Search Engine Optimization/ SEO: Things You Should Know As A beginner

Search Engine Optimization as described by Wikipedia is

If you are new to SEO, it is very important to keep in mind that you don’t know it all yet. Seo is a discipline that require constant learning and keeping oneself updated with latest changes in the field. A Good SEO is the one who has never finished learning.

Being a Beginner in SEO requires you to know some important concepts and technical terms thoroughly.

Search Engine Optimization Important Concepts And Strategies

Basically, the process of optimization for Ranking higher in search engine is divided into two parts or factors:

On-Page SEO

On-site Optimization which is basic changes which you made to your website which Include type of content that is to be published, HTML clues for search engines to determine the relevance of a particular page in reply to a search query, Building a search engine friendly site structure.

Off-Page SEO

Off-Site Optimization is everything else like links and social media.

To know more about these two factors in details read this blog post on SEO Strategies

SEO Foundation Is Laid On Quality Content

All your SEO efforts are very much dependent on Quality of content you produce. Every Search query comes with an intent to either Do, Know or Understand something. Crafting fulfilling, thorough content that addresses searcher’s needs improved your chance to earn top rankings. Quality Content is one which engage the user in reading your page for more than few seconds. Web pages with Quality content offer a substantial value to its reader that is unique and useful.

Keyword Research

A good content can get away unnoticed if it fails to convey search engine that it is about a particular subject or it fulfill the intent of a particular search query.It is here where the role of keyword research come into play. Obviously, if you want your page to have a chance of ranking in the search results for “wedding dress,” it’s wise to make sure the word “wedding dress” is part of the crawlable content of your document. There are a variety of tools like Google Adwords Keyword planner available to help you know what exactly people type in search engines while searching for a particular product or service.You want to create content using those keywords, the actual search terms people are using, so you can produce content that effectively “answers” that query.

SEO Sucess Depends On Right Placement Of Keywords

Keyword Research will result in a list of keywords you want to target for a particular topic, so now the question is where and how to use those keywords?

Title Tag

Title acts in much the same way as the title of a book to your prospective customers.So it is meant to be an accurate, concise description of a page’s content. It is critical to both user experience and search engine optimization.Below are listed some recommendations for optimizing title tags for search engines.

Write a catchy and compelling Title tag.Title tags should be descriptive and readable.

Be mindful of the length of Title tag, Search engines display only the first 65-75 characters of a title tag in the search results.

Place the primary keyword right at the beginning of Title tag.

Relevancy of primary keyword to the content of your page is very important, Don’t Piss off your reader by showing and delivering 2 different things. Keywords in Title tag should be strictly in line with the content on your page.

Meta Description

A description is a summary of what your web page is about, giving a more sneak peek into the content of your web page than a Title can tell.

Limit your Meta Description character length to 160 characters as search engines generally will cut snippets longer than that.

Try Placing your primary keywords near the beginning of your description.

Meta Description should reinforce the intent expressed through Title.

URL

A good URL is one which is appropriately Descriptive and through which it is easy to predict the content you’d expect to find on the page.If your page is targeting a specific term or phrase, make sure to include it in the URL but Keyword stuffing can effect negatively.

Header tags: H1, H2, H3

Try putting keywords in the header tag H1-H4, have only one H1 tag per page. Make your headline attractive and user engaging.

Images And Alt tags

Images, Flash files, Java applets, and other non-text content are often ignored or devalued by search engine crawlers, despite advances in crawling technology. Giving Alt Tags to Images help search engines know what your page is about as Alt tag is a text description of the visual content.It is a good idea to place your keyword in alt tag.

Search Engine Friendly Site Architecture

The right site structure can help your SEO efforts flourish while the wrong one can cripple them.Below are listed some important factors which can effect Ranking of a website on search engine.

Crawlability of a site

Search Engines like Google use bots or Robots to crawl sites.Search engines “crawl” websites, going from one page to another making copies of your pages that get stored in what’s called an “index,” which is like a massive book of the web. To be in the book, you have to be crawled.It is very difficult to achieve good search engine rankings if you have poor crawlability.The use of robots.txt, internal link structures and specifically telling search engines not to crawl pages with certain URL parameters can all improve crawl efficiency. It is a good practice to use sitemaps, both HTML and XML, to make it easy for search engines to crawl your site. To know more about Site Crawling and Robot You can visit this particular category on searchengineland.

Duplicate Content And Canonicalization

Search Engines are troubled by duplicate content, which is basically the appearance of identical content at different web pages on the internet. It is difficult for search engines to decide which version is more relevant to a given search query.When duplicate content is present, site owners suffer rankings and traffic losses, and search engines provide less relevant results.

Canonicalization is the practice of organizing your content in such a way that every unique piece has one, and only one, URL.

To know more about the problem of Duplicate content and Canonicalization and its solution read this very informative post on Moz.com.

Mobile Friendly Site

With 50% of traffics coming through Mobile devices, it has become necessary for a site to be mobile optimized. Google is rewarding sites that are mobile friendly with a chance of better rankings on mobile searches while those that aren’t might have a harder time appearing. So Ensure that your site is Mobile Friendly.

Sites Which Loads Faster Rank Better

Neither Humans Nor Search Engines Appreciate sites which take time in loading. Google has declared that speedy sites get a small ranking advantage over slower sites. So make sure that your site doesn’t fall in the category of those lazy sites which are slow.

HTTPS Making Internet A Safer Place

In order to provide better security to web surfers, google rewards sites that use HTTPS with a small ranking boost. So moving to HTTPS is a good Idea and a step towards future of the internet.

Link Building

All though there has been chatter in SEO Industry in last few years regarding the Importance of Links in overall ranking factor and even recommendation by Google to not focus on link building. But the important part is Google Still uses Links as part of their ranking algorithm, so there is no question of not doing Link building, but you have to be cautious. Over the years, it has become evident that Quality of Links is more Important than Quantity of links. Avoid Bad Links and in order to do so you have to be sure that a link you’ve manually built isn’t just going to get your website penalized?

Click to know more about link building guidelines

Social Media Role In Ranking

There is no denying the rising importance of social channels in last few years.Social media is important, easily accessible medium to amplify your content, site and brand.Participation in social sharing sites is crucial. If you don’t have a Twitter account, a Facebook fan page or Google+ Page you’re missing out. Getting references from well reputed social accounts and getting quality social shares is ideal, but being shared widely on social networks is still helpful and can be a big plus in lifting your search ranking.

Post share-worthy content, Engage, Talk, Comment with the users

Get Buzz from Experts, If you have any expert in your field reach out to them and get them talking to you on your social media profile or get them commenting on your post or twits.

Congratulations! If you’ve been reading through this guide from the beginning, you’re done!Best of luck with your SEO efforts!

Know the trick to optimize your website for driving traffic by watching Complete Video Guide For Beginners on SEO

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