Search engine optimization is essential to any online business success. Every webmaster should understand what SEO is, how it works and the traffic potential it can generate for all website types.
We’ll cover topics in this SEO guide:
- What is SEO?
- Why is SEO important?
- Introduction to SEO for beginners
- The best way to learn how SEO works
- SEO and digital marketing
What is SEO?
SEO means search engine optimization. It is a set of rules for optimizing your website so that you can rank higher in the organic results of search engines.
It’s a great way to increase the quality of a website by making it user-friendly, faster and easier to navigate.
SEO can be considered a complete framework as the whole process has a set of rules (and guidelines), a set of stages and a set of controls.
Why is SEO important?
In today’s competitive market SEO marketing is more important than ever.
Search engines serve millions of users every day to find answers to their questions or find solutions to their problems.
If you have a website, blog or online store, SEO can help you get free targeted traffic from search engines.
Search engine optimization is important because:
- The majority of search engine users (more than 65%) are more likely to click on the top 5 recommendations on their search engine result pages (SERPS). To take advantage of this and gain customers to your website or online store, your website needs to appear in one of the top positions of the search results..
- SEO is not just search engines, good SEO practices also improve the user experience and usability of a website.
- Users trust search engines and having the top positions for the keywords the user searches increases the website’s trust.
- SEO has an important place in the social promotion of your website. People who find your website by searching on Google or Yahoo are more likely to promote your website on Facebook, Twitter or other social media channels.
- SEO is important for a website with high content to run smoothly. Websites with multiple authors can benefit from SEO directly and indirectly.
- SEO can get ahead of the competition. If two websites are selling the same thing, the more customers and sales are likely to be from a search engine optimized website.
Introduction to SEO for beginners
For SEO beginners, search engine optimization is a way to improve your website. So it will appear closer to the top in the search results of Google, Yahoo, Bing or other search engines.When you do a search on Google, the order in which returned results are displayed is based on sophisticated algorithms.
These algorithms (also known as search engine ranking factors) determine which web page ranks first, second, etc. takes into account a number of factors before deciding whether to display it.
Optimizing your website for search engines gives you an advantage over non-optimized sites and increases your chances of ranking higher.
What are the main stages of the SEO process?
As we mentioned above, SEO is not a static process, but a framework with rules and processes.
To keep it simple, SEO can be divided into 3 main headings:
Technical SEO – With technical SEO, you can enable search engines to crawl and index your website without any problems.
On-Page SEO – Rules to be applied to your site and content to make it search engine friendly.
Off-Page SEO – Ways to promote your website or blog so it can rank higher in search results.
Technical SEO
The first stage of the SEO process is called Technical SEO. As the name suggests, Technical SEO has nothing to do with the actual content of a website or website promotion methods.
It is about the settings you need to configure to make it easier for search engine crawlers. Usually once you have completed Technical SEO correctly, you may not have to reorganize it.
On the other hand, if you have problems with crawling and indexing, this can negatively affect your search result rankings.
You can read our Technical SEO Guide to conduct a Technical SEO audit review and make sure everything is working as expected.
On-Page SEO
On-Page SEO is primarily about the content and other elements found on a page. Unlike Technical and Off-Page SEO, the main focus of On-Page SEO is to provide enough signals to search engine crawlers so they can understand the meaning and context of your content. Remember that search engines do not read a page and therefore look for signals to understand what a page is about.
At this stage you will be interested in website structure, SEO, keywords, title optimizations, sub-titles, internal links, images, structured data markup and other techniques that can send the right signals to search engines.
If followed correctly, On-Page SEO will also increase the usability and credibility of a website or blog. Keep in mind that content optimization is part of On-Page SEO but is sometimes referred to as Content SEO.
Our On-Page SEO Guide explains in detail the different On-Page SEO techniques.
Off-Page SEO
In addition to the changes you can make to your website (On-Page SEO) to rank higher in SERPs, another way to improve your website’s ranking position is to use off-Page SEO techniques.
Off-Page SEO is often known as link building, but I prefer to use the term Website Promotion, as a convenient way to promote a website involves a lot more methods and techniques than creating links.
Why is Off-Page SEO important?
Generally, when a user types a search query, search engine algorithms look at their index and try to find the best pages that can meet the user’s purpose. Pages that are good candidates appear in the top positions of the search results.
One of the factors that determines a web page’s position in the results is the number of inbound links (backlinks). Backlinks are a sign of trust, and depending on where the links come from, they can greatly affect your ranking position. If the links come from well-known and reliable sites, your ranking will be positively affected. If you have paid links, links in article directories, link farms, or a stock market result, your ranking will be negatively affected.
Getting links this way violates Webmaster Guidelines and will likely result in Google Penalty.
What can you do to get more links?
This is a very important question, and if you search for this phrase online, you will get hundreds of different answers.
Your primary focus should be on how to create quality content for your website, not how to get links. Good content will provide you with natural links, which will give you high rankings and traffic. If you try to buy links or get the easy way, you may get temporary success and then find your website disappear from the top pages after the next Google update.
What is the best way to find out how SEO works?
The best way to learn how SEO works was to learn about different concepts and theories, as well as to see if what you learned worked – practicing SEO. Monitoring your rank by applying SEO techniques to a website will get you the right information.
If your rankings and organic traffic are increasing, it means you are in the right direction. If not, you will need to review your SEO strategy and action plan.
What is the difference between SEO and digital marketing?
“Is SEO the same as Digital Marketing?” The simplest answer to the question is that SEO is one of the tools in your digital marketing arsenal.
The general digital marketing such as SEO social media advertisement, PPC, content strategy can be the part of your campaign.
Quality content is still the most important success factor, with or without SEO.
Before closing this entry for search engine optimization, you should keep in mind that SEO won’t help you if you don’t have good content. In other words, implementing SEO on a website that doesn’t have very good content will (in the long run) minimize the chances of success. On the other hand, a website with good content can be improved with or without SEO. SEO will only give the website an extra boost.
