SEO: Beginner to Advanced!
What does it mean:
Search Engine Optimization refers to all those techniques that you need to follow in order to maintain visibility of your website on Search Engine Results Pages. That's right. Being online is not enough for your businesses nowadays. You need to ensure that your customers can easily reach you in order to increase revenues.
It's broadly classified into On-page and Off-page SEO. As you could have easily guessed, On-page SEO involves those techniques that you can do on your web pages to increase your rankings. Whereas, Off-page SEO involves increasing the authority of your domain by link building or social networking.
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| Two categories of SEO |
Why should you care:
If you want to be ahead of your competitors, you need to reach out more to your customers. How are you going to do that if your website doesn't even show up on the first page of the Google's search results for the keywords that are related to your website?
80% of the people never scroll past the first page of search results.
Getting to page one is vital!
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| As you can see above, only 10% people ever check the other pages of the search results. |
What all do you need to do:
This is a domain where you can become an expert on your own. For starters, Search Engines give you a better ranking if you take care of the following things:
Relevance matters the most!
You need to prove to search engines that your website contains relevant data.
Step 1:
Seach engines look for quality instead of quantity. Try your best to put well-researched content without any errors.
Step 2:
Add facts to your data. It has been proven that images, videos, and numbers increase the credibility of your website.
So, go ahead and add numbers to your titles (just like I did).
Step 3:
Get emotional! Articles that elicit emotions are more likely to go viral.
Step 4:
Blogs and testimonials can do wonders for you. They prove your credibility to the search engines.
Also, don't turn off comments. When people comment on your blogs, Search engines get to know that people actually care about your website.
User experience matters next:
Step 1:
Your website should be mobile friendly. Why? Because 75% of the traffic comes through mobiles rather than desktops.
How to do this? First, build a responsive website. You can start from here.
You can also check whether your website is considered mobile friendly by Google or not by entering your website's URL on Google's Mobile Friendly.
Step 2:
Would you like to visit a website again that took 2 minutes of your time to load?
Exactly, nobody does.
You can start by removing everything unnecessary from your website and compressing the size of all the media used.
To check how fast your website is, you can go to Pingdom. It's free and they will also suggest you things you can do to increase the speed. Cool right?
Step 3:
Switch to https from http to safeguard the connections and other details on your websites as users will feel more secure then. And search engines also prefer secure websites.
Step 4:
Make sure there are no dead or broken links present in your website.
In case they do, use proper redirects to enhance user experience on your website.
You can check whether your website has any of them on Google Analytics.
Search Engines also care about your authority:
Step 1:
Socialize as much as you can. But, all social media platforms do not help in building authority.
Docstoc, Slideshare, Quora etc. are the websites that expect quality content. These sites will also build a following, within a short period of time.
Step 2:
Link building helps in building authority too.
It works in two ways: You need to follow sites that have high authority. And you need to be followed by such sites too.
You can look for such sites at Alltop.
More stuff that you can do:
Add schema markup to your website. You can learn everything about it here.
Make the most of the free tools that search engines provide such as Google Webmaster.
Here is what you should not do:
Yes, you read it right. Just like Search Engines reward you for doing all the right things, you can be penalized too if you try to be over-smart. But, it's easy to be in the good books of the search engines if you just avoid the following:
- Keyword Stuffing:
- You might get tempted to do this in order to get more clicks but it gives a poor user experience thus Search Engines will lower your ranking.
- Duplicate Content:
- Copying content from other sources and claiming them your own lowers your credibility and ends in bringing you down the search list.
- Hidden texts and links:
- This way of manipulating rankings might not be seen by the users on your website but Search Engines do find it and punish you for it.
- Annoying Ads:
- Too many Ads on your website can make it slow and hamper users' experience on your site.
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