Engine Ranking

When we make search on Google, we get different websites that will likely have an answer to our question. These web pages brought is lined up in a way that the search engine thinks will best have an answer to our query. That is, webpages are brought up in order of relevance. This process is known as ranking. If your website is frequently ranked high, the search engine will believe that your site matches the query.

For some reason, you can prevent the search engine from crawling your website or some part of it. This will prevent the selected content from being indexed. But you should know that if you want your website to be found by searchers, it needs to be crawled by Google bots. If not, that content will be inaccessible to the public.

 

Rankings and Visibility

Increasing visibility or making it simpler for prospects to find you when they search for a service or product you provide is one of the most crucial SEO functions. Your ranking has a direct impact on your visibility.

It’s important to raise your organic page ranking because the higher you appear on a search engine result page (SERP), the more likely it is that prospects will see you and click through to your site. An important factor to keep in mind is that a quarter of web users never scroll past the first SERP, so the more successful your SEO efforts, the higher your ranking and the better chances you have to be visible to the audience.

 

Website Traffic

One of the primary goals of SEO is to increase website traffic, and you can increase a website’s traffic by increasing visibility and rankings. When an audience has a query online, 32% of them click on the first webpage ranked by google bots, and this can increase your CTR by 30%.

The featured snippet is every website owner’s desire, and it is referred to as the number 1 position before the normal ranking of number one. Contents on the featured snippet are usually gotten from websites that answer questions people search for. This can give you an organic click with high traffic.

So if you want your content to rank top five and get more traffic to your website, you need to make use of SEO tools.

 

Authority

When it comes to increasing your Page Authority (PA), SEO is an important aspect. Page Authority indicates the level of trust, quality, and relevance your website has. Pare Authority ranges from 1 – 100. In essence, the higher your PA score, the more authority your site has. You can use some tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, Moz, etc., to check your PA.

 

Creating a Better Visitor Experience

Another reason SEO is important to websites is that it creates a better experience for visitors. For instance, we would prefer a site that is more responsive, well-structured, and accessible from both mobile and laptop devices. Your bounce rate will reduce and encourage visitors to stay longer on your blog.

Bounce rate indicates the percentage of users who enter your blog and then leave before the average read time of that content due to some reasons. Viewers prefer a site that loads fast unless the bounce rate of that site increases, which will be bad for your site and indexed post as it will signal to google bots that your site doesn’t answer their question, thereby taking you down from where you rank.

 

Back up your website in case Search Engines malfunction

Search engines are bots, and sometimes they malfunction. This is why SEO is essential to your website. With proper link structure, google bots will crawl your websites and index them properly. Without the proper SEO, it might be hard for you to rank.

 

Types of SEO

There are three types of SEO, namely:

• On-page SEO – Anything on your website’s pages, including blogs, contents, product copy, and web copy.
• Off-page SEO – Anything that occurs away from your website that aids your SEO strategy- Backlinks.
• Technical SEO – Any technical work done to improve search rankings, such as site indexing to aid bot crawling.

 

What is on-page SEO?

On-page SEO, also referred to as on-site SEO, is the process of optimizing websites to raise a website’s position in search results and get organic traffic.

It also includes optimized publishing headlines, high-quality content, relevant webpage, and images. On-page SEO also means ensuring that your website has a high PA – a high level of trust, quality, and relevance.

 

What is Off-Page SEO?

Off-Page SEO involves the activities carried out outside of your website. Tasks performed on an off-page SEO don’t require you to change your web pages or contents.

Backlinks are an essential aspect of Off-page SEO. This is a process where other websites that have a higher Page Authority than you and are also relevant put your website link on their site, which links to you. This process helps your site tap from the Page Authority of the other website, which helps your Google SERP increase.

Other off-page SEO includes:

• Guest posting.
• Brand Building.
• Social Media Marketing.

If your content is well optimized, but you have no rank, you can be outranked by similar websites that have more rank than you do.

 

What Is Technical SEO?

This ensures that a website meets the technical requirements of search engines with the aim of improving the website ranking organically. Indexing, crawling, website architecture, and rendering are important elements of technical SEO. Examples of technical SEO include; building structured data and sitemap for your website.

 

White hat vs. black hat SEO

White hat SEO refers to the best practices of SEO that are approved by the search engine rules. This aspect of SEO focuses more on providing value to the audience.

Black hat SEO is a type of SEO practice that attempts to fool the search engine. This method of SEO puts a website in danger as it can get penalized once this method is figured out. One of the punishments given to a site that uses the black hat SEO includes de-indexing of posts, de-ranking, and having an ad limit for a site that is partnering with a google ads agency.

 

What is the difference between white hat and black hat SEO?

As noted above, the major difference between the white hat and black hat SEO is that while the white hat follows the best practices of SEO that are approved by search engine rules, the black hat attempts to fool the search engine with the wrong SEO method and no regard for it viewers.

 

Conclusion

In this blog post, you’ve learned everything you need to know about Search Engine Optimization (SEO), including what it is, why it’s important, and how to optimize your website for search engines. You also got advice on how to improve your site’s SEO, as well as information on common SEO pitfalls and the latest trends in SEO.

If you have any questions about SEO, kindly leave them in the comment section below.

Thanks for reading

Originally posted 2022-09-07 11:09:59.