Learn SEO to stay ahead.

Image downloaded from Pexels

In this article, I’ll provide all the detailed and latest information related to SEO, which helped me improve the ranking of my website and my clients’.

SEO known as Search Engine Optimization is the process of Optimizing your website in such a way that it will rank higher in the SERP (i.e. Search Engine Results Page).

And Why It plays an important role???

If the SEO of your website is done correctly then you will rank higher in the results page and chances are that you may get more than 50% of organic traffic from the results page.

Sounds Interesting …Right…

If we talk about Google Search, it changes its algorithms every single year, Google wants to show the right content at the right time to its users. So, you need to be on the lookout for the right content, stay updated with the algorithm changes by learning from Google itself.

Also, It doesn’t matter how old or new your website is, your website doesn’t need to be old to rank higher in the results page.

SEO is divided into two segments On-Site Optimization and Off-Site Optimization, also known as On-Page and Off-Page SEO.

Keep scrolling down….

And you will understand what On-site and Off-site Optimizations are and how to implement the right techniques to get higher ranking.

On-Site Optimization

Making small modifications to your contents, designs, link structure, metadata, When combined, all you will have a noticeable results in your sites performance and user experience.

Content

Creating content seems hard at first, when you see it from afar. But not if you know your audience and their taste or you decide to write about your passion. It’s easier to create contents, provide information that they may like to spend their time on and later share it on different social media platforms.

Image downloaded from Pexels

When I first started writing, i was worried about questions like ‘Where to start’, ‘How to start’. But, then I chose a niche for a specific smartphone and started writing tutorials on how to install custom ROMs in it.

I started sharing those contents on Facebook, Google Plus, Twitter. I started getting some traffic from it then users found it useful and started sharing it and it did work for me.

Focus on the quality of your content. You just can’t publish anything by just copying and pasting. You need to publish custom content. A survey by the Custom Content Council reported that 61% of consumers have a higher regard for a company that delivers custom content or personalized content.

Also, you need to focus on the quantity of your content, your content must have at least 500 words, good your website.

Though, Keywords are not so important these days, It’s good to have your keyword research done and try including those in your contents. If your content and keywords are related than it will be logical and it will seem related.

Link Structure

The link structure is another important element of SEO. It should show what the page is about, where the link is going to take the user. Basically it should be similar with the Title of your page.

Here’s an example of a good link structure:

This type of URL is meaningful and can be understood by the search engines and users.

And here is an example of a bad link structure:

URLs like these can be confusing to search engines and users.

Internal links

Another good habit is interlinking your pages. In this way crawler won’t stuck in any of your pages.

Internal links are links that go from one page on a domain to a different page on the same domain. They are commonly used in main navigation.

These types of links are useful for three reasons:

They allow users to navigate a website.

They help establish information hierarchy for the given website.

They help spread link equity (ranking power) around websites.

Learn more at Moz.

Meta Tags

These are the snippets of texts that describes what the page is about. This appears on page’s source code, search engine results page and social media shares. You will find these under <head> tag of your page’s html code. There are many meta tags you may find but those which are important for SEO perspective are title tag, description tag, alt tag.

Image downloaded from Pexels

Title Tags are important when it comes to On-Site Optimization. You title tags should be accurate, concise and unique from any other pages of your website, Because, this is the first thing that is displayed to the users. It should be kept under 60–70 characters to be properly visible to the users.

Description Tags gives Google and other search engines information what the page is about. Also, users can learn more about the page. Keep it under 160 characters for proper visibility on the result pages. It should be accurate, descriptive and unique from any other pages of the website.

Alt Tags are used for images. Search engines crawlers cannot see the image, It’s best practice to write alt tags for all images of your websites, So, search engine crawlers can index them properly. And in case of image failed to load the alt tag is displayed to the user.

Design of your Website

The changes you make on your website’s Layout, User Experience. The better graphics and effects you use it will be more engaging to the users and they are less likely to bounce. Also, keep the site speed in mind.

Image downloaded from Pexels

Better design of your website will limit SEO optimizations and If you want more optimizations with your website than you have compromise on the design and user experience. Maintaining the right balance is necessary.

Off-Site Optimization

Off-Site Optimization refers to the efforts you make outside of your website which improves your sites ranking. Also, refers as Link Building. The links and connections you create with other website and when they link back to your pages, it increases the authority of your website and pages.

Image from Maxpixel

Getting links from other reputable and high authority websites helps in improving Off-Site SEO of your website. And this is one of the critical parts of the link building process.

The best way to get other sites to create high-quality, relevant links to yours is to create unique, relevant content that can naturally gain popularity in the Internet community.

Creating good content pays off: Links are usually editorial votes given by choice, and the more useful content you have, the greater the chances someone else will find that content valuable to their readers and link to it.

Learn more about link schemes from Google.

Bonus Tools and Tips

Site Audit

Site Audit is the process of analysing your website and finding out what’s working and what is not. By doing Site Audit you can find the technical errors in your On-Site SEO and you will find out what’s the issue that holding your website from ranking higher in search engine ranking pages.

Image downloaded from Google

You will find out the issues related to Performance, HTML, Inbound links and Outbound links details, Content Quality, Social Presence, Pages those have issues, Site Speeds and lots of other details.

There are lots of Free and Paid SIte Audit tools available on the web. Some of these are semrush, ahrefs, seoptimer, ubersuggest (Free).

Learn more about How to Audit your website from hubspot.

PageSpeed Insights

Page Speed is another important factor when it comes to ranking of your website. PageSpeed Insights is a free tool from Google. Google scans your website and also the mobile version of your website and gives suggestions on how you can improve the speed of it.

There are other Tools also available like GTmetrix, pingdom, where you just have to enter the URL of your website, analyze it and terminate the issues.

Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools

These are the tools to check whether your website is properly indexed in search engines or not. These services are offered by Search Engines like Google and Bing, where you can create an account for free and keep track of your site’s indexing, optimize performance on result pages, you can create Crawler request from the dashboard.

Also, you can check which pages are at which position of the result page, crawl stats, keywords performance and lot more. If you haven’t registered your website there then you should.

Learn more about Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools.

Voice Search

People started using voice search more in 2019 and it’s going to increase even more. Voice search devices such as Alexa, Google Assistant, Google Home etc are getting more into the trend. These are the future for controlling your Internet Connected devices in your home or in your office.

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You must have used any of these devices in your day to day life creating reminders, searching for queries, setting up an alarm, playing music, setting up navigation. Now ling terms keywords are easy to search with these devices, for example. ‘Chinese restaurant near Austin’. So, if you’re a local business and have optimized your content for long term keywords than this can be an opportunity for your business.

Featured Snippets

This is the Featured search result that Google features on top of its organic results. Check the image below to have a better idea.

Image screenshot from Google

This is displayed when Google identifies that this format will help users find the information more easily. Three types of featured snippets are

Paragraph

Table

List

According to research by Ahrefs, 99.58% of featured pages already rank in top 10 of Google. So if you are already ranking high for related search queries, you have very good chances to get featured.

On the other hand, Getstat claims that 70% of snippets came from sites outside of the first organic position. So it’s required that the page is ranked in the top 10, but it’s not required to be #1 to be featured.

Read more about How google’s featured snippets work.

Conclusion

It is a continuous process, you need to keep creating, monitoring and optimizing your content, make changes to your website. Learn and apply the idea you get from this blog. The process may take some time, but, I’m pretty much sure that this will help you gain better results for your website performance.

I’m excited to see you in my next post.