Everything You Need to Know About Search Engine Optimization

What Is SEO?

Many people may have heard a ton about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) but don't necessarily know what it's about. While most tend to associate it with optimizing keywords, there's an ocean of information behind it, and understanding the fundamentals will help in the learning process.

Essentially, you try to understand the search terms that people will look for when they're looking for businesses or entities in your domain. When they search about a service, product, or anything you provide, you should appear in the results.It's a deeper understanding of your consumer, what they consume, and their intent. Essentially, you're solving yet another problem of theirs. If that wasn't enough to sell you about all the benefits SEO has, you also see an improvement in:

Traffic Quality

The major influence that SEO has on your website is that you receive a lot of organic traffic. What this means is that the incoming user is interested in acquiring or at least learning about the product or service you're offering.It's not worth it if someone looking for a video editing tool ends up on a site that's all about video games. You get organic searches from the search engine without having to pay the service for it.

Traffic Quantity

When you've figured out and are targeting the terms that people are using to locate pages such as yours, you are bound to and can further emphasize ensuring that you receive more traffic than before.

How Does SEO Work?

Have you ever wondered how Google knows what to bring up when you search a term? Out of the millions of pages online, there must be an elaborate way to figure out that this is the right page for this particular search. This is what that process looks like:

Crawling

The purpose of crawling is the search engine scouring through numerous web pages at once, using programs called bots or crawlers. These programs go through various hyperlinks, which allows them to branch off into different directions. One by one, the program makes its way across the internet and ends up finding various relevant search terms along the way.

Indexing

After the crawling process for a particular website is over, the information on that site is added to an index. In this process, the goal is to get an idea of the page's content, understand it and store them on the index for later use. You can picture the search engine as a large database of all of the crawled websites, trying to analyze and understand the site's content and recommend it to the user whenrequired.

Recommending the Results

Once you hit enter after entering a query into the search bar, the search engine goes through the index and finds the most relevant results possible. These results are called the Search Engine Results Pages or SERP for short.

Google's SearchAlgorithm or How Google Ranks Websites

It's important to know that Google's Search Algorithm is an ensemble of various solutions, ranging from machine learning techniques to various subsystems and technologies, many of which haven't fully been disclosed or understood. Despite this, experts have been able to uncover various metrics that ensure the search algorithm picks up your content as relevant based on the following factors:

• What the query means – The search engine has to have an awareness of what the user is searching for on the internet.

• Relevance – The page that the search engine recommends must be relevant or about what the original query was.

• Quality content – Search engines are becoming increasingly efficient and can filter out the quality of content, so you can't get away with slapping the same keyword countless times.

• Page Usability – This is an umbrella term, as it involves various aspects like the readability of the page, the safety protocols the website has in place, and how accessible the content on the site is for various users. Google emphasizes ensuring that the pages they recommend are well-maintained, offer great performance, and are technically well-designed.

• Context – Many of the context aspects are focused more on the user's location and settings, as you don't want to recommend a service that's not even available in your region or country.

Be aware that Google's Search Algorithm is a huge element and has gone through various revisions and continues to update regularly. This makes it important to stay updated, but there's generally much hype when Google rolls out any significant changes.

Other Key Aspects

These are other essential aspects, many of which SEO professionals work on and optimize for their clients to improve their overall SEO performance for Google:

• Off-Page – Google likes backlinking, aka linking to other pages which are reliable and known as authorities in their domain. Off-page SEO is an important part of the process and is used regularly.

• On-Page – On-page optimization refers to utilizing the right number of keywords and queries on your webpage. This is more than just copy-pasting the keyword numerous times.

The Different Types of Keywords

SEO isn't entirely about keywords, but it's involved with them to such an extent that many people equate the two with each other. SEO utilizes two forms of keywords, namely Short-tail Keywords and Long Tail Keywords. Both of them have their own goals and bring in various kinds of traffic. Here are some of the differences between the two:

Short-tail Keywords

As the name suggests, short-tail keywords are phrases of 1 to 3 words. If you're looking to bring in a large influx of users to your page, these are preferred. As these are smaller, they have an open nature, and you can easily add them to your webpage. But that also has its downside, as they're regularly utilized by more sites, including your competitors. Because so many people are using them at a time, it can be hard to rank higher for them on Google.

The large volume is an issue, but with long-term utilization and optimization, you can see positive results for short-tail keywords and rank higher as a result.

Long-Tail Keywords

On the contrary, a long-tail keyword refers to any search term longer than three words. A majority of the search terms on the internet are long-tail keywords as they're more descriptive and help pinpoint the content that's required by the user when searching for it. Since they contain more words, they can help specify the right keywords and search terms across the internet.

But long-tail keywords aren't the end-all solution that one might assume. They don't generate the same level of traffic as a short-tail keyword but generally help narrow down the search process.It's a double-edged sword as it does not produce the same level of influx, but it's ideal for bringing in organic traffic as they're more likely to lead to conversions.

SEO For Your Website

Google is by far the first search engine that you'll target. Unless you're living in a region with some other predominant search engine, you'd want to be visible on Google so that most people can find you online. And to start things off, you can look up your website in the search engine. Copy the name of your website URL into the search engine (not Google Chrome's URL search) and hit enter.

It's more than likely that the crawler will be able to find your website fairly easily, considering that crawler bots are regularly adding pages to the search index 24/7. If your website can't be found, this is a sign of problems, and you'll have to make some necessary changes. These are some of the common reasons why Google can't find your website:

• The site is poorly connected.

• The website was recently created and has not yet been found and indexed.

• The website lacks technical competence, making it hard for the crawler to crawl through it properly.

• You've blocked Google's crawlers.

• Some errors on your site are preventing Google from indexing your site, generally technical issues.

Sitemap

If you've set up a new site or noticed that your site hasn't been showing up in search engines, add a sitemap for your website. You can let Google's crawlers find your website, along with the other pages on your site using the sitemap. It acts as a validation for the search engine and also denotes any changes. Work on this aspect to ensure that your page at least shows up on Google when you add the URL, and once this is accomplished, you can get to work on working on other aspects.

Regarding Content

A large chunk of the SEO process revolves around content. Creating content is key, but it also takes up a lot of time, especially if you don't have external resources in the form of competent SEO writers that are doing the job for you.There's no denying the importance of value-added content such as videos and audio material have to bring in traffic from other sources, but this isn't a feasible option for everyone.

On the contrary, you always have some level of success by providing value-added blogs, articles, and other written material that you can spread out across your site to get all those SEO benefits. These pieces of content also do well to bring in your viewers and retain their attention while educating them about your business. These are some of the general aspects that SEO experts will emphasize that you get right to shape yourself up for success:

• Relevance – The most important thing is creating content that's relevant to what your end-user is looking for. Incorporate those keywords smartly across your content and website in general.

• Quality – Your website also gets a great boost from having good content, as Google recognizes it as they're able to filter through quality content using AI.

• Easy Navigation – There are various aspects to easy navigation, from ensuring that you don't have an amalgam of readability and access options for users.

• Compatibility – Google is very specific about website compatibility. In recent years, they're pushing for mobile-friendliness as websites as more users than ever use the internet using mobile devices now. Ensure that it can easily be used on a compliant device to earn an SEO boost.

• Internal Links – Internal links involve adding links to other pages on your site, which is a great way to help users find ways to navigate around the platform. These are also preferred by Google.

• Site Speed – If your website has a slow response rate, it will eventually cause users to stop using the platform. This leads to a higher bounce rate, which is something that Google looks at negatively and eventually stops recommending.

• Title Tags and Meta Descriptions – A meta description appears below the headline when your page shows up on the search engine. While this isn't a requirement for the search engine itself, it's a great way of grabbing user attention. A meta description should be about the page and let the user know what the internal content is all about. Title tags consist of your keywords, letting both users and the search engine know what your content is about.

Conclusion

SEO doesn't take place in one day. It's a lengthy process that requires a bit of time and expertise to execute properly. But on the flip side, it's also a must-have to ensure that your website has the best chance of being visible. With more people using the internet to acquire all kinds of services, you need to work with SEO professionals and give your website the best chance to stand out from the crowd.

Xpeer is your go-to resource for a plethora of resources, providing all the help you need to utilize the digital space efficiently for your business. We provide web development services, top iPhone app developers, PHP, .NET, and Shopify developers, among others. Our services as a B2B business are to connect vendors to those that require services and help them work mutually to take their potential to the next level.

Reach out to us today.