Do you want to increase your business through online means? Do you want to enhance your capabilities and increase your visibility to the potential customers? If you are nodding in affirmation, then you need to know what is SEO.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of bringing quality traffic on a website. This process is conducted by enhancing the visibility of the website or its webpages to the current and potential users of the search engine. Traffic can be generated from “organic”, “free”, “editorial” or “natural” means.
What is SEO?
For a detailed understanding, know what constitutes SEO. SEO is constituted by:
Quality of traffic:
Attracting visitors who want Apple appliances to a farmer’s website wouldn’t help in the growth of his business. You need to attract the right kind of visitors and the right audience who are genuinely interested in the products and services that you offer.
Quantity of traffic:
Once your audience is defined and you have the right people clicking on your links, it is better to have more of them. More people reaching your website certainly means more business.
Organic results:
While a major portion of your Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) is made up of ads, Search Engine Optimization focuses on non-paid traffic generation. Organic traffic is the one you do not have to pay for.
Why is SEO used by digital marketers?
In this digital era, advertising and digital marketing are vital for a business to flourish. Digital marketing works best for garnering a huge amount of web traffic. In this context, Search Engine Optimization provides an opportunity for an enormous amount of free advertising and traffic generation. Experts say that SEO is an essential part of a digital marketing strategy, and it is important to know what is SEO and how it is used.
Going by the statistics, over 14 billion online searches occur each month. It is intriguing to know that out of these 14 billion searches, a fraction happens for your business. If done appropriately, SEO enables your website to be ranked high on the first page of Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). This is highlight applauded because as per digital marketers, users generally scan through only the first two pages of the SERP.
Search engine optimization helps the business by making the process of finding, crawling and categorisation of a web page easy. It is about letting your current and potential customers find out about your business from amongst millions of others. For achieving that, it is essential for your website to perform well in social media marketing, rank higher in the SERP and perform other digital marketing tasks.
If you wish to get an overview on Search Engine Optimization, quickly check out our video below.
How to do it right?
Want to know the correct process of Search Engine Optimization? Let’s get you more insights on what is SEO and how it is done. Here are the steps to be taken in your SEO strategy.
Selection of right keyword
Keyword research is the first and the most important part of Search Engine Optimization. It is a one-time activity and needs to be completed before you start optimizing your website.
On-Page Activities
On-Page activities primarily consist of writing and optimizing (adding keywords in the written content) content on each web page. They include optimizing images, titles, headlines, etc. These activities are done once a month, but we keep conducting a site audit to ensure that the keywords used are correct. In case we change the content of the page, we must change the keyword or optimize the keywords likewise.
Off-Page Activities
Once On-Page activities are done, then Off-Page activities are taken forward. These activities are ongoing and are continued even when the website ranking has reached the top. This is done to ensure that the ranking is maintained. If the Off-Page activities are not continued with, the ranking may drop at a later stage. They include social media promotion, website listing on various directories, and building links of your website.
Understanding what is SEO and the steps to conduct the process is not enough. You need to know what those steps are about. Here’s what you need to know:
What is Keyword Research?
Keyword Research is the process of determining the phrases and words that users primarily use in search engines for conducting their searches. Also, these keywords must be the words/phrases that summarise the content on your page or website. The ultimate goal behind conducting keyword research is to optimize content around those keywords and stay high up in Google ranking for those keywords.
Before you begin with formulating content for your website or your web pages, you must determine suitable high-volume search words. These keywords give the direction to your content and make sure that the content made is relevant and easily searchable on Google search engine.
Since keyword research influences your SEO campaign, it is imperative you begin it with keyword research. But how?
How to get the right keywords?
Before you begin with keyword research, you need to have a few answers ready with you. For a business to grow through SEO, it is important to know who they are targeting for, who are their target audience, and what are their goals. Once you have answered these questions, it is time you move towards the next step. As a part of content optimization, you need to know how to target your audience.
Every person has a way of explaining the things they do and puts in the best of his efforts for explaining his products and services to the customers. It is quite obvious that your prospective clients search for your products, but you need to know as to how do your potential customers search for you? The essential question is, what do they actually search? It is important to get such insights before beginning with the keyword research process.
For instance, a vegan ice cream seller based in Delhi must ask questions like:
- What kinds of ice cream are people searching for?
- Who are these people?
- When are they searching for ice cream — is the search seasonal or perennial in nature?
- What words/phrases are the people using when searching for ice cream?
- What questions do they ask?
- Where are these prospective customers located — locally, nationally, or internationally?
Types of SEO
To understand what is SEO, it is imperative to understand its types. There are two types of SEO you require for an appropriate organic search strategy. They are On-Page SEO and Off-Page SEO.
On-Page SEO
On-page SEO refers to the SEO activities within a website. Such kind of SEO talks about activities on the page itself and ways to make it friendlier to users and search engines.
While search engines observe a website in its entirety, it is essential to note that the ranking is conducted on a page-level basis. This is the reason that it is vital to pay attention to the optimization of every page on a website.
The activities that make up On-page SEO successful are:
- Optimize your page titles
An essential SEO factor, Page Titles should be compelling enough to attract the potential as well as current users to click. Also, these titles are displayed in the search results so they should provide the Search Engine Bots with enough hints as to what the page content is about.
- Optimize your H1 Tag
A Page Title is displayed in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), and an H1 Ta is displayed at the top of a page (heading). Optimize your page by displaying only one H1 tag, the same as the Page Title.
- Optimize your headings
In addition to the H1 Tag, add subheadings (H2, H3) on your page for various sections. If your page comprises long-form content, the subheadings will make the page easy-to-scan for crawlers and easy-to-read for users.
- SEO for Images
Any piece of content on the internet needs to be optimized, including the images. This is done in order to make them easy to comprehend for search engines. For Image SEO, optimizing things like filename, file size and ALT text is essential as search engines need to understand what they represent.
- Page formatting
It is important to beautify the content on a page with text and images for good SEO. Leaving the page without beautifying it is not good practice for Google has its ways to understand how a page looks like. Although not a human, Google surely understands if the page has popups and ads, and takes it into consideration during the ranking process.
Off-Page SEO
Once On-Page activities are done, we proceed with the Off-Page activities. Off-Page SEO is referred to as any activity done outside the website. Off-Page SEO is an ongoing activity that continues even after your page is on top of the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). This includes page promotion on social media, website listing on various directories, building links of your website, etc. To know what is SEO, it takes more than understanding On-Page activities. For that, one needs to know about Off-Page activities as well. The most important Off-Page SEO techniques are:
- Link Building
The process of getting backlinks for Search Engine Optimization from other websites is referred to as Link building. These backlinks expand the authority of the target website and act as ‘votes of trust’. This, however, happens only in case they do not have the “nofollow” attribute attached to the link.
- Brand Promotion
Apart from promoting your website for getting backlinks, businesses should work on brand promotion as well. You must engage with your potential customers and encourage conversations about your business in various social media networks as well as forums. Google takes such signals and rewards the most frequently used and often talked about websites. Thereby, you get a high ranking in the SERPS by Google as people trust these known brands more.
As one of the most powerful digital marketing tools for a website, SEO allows the websites to enjoy high visibility in search engines. Create an SEO strategy and use various kinds of SEOs simultaneously for optimum results and grab the best chance at showing up at the top in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).
To know more, you may choose to do a digital marketing course. Assimilate the knowledge and become a professional digital marketer by learning from the brightest minds of our time. Provided by industry experts, this course comes with a comprehensive curriculum and promises to make you a master in the field within 3 months. Learn what is SEO and let your business soar high in the market.
Good Luck!
