Welcome to your SEO learning journey!
We have developed this guide to provide you with an introduction to all major aspects of SEO, from finding the terms and phrases (keywords)that will help to boost relevant web traffic to your website, making your blog or company’s website friendly to search engine algorithms, to building high-value external links.
The world of search engine optimization(SEO) can seem very complex and ever-changing, especially if you are a beginner in this field, but you can easily learn the optimization basics.
What Is SEO?
SEO stands for Search engine optimization, which is the process of increasing the quality and quantity of website traffic. SEO optimization increases organic search traffic to your website through improving rankings in the search engine results.
Organic search traffic from SERPs(Search Engine Results Pages) in orange and paid traffic in blue.
How SEO Affects Page Ranking on Google?
Google scoring their search results mainly based upon web content relevancy and authority of pages its automated programme has crawled(fetched) and included in its web index, with the main objective is to provide a website user with the best answer for their requested query.
Google search engine applies over 200 various website ranking factors in their algorithm to arrange their search results, and SEO optimization encompasses technical and creative activities to influence that web page ranking metric data.Google
It is often useful not to focus heavily on individual metric data signals and instead better to try to aim for the wider objective, on how more effectively provide the best answers for your users.
SEO optimization process ensures that your website is accessible for crawling & indexing, produces useful and high-quality content that uses correct keywords matching visitor’s search query thereby provides with excellent user experience.
Google has a very large team of human fact-checkers, also known as quality raters who are rating the quality of the search results that are getting fed into Google’s mathematical formula, the algorithm that determines relevant query outcomes. Google uses a hyperlink based formula (known as ‘Page Rank’) to determine the authority and popularity of a particular page, and while Google’s machine learning algorithm is far more sophisticated today, this is still a fundamental factor in website ranking. Google frequently updates its algorithm to return improved search results as well as keep up with the constantly changing ways people search on the internet.
Google’s search quality rater guidelines provide a lot of details and examples of what their machine learning algorithm class as low or high-quality web content, and their emphasis on wanting to reward websites that demonstrate their expertise, authority, and trust (EAT). Search engine optimization is the process that helps to improve the numbers and quality of ‘inbound links’ to a website, from other websites. This SEO optimization task is known as ‘external link building‘, and involves practices in exchanging links with other websites to increase your own site’s backlinks & quality backlinks.
If Relevant and reputable websites are linking to your website, then it is a strong signal for the Google page rating algorithm, that this web page can have value to its users, and can be trusted to appear in the search engine results for relevant queries.
Onsite SEO
Onsite SEO optimization involves optimizing methods to improve the website’s organic visibility. This particular activity means optimizing your website and its content to improve the accessibility, relevancy, and experience for your users.
Some of the typical Onsite optimization tasks will include:
• Keyword Researching – Analysing the types of keywords & keyword phrases and the frequency used by potential customers to search and find particular business services or company products. Recognizing & understanding their intent and consumer’s expectations from their search query.
• Technical Auditing – To get indexed, your website needs to be crawled by crawler bots with direct access to the correctly geo-targeted links provided in your sitemap with no errors or user experience barriers.
• User Experience – Ultimately, we design and develop websites for both internet users and search engines. Valuable for the user content shows trust, expertise, and authority, is simple to navigate, with fast-loading pages, and ultimately delivers the best available experience to its users compared to the direct competition websites.
• Onsite Optimisation – Improving the overall structure of the website, pages, titles, on-page alignment, tags, internal navigation, and web content relevant for the user’s search query to help prioritize key areas and target relevant keywords and search phrases.
The above list only touches upon a small number of activities involved in Onsite SEO as an overview.
Summarize your web page content. Accurately Write a description that would inform and interest your viewers if they saw description meta tag as a snippet in a Google’s search result.
Offsite SEO
Offsite SEO optimization involves optimizing methods carried outside of a website to improve the website’s organic visibility.
This is often referred to as ‘link building’, which helps to increase the numbers of reputable ‘inbound links’ to your website, from other websites.
Links from reputable websites and blogs with more trust, authority, popularity, and relevancy will deliver more value to your website, than links from an unknown, poorly build and optimized, lacking authority website that isn’t trusted by the search engines which use them signals as a scoring vote of trustworthiness. So the quality of the links to the website is one of the most important elements of metric data.
Some of the typical Offsite SEO optimization tasks will include:
• Content (‘Marketing’) – Reputable websites are more likely to link the to unique, high-value web content. So by creating amazing content in your blog or a website will help you to attract high-value links. Those types of popular web content might include a how-to guide, real-life stories, visualizations, news or researches with compelling data.
• Digital PR – PR provides reasons for other high-authority websites and blogs to talk and link to your website. This might be internal news-flow, writing for external publications, latest researches or studies, industry expert interviews, celebrity quotes, trendy product placement and much more.
• Outreach & Promotion – This Offsite SEO optimization task involves communicating with bloggers, key journalists, web influencers or webmasters about a particular industry, brand or some of their latest products and services, resources, content or PR to develop coverage and ultimately build valuable links to your website.
There’s a huge number of reasons why your blog or a website would like to make links to other websites, and not just for all of those activities mentioned above. The other good reasons for websites to link might include activities such as speaking at an event that is covered by local or national bloggers, sponsoring or promoting a local football team, or being listed by various businesses & their suppliers, as examples.
Good criteria on whether particular links are valuable to your website are to consider the quality of referral traffic (visitors that might click on the link to visit a website). If for example a blog or a website is not attracting any visitors, or the audience is completely unrelated and irrelevant, then it might not be the links that are worth pursuing.
It is important to keep in mind that link schemes such as exchanging links excessively, buying links, or low-quality directories and articles that aim to manipulate Google’s algorithm rankings, are against Google guidelines and can take action by penalizing your website.
One of the best and most sustainable approaches to building inbound links to your website or a blog is to earn them, by providing genuine, unique, valuable content with the best available experience for your user, thereby compelling reasons for other websites to link to your company’s website.
What is the Local SEO? How Different Local SEO from SEO?
The main difference between organic SEO and local search is that local SEO has a geographical element added. If a potential customer browses the web for a product or service + location, the search engine knows that the search query has local intent. All search engine algorithms have been developed with the main goal of how to serve their customer in the best and most convenient manner and provide the information to the user with relevant returned data on what they have requested in the search query.
What is Local SEO Marketing?
Local SEO marketing is an incredibly effective optimization method to market your local business or a company online, as it helps local brands to promote their products with the latest deals and also newly introduced services for a locally based clientele at the exact time those customers browsing the internet for those goods and services.
Why Local SEO is Important for SEO Optimization?
Local SEO provides potential customers with the data on products and services that they are browsing for and in real-time when they are looking for them. Even if your local store does not have a website, local SEO will help your shop to stand out in local search listings against your direct competition based in the same location and will aid to drive more traffic through online leads.
How Does Local SEO Work?
Local SEO helps locally based businesses & brands promote their latest products and services to customers based in that geographical area. To return information for local search queries, the algorithm relies on data metrics such as local content, social profile pages, reviews, behavioral analysis, links, and citations to provide the most accurate & relevant local search results for the user.
How Successfully do SEO Optimization for Your Website?
SEO is a long marathon contest, not a 100 meters sprint race – so you’re will be taking part in the long game.
SEO is not about a one-time optimization of seven existing web pages and never-ever looking back at your website again. It’s not just only about planning, designing, and developing valuable blog content for your customers that will earn a measurable amount of passive traffic for your website.
Industry professionals with a great deal of expertise seem to be agreeing that the definition of SEO is evolving. A decade ago, the most in-depth SEO optimization strategy involved filling a post or a page with a lot of the same keywords or phrases so that Google algorithm would associate the mentioned keyword with the page.
These days, SEO seems to be everything at once from Ensuring Crawling accessibility, providing with a great UX experience, Optimizing page titles, URLs, & descriptions to developing web content that is a perfect match to searchers’ needs.
As you can see, the foundation of good SEO begins with Google bots(Google’s automated crawling program) crawling the web constantly looking for the new or updated web pages, then indexing them.
Using this SEO beginner introduction guide, you can follow these seven steps to successfully optimise your website:
1. Ensuring Crawling Accessibility by Creating a Sitemap so Automated Software can Crawl Pages from the Web and Index them.
2. Providing Compelling Web Page Content that is Relevant to the Searcher’s Query.
3.Using Effectively Optimised Keywords and Keyword Phrases to Attract Visitors & Search Engines.
4. Providing your Website Visitors with a Great User Experience which Includes a Fast Page Loading Speed and Compelling UX.
5. Sharing Valuable Content on your Website or Blog Pages that are Earning Links, Citations, and Amplification.
6. Optimizing Web Page Titles, URLs, & Descriptions to Draw Increased CTR( Click-Through Rate ) in the Rankings.
7. Adding Snippet/Schema Markup to your Website to Stand Out in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).
Search engine optimization (SEO) can be very competitive, but it is still by far the most effective and sustainable path to generate traffic to your business website.
Moreover, the efforts you put in optimizing relevant keywords with good search traffic potential, Building relevant links from other high-authority websites to your website will add up over time, helping you get even more traffic as long as you are consistent with basic SEO.
Web Craft Station – The leading SEO Agency in Leeds, which helps you to promote your business through SEO marketing, pay per click optimisation, social media marketing campaigns, etc.