SEO is the short form of search engine optimization that is the practice of increasing both the quantity as well as quality of traffic to your site through organic search engine results.
So, What Goes Into Search Engine Optimization?
In order to understand the true meaning of SEO, let us break the definition down and take a look at the parts:
Quality of Traffic
You will be able to attract all the visitors in the world, however if they are visiting your website just because Google tells them you are a resource for Apple computers when actually you are a shopkeeper selling apples, this is not quality traffic. Instead, you should attract visitors who are genuinely interested in the products and services that you have to offer.
Quantity of Traffic
Once you have the right audience clicking through from the search engine results pages (SERPs), the more the traffic the better.
Organic Results
Advertisements make up a huge portion of numerous SERPs. Organic traffic can be defined as any traffic that you do not have to pay for.
Pop Web and Print offers expert SEO services that help improve the quality traffic from organic search results.
How Does Search Engine Optimization Work?
You may believe that a search engine is a website you visit to type a question into the box and Bing, Yahoo, Google or whatever search engine you are using magically just replies with a long list of relevant links to websites that could possibly have an answer to your query.
This is true.
However, have you ever stopped to consider what is behind all those magical lists of links?
Here is how it works.
Google or just about any other search engine you are using uses a crawler that goes out to gather all the relevant information about the content they can find on the internet. The crawlers then ring all the 1s and 0s back to the search engine in order to build an index. This index is then fed to an algorithm than aims to match all the data with the query.
This is all the SE (search engine) part of SEO. The O part of the SEO is optimization. Optimization can be defined as the content which is placed on websites. Optimization can take numerous different forms. It is everything from ensuring the title tags and meta descriptions are both informative and also have the correct length pointing to the internal links at pages that you are proud of.
Learning Search Engine Optimization
Following is a general overview about how to go about search engine optimization.
Building an SEO Friendly Website
Once you are ready to start walking search engine optimization, it is time to apply these SEO techniques to a website, whether it is brand new or just an old one you are trying to improvise. In fact, designing an SEO friendly website is the first step in learning and implementing SEO optimization in the real world.
Content and Related Markup
A website is not really a website until there is content placed on it. However, SEO for content has specific variables. It is important to conduct a proper keyword research and then produce SEO friendly copy to help search engines understand what your content is all about.
The Evolution of SEOx
Search engine algorithms alter frequently and the search engine optimization tactics evolve in response to all the changes. Therefore, if somebody is offering SEO advice that does not feel quite right you must check in with the specific topics page.
What is on-site SEO?
On site search engine optimization is the practice of optimizing elements on a site to help your business rank hire and earn more relevant traffic through search engines. On site search engine optimization refers to optimizing the content as well as HTML source code of a page.
Just beyond helping search engines interpret the page content, proper on site search engine optimization can also help users clearly comprehend what the page is all about and whether or not it addresses their search query or not. To put it simply, good on site SEO helps search engines understand what any human would see if they were to visit a page, so that the search engines can consistently serve up what visitors might consider high quality content regarding a particular keyword or search query.
The goal of onsite SEO can be described as attempting to make it easier for both the search engines as well as users to:
- Understand what the webpage is about
- Find the webpage useful and worthy of ranking on search engine result pages (SERPs)
- Identify that the webpage is relevant to a search query (for instance a particular keyword)
What is off-page SEO?
Off page search engine optimization can be referred to as action that are taken outside your website in order to impact your business?s rankings within search engine results pages (SERPs).
Optimizing for the offsite ranking factors comprises of improving search engine and user perception of the website?s popularity, authority, relevance, and trustworthiness. This can be accomplished by various other reputable places on the internet linking to or promoting your site and effectively assuring the quality of your content.
Why does off-page SEO matter?
Even though search algorithms plus ranking factors are continuously changing, the general consensus within the search engine optimization community is that the relevance, dependability, and authority that operational off page SEO still plays a huge role in any webpage?s ability to rank.
How to optimize for Google?
Google is famous for using more than two hundred ranking factors. No one really knows what all of these different ranking factors are, but we do know some of them.
How?
Because Google has told us so, and numerous people have studied the connections between numerous different factors plus Google rankings. Simply because your business creates stained glass windows does not mean that every single page on your website must rank for the query ?stained glass windows.? You might also rank for other keywords with different pages.
Crawlability
Before Google can even consider your content for ranking, it first needs to that this content exists. Google makes use of numerous different way through which it can discover new content on the World Wide Web, however the primary method is crawling. To just put it simply, crawling is when Google follows links on the pages they already know about. To do this, they make use of a computer program known as a spider. Let us say that your homepage has a backlink from a website that is already in Google?s index. The next time they crawl that website, they will follow that link in order to discover your site?s homepage and likely add it to their index. From there they will crawl the link on the homepage to discover other pages on your website.
That being said, there are some things that can block Google?s crawlers:
- Missing internal links: Google relies heavily on internal links in order to crawl all the web pages on your website. Pages that have no internal links often will not get crawled.
- Nofollowed internal links: Internal links which have nofollow tags will not get crawled by Google.
- Noindexed pages: You can also exclude pages from Google?s index by using a noindex meta-tag or HTTP header. If all the other pages on your website only have the internal links from noindexed pages, there is a chance that Google will not find them.
- Blocks in robots.txt: Robots.txt can be described as a text file that lets Google know where it can and cannot go on your site. If the pages are blocked here, it will not crawl them.
Mobile-friendliness
More than 63% of all Google searches come through mobile devices, and this number is consistently growing every single year. Given this statistic it should come as no surprise that in the year 2019, Google announced a ranking boost for mobile friendly websites in the mobile search results. This is important as Google wants to keep all its users satisfied. Webpages that are not optimized for mobile can lead to dissatisfaction. And even if you rank and win the click most people are not going to stick around to consume the content.
Page Speed
The page speed is how fast your website loads. It is a ranking factor on both desktop and mobile. Why? To answer is simply, Google wants to keep all its users satisfied. If your users are clicking on the search results that take too long to load it can lead to dissatisfaction.
Search intent
Looking for a keyword that you want to rank for is very easy. Just place a topic into any keyword research tool then just search for relevant keyword ideas with search volume. That being said, what numerous people fail to consider is whether their webpage aligns with their selected keyword?s search intent.
Backlinks
Google?s ranking algorithm is based upon something known as a PageRank. To put it simply, this interprets backlinks as votes. Speaking in general, we pages that have more votes are most likely to rank higher. To cut the long story short, backlinks matter if you wish to rank for anything worthwhile.
Content quality
Google wishes to rank the most consistent and valuable results at all times. In order to do this, they look at all the content related signal such as expertise, trustworthiness, and authoritativeness.
Numerous other things that you can do to increase the perceived quality of your content is as follows:
- Stick to a seventh or eighth grade reading level. Most people tend to read at this level.
- Make use of shorter sentences along with paragraphs. This is a website content, not an essay.
- Link to proper resources where suitable. Do not be concerned about the ?hoarding PageRank.? Your goal should be to make your content as valued to website visitors as possible.
- Avoid huge walls of text. Break content up with images, and quotes. Aim to make your content easy to skim.