What is SEO

A Comprehensive Guide to What is SEO?

Do you have a dynamic, beautifully designed website with great content? If so, kudos. But what good will it do if no one knows about its existence?

That’s where Search Engine Optimization comes into action.

Search Engine Optimization, also known as SEO, is the practice of improving the visibility of a website on Bing, Google, and other search engines people use. The goal behind SEO optimization is simple: to get you seen. It helps you connect with people searching for the products, services, or information you offer. The higher you rank in search results, the more chances you can be found by potential customers online.

In this extensive guide, we will discuss everything related to SEO. We’ll also discuss the types of SEO, their importance, how they work, how they differ from PPC and SEM, and more. Let’s get started.

A Quick Overview of SEO

As we mentioned earlier, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It was coined in the mid-1990s by Bob Heyman, a marketing strategist who was taking steps to improve the rankings of the popular band Jefferson Starship’s websites.

Moving forward, SEO has become a significant part of marketing. Web owners or their hired seo practitioners create strategies to drive users to a website organically. It also facilitates improving the overall conversion rate.

The Different Types of SEO

Search Engine Optimization can be divided into three different types. Each type focuses on different aspects of improving the rankings of a website on search engines. The following are the types of SEO:

On-Page SEO

In on-page SEO, your site’s content needs to be optimized for two different audiences: search engines and people. This means that you need to create content that is optimized for both people and search engines. The goal should be to publish high-quality and helpful content. You can achieve this by thoroughly understanding your audience’s needs and wants and adhering to Google’s guidelines.

When optimizing content for the audience, you need to ensure that the content you create includes:

● The right keywords users often use when searching for a product or service.

● The topic should cover all the necessary information.

● It should be unique, original, and authentic.

● There should be no grammatical or punctuation errors.

● The information you provide is accurate and up-to-date.

● For better understanding, it should have relevant images or videos.

● It should have a competitive edge over others.

● Lastly, it should be structured in a way that is easy for people to reach and understand.

On the other hand, when optimizing your website for search engines, you need to take care of the following elements:

● Write engaging and concise meta descriptions. Include the targeted keywords in the description to encourage users to click on your web page.

● The title of the page should be unique, engaging, and descriptive.

● Use H1 for the page title and H2-H6 for sub-headings. Following this structure helps in organizing your content properly.

● Add keyword-optimized and descriptive alt-text images.

Off-Page SEO

Off-page SEO refers to activities that take place outside your website but still significantly impact its ranking. Link Building is the foundation of off-page SEO. It occurs when other websites link back to yours. The more credible and relevant websites link back to you, the better your site appears to search engines. There are many ways to get those links, such as:

● Content marketing

● Broken link building

● Resource pages

● Influencer outreach

● Business Directories

● Skyscraper technique

● Competitor analysis

● Testimonials

● HARO (Help a Reporter Out)

Technical SEO

Unlike others, this type of SEO focuses on the technical aspects of your site. It also affects how search engines index your pages and crawl your website. The following activities are included:

● Using code to help search engines comprehend the elements such as products, reviews, and events used on your site better.

● Ensuring your site works properly on mobile devices.

● Make sure your site loads quickly and responds to user interactions.

● Facilitating search engines to locate and understand your content correctly via XML sitemap.

SEO Specialities

There are several other subcategories of SEO. These are different from the ‘traditional SEO.’ These areas often demand additional techniques and pose unique challenges. Let’s take a look at the most used ones:

Local SEO

Local SEO is a valuable strategy that helps businesses to rank in searches based on location. For instance, if someone searches for “best pasta near me,” local SEO will ensure your pasta restaurant shows up in the results. This includes:

● Optimizing your profile on Google My Business

● Getting listed on multiple online directories

● Encouraging customer reviews and testimonials

E-Commerce SEO

We all are aware of the fact that competition in the e-commerce space has become fierce over the years, and if you want people to purchase from you, then you need to put in extra effort, which is using e-commerce SEO.

This type of SEO focuses on optimizing product pages, creating high-quality and engaging product descriptions and ensuring easy site navigation. The ultimate goal? To make it easier for customers to find the products they are looking for.

International SEO

Optimizing a website for different countries and languages is necessary if you want it to rank well globally. This type of SEO is called International SEO which allows brands to reach a global audience. It’s much more than mere translation of a site. Aspects like language variations, search behaviors, and regional search engines are also taken into account.

Moreover, the Hreflang tags also help in displaying the right version of the language in each region. This strategy facilitates businesses to tap into new markets while offering a personalized experience globally.

News SEO

According to a Parse.ly report, around 51% web traffic comes organically. News websites can take advantage of this strategy. News SEO involves the process of getting news article rank higher in search results. It helps in attracting more users. Publishing fresh, well-written, authentic content timely is necessary. The news articles should be clear and concise. Moreover, including high-quality media files like images and videos can improve rankings.

Each type of SEO plays an imperative role in improving the visibility of your website on search engines and helps attract more visitors. You can implement these different types of SEO strategies on your site. With their help you can boost its overall performance and increase its chances of ranking higher on SERPs.

The Importance of SEO in the Digital Marketing Space

Search Engine Optimization is essential for all. It’s a highly effective and tried-and-tested way to boost the visibility of your brand. It helps drive the right traffic to your site, establish your brand as credible in your niche, and increase the overall conversion rates. Let’s learn how each of the following factors plays a significant role in making SEO important for a website.

Web Traffic

To break it to basic, having a well-designed, engaging and user-friendly will never bring customers if no one can find it. If you’re not ranking in the top results of search engines then you must be missing out on numerous sales opportunities.

With the help of SEO, you can increase the organic traffic on your site and directly improve your sales. The formula is pretty simple: the more users visit your site, the more chances you have to sell your offerings.

Website Rankings and Visibility

When users search online for a product or service, they usually choose from the top 5 suggestion search engine shows. Even though search engines like Google and Bing come up with hundreds and thousands of suggestions, hardly anyone makes it past the first page.

According to Oberlo, a recent study discovered approximately 75% of users do not scroll past the first page. Only 0.78% of users click on the links listed on the second page. This signifies the importance of SEO. Furthermore, it helps you dominate the search results, get more visibility online, and drive more potential customers to your site.

However, even if they don’t visit or convert, still ranking in the top search results will make users more acquainted with your brand. Next time, if they’re interested in any products or service you sell, they’ll directly visit your website and purchase from you.

User Experience

Toptal conducted a research that concluded 88% of users don’t prefer to visit websites after having a poor user experience. A website should be designed in a way that it communicates clearly what product or services are being offered, how to acquire it, and answer common questions surrounding it.

The user experience of a website has a significant impact on rankings. Search engines like Bing and Google consider it as a major ranking factor. Having a good user experience means your site is accessible to both users and search engines. However, if a user struggles while navigating through your site, it is probable that search engines will as well.

Brand Growth and Credibility

Getting ranked at the top of search engine results can positively impact the growth and success of your business. A well-optimized website will generate more traffic and generate more sales. Moreover, websites that rank higher in search results are able to gain the trust of customers quickly. Users pay heed to the recommendations given by search engines.

How Does SEO Work?

If you have landed on this page via Google search, you are likely to search for terms like ‘SEO’ or ‘What is SEO?’ This is a clear and perfect example of how Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, works. That’s one way of putting it, but SEO works through a mix of:

The experts or team members who plan, manage, and execute the SEO efforts. Together they ensure that the created strategy is carried out successfully.

The platforms, tools, and software that facilitate automation and support SEO efforts include content management systems, keyword tools, and SEO analyzers.

The methods and workflows used to organize and streamline SEO tasks so they can be completed efficiently.

The actual tasks and outputs include creating SEO-optimized content, improving load times, building quality backlinks, and refining website structure.

However, there are some other critical areas that work together and make SEO work. Let’s take a look at them step by step:

1. Learning How Search Engines Work

Understanding the technicalities is the first step if you want people to find your website through any platform. Next, you need to take the proper steps and provide the signals to impact your visibility.

When it comes to traditional search engines like Bing and Google, the process happens in four key stages:

Crawling: Search engines send bots (also known as crawlers) on a mission to follow links and read sitemaps to find new web pages.

Rendering: The code of the pages (HTML, CSS, JavaScript) is processed to understand how they look and work.

Indexing: The search engine analyzes the page content and metadata and stores it in the database. Please note not all pages are included.

Ranking: The advanced search engine algorithms analyze which web pages are of high quality and most relevant for specific users.

However, optimizing your web page for Google search is entirely different from optimizing for other search platforms like Amazon, Bing, or YouTube.

Let’s take YouTube, for example. The YouTube SEO rankings factors are video title, description, tags, thumbnails, engagement metrics, watch time, video length, channel authority, and user interaction.

2. Conduct In-depth Research

Researching is an imperative part of SEO. It helps identify the correct set of keywords and understand user intent. Here are different forms of research you must conduct to improve the overall performance:

Competitor research: Keep your friends and enemies close. This famous phrase sums up the whole idea behind competitor research. Always look out for what strategies your competitors are implementing, their strengths and weaknesses, and what type of content they are publishing. All of this will help you to create an effective strategy with which you can outrank them easily.

Audience research: Selling a product or service without knowing your audience will never bring success. That’s why it’s essential to understand your target market and audience. Who are they, based on their location, age, gender, and interests? What are their common pain points? How can you answer their queries?

Website research: By conducting an in-depth SEO audit, you can determine hidden opportunities and issues within your website that hinder organic search success. Some audits you should consider:

● Technical SEO

● Content Review

● Link Profile Analysis

● E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness

SERP Analysis: This method will help you to understand the type of search intent of a query, for instance it is informational, transactional, commercial, or navigational. Using this valuable data, you can create something that will earn more visibility or rankings on search engines.

3. Creating Action Plan

Once you have thoroughly understood the technicalities of SEO and completed your research, you need to create a roadmap that works for you in the long run. You need to set clear goals and then jot down a plan for how to achieve them. Even though your action plan will change and evolve over time the ultimate goal should remain unchanged and clear. Following are the items you should include in your SEO plan:

● Set clear goals (like SMART or OKRs) and expectations with timelines

● Align the key metrics and KPIs with your objectives

● Figure out how the project will be managed (internally or externally)

● Communicate and coordinate with your team members and partners

● Choose a set of the right tools and software.

● Build and train your hired teammates.

● Choose the budget for the plan.

● Record the following process and strategy for future use.

Implementation of SEO Strategy

Once you have a profound strategy in your hand, it’s time to put it into action. Start with creation of content first. Guide your content team what type of content is required and provide them with all the necessary information and tools to create valuable content.

Go through all the existing web pages and look for the content gap. Determine which content needs to be improved. Check all the links to avoid broken links. Incorporate the right keywords, entities and topics. Also, look out for low-quality and outdated content that is hindering you in achieving your SEO goals.

Continuous Monitoring and Maintenance

If your website breaks or something goes wrong you should be the first person to know about it and that can only happen if you monitor your site regularly. You need to keep an eye if page speed is slow, website goes offline, dip in traffic, broken links, and other potential issues.

Tracking, Measuring, and Reporting Results

If you’re not measuring your SEO efforts, you cannot find the loopholes and improve them. To make metric-based decisions, you need to make use of various web analytics tools, software, and other platforms. These tools will help you track, measure, and analyze web traffic and user behavior. Following is the list of tools you can use:

● Google Search Console

● Google Analytics

● Bing Webmaster

● Adobe Analytics

● Matomo

● Mixpanel

● Hotjar

The Never-Ending Journey of SEO

SEO doesn’t stop here. It’s an ongoing process. From search engines to competitors and user behavior, everything is changing with every passing day. Websites move and change. The content becomes outdated. It’s your job to keep a close eye on the changes and use your strategy to cope up with the alterations and become more efficient.

To support our findings, here’s a quote from Brian Dean, Founder of Backlinko, that signifies that SEO is a continuous practice:

“SEO is never finished. It’s about keeping up with search engine algorithms, producing fresh content, and continuously optimizing.”

How to Learn SEO?

That’s a billion-dollar question, and almost everyone asks this after learning how SEO works. The best way to learn SEO is through reading. There’s plenty of valuable material available on reputable sites that will help you understand it better. If you aren’t into reading, then realize it through videos. The following courses are designed by SEO professionals for beginners:

5 Common SEO Ranking Factors

When you’re planning to improve the visibility of your website on any search engine, you’ve probably heard a term people constantly use in the space, ‘SEO Ranking Factor.’ If you’re new to this, you may find them overwhelming, but don’t worry. We have broken it down for you in a simple way so you can understand what search engines actually look for and how you can improve the rankings of your site.

Quality Content

Content is the king. There’s no doubt about it. It’s one of the most critical factors in SEO. Why so? No matter which search engine you use, each of them focuses on serving the users with the most authentic, best, and relevant answers to people, and only high-quality content can fulfill this.

That’s why when you’re creating content for a website, make it interesting, helpful, and informative. Imagine your audience and think about what problems they’re facing and how your content can answer their query or solve their problems.

Keywords

Keywords are like those teeny tiny bridges that connect users with you. Incorporating the correct and relevant keywords in your content helps search engines understand what your web page is about. For instance, if you’re running a food blog, use the terms ‘5-minute recipes’ or ‘3 ingredients recipe’. Using such terms will help search engines connect you with people who are searching for those things.

But keep in mind, never overdo it. What we mean is never stuff your pages with keywords. It can actually negatively impact your rankings.

Backlinks

We consider backlinks as votes of confidence. When other reputable websites link to your content, they basically mean, “This website is trustworthy. Check it out.” The more quality backlinks you can earn, the more search engines will trust your site.

If you’re out of ideas, here’s one tip. Think of content that is helpful, interesting, and informative too. You can create valuable guides, fun how-to posts, or research papers.

Page Speed

Maile Ohye, a former Developer Program Tech Lead at Google, once said, “Users want to find answers quickly, and data shows that people really care about how quickly their pages load. Faster sites create happy users, and we’ve seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there.”

Her words say it all. Page speed is super important. In ideal circumstances, a web page shouldn’t take more than 2 or 3 seconds to load. If it takes longer than that, then people will exit before it appears. This activity will never go unnoticed. Search engines count these ranking factors and demote websites with poor page loading speed.

Mobile-Friendliness

Most users use their phones to conduct searches. So this means your website should be mobile-friendly. If it’s not then you’re missing out big time. Search engines prefer websites that are mobile-friendly. It means it loads quickly, looks good, and is easier to navigate on smaller screens.

There are some other SEO common ranking factors as well, such as:

● Content Freshness

● Technical SEO

● Domain Authority

● On-page SEO

● User Experience

Don’t worry; we’ll create a separate guide dedicated to them soon.

How Does SEO Differ from SEM, PPC, and AEO?

SEM, PPC, and AEO are a few common terms that are often used alongside with SEO. SEM (Search Engine Marketing) is a model in which paid strategies are implemented to increase visibility.

On the other hand in PPC (Pay-Per-Click) advertisers pay for each click they get on their ads. Lastly, AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) focusses on optimization of content for featured snippets and voice search.

Now, let’s explore how each of these terms is different from SEO.

SEO vs. SEM

As we mentioned earlier, SEM stands for search engine marketing, also commonly known as search marketing. It is a type of digital marketing and an umbrella term used for the combination of PPC and SEO activities created to drive traffic via organic and paid search.

To put it simply, it is the dynamic process of improving visibility on search engines and driving more traffic to your site. So here comes the main question, how is SEM different from SEO? Well, technically speaking SEO is a part of SEM. SEO is all about driving traffic organically whereas, SEM drives organic as well as paid traffic from search engines.

Here’s an example to explain this: SEM is a complete toolkit used for improving online visibility. SEO and PPC are the two critical tools within that kit.

SEO vs. PPC

PPC is a short form of pay-per-click. The word describes the term itself. In this type of digital marketing, advertisements are charged a certain amount of money whenever someone clicks on their ads. Let’s learn how it works for better understanding:

● Advertisers create an ad. They use catch headlines, detailed descriptions, and a link.

● Next, they choose the relevant keywords for their offering.

● After choosing keywords, they make a budget for how much they’re willing to pay per click.

● Once they get live, it’s ready for users to explore.

Beginners often get confused between SEO and PPC. They are two sides of the same coin. The mere difference between the two is one is unpaid while the other is paid. In this battle between PPC and organic SEO, no one wins because these two are complementary channels. To improve your visibility, traffic, and overall conversions, choose both of them if you have the budget for it.

SEO vs. AEO

We already know what the function of SEO is. AEO, or Answer Engine optimization, takes it a step further. It focuses on ensuring the existing content is optimized for featured snippets and voice searches. So, if you’re wondering if you should choose SEO or AEO, our recommendation is both.

Key Takeaways

Search engine optimization (SEO) is essential for boosting online visibility and attracting organic traffic to your site. The ROI of SEO really pays off with consistent effort. But remember, it’s not something you set once and forget. It’s a continuous process that needs updates and tweaks regularly.

Now you have the basics down, it’s the right time to create effective strategies or polish the existing ones. However, if you’re not tech-savvy and need assistance, Dg Concepts is here to help. Among many, we also offer SEO services in the market. We have an expert team of SEO practitioners to do the job for you.

If you’re interested in learning more about the service, you can ping us or send a message to schedule a virtual coffee meeting.

Frequently Asked Questions

1.What is SEO for beginners?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility and rankings of your website on search engines. Beginners can do this by using relevant keywords, creating high-quality content, and improving technical aspects of the site.

2. How do you generate backlinks?

To create high-quality backlinks, reach out to different authoritative websites. Create valuable and exciting content that other websites want to link to.

3.What is search engine optimization marketing?

Search engine optimization marketing uses various SEO techniques, including creating valuable content, optimizing keywords, and building quality backlinks, to improve a website’s visibility on search engines and gain more traffic.

4. How do you increase website traffic with SEO?

To increase web traffic via SEO, you should improve page loading speed, incorporate the right keywords, optimize your content, build high-quality backlinks, and create a good user experience.

5. How much does SEO cost per month?

The price for monthly SEO services varies from agency to agency. However, it ranges from $500 to $5000, and so on. Startups often spend less, while big enterprises may invest more to obtain favorable results.

6. What is Google E-E-A-T

Google E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness. It is a framework created by Google to ensure the quality and credibility of a website’s content. Websites with strong E-E-A-T usually rank higher in search results because they are considered trustworthy sources of information.

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