SEO- Search Engine Optimization

 Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Ø What Is SEO?

SEO means search engine optimization and is the process used to optimize a website’s technical configuration, content relevance, and link popularity so its pages can become easily findable, more relevant, and popular towards user search queries, and as a consequence, search engines rank them better. 

search engines recommended SEO efforts that benefit both the user search experience and the page’s ranking, by featuring content that fulfills user search needs. this includes the use of relevant keywords in titles, meta descriptions, and headlines(h1), featuring descriptive URLs with keywords rather than strings of numbers, and schema markup to specify the page’s content meaning, among other SEO best particles.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is orienting your website to rank higher on a Search Engine Results Page (SERP) to receive more traffic. the aim is typically to rank on the first page of google results for search terms that mean the most to your target audience. so, SEO is as much about understanding the wants and needs of your audience as it is about the technical nature of how to configure your websites.

How do search engines work?

Search engines provide results for any search query a user enters. to do so, they survey and “understand” the vast network of websites that make up the web. they run a sophisticated algorithm that determines what results to display for each search query.

Ø Why SEO focuses on Google?

To many people, the term “search engine” is synonymous with Google, which has about 90% of the global search engine market. because google is the dominant search engine, SEO typically revolves around what works bests for google. it’s useful to have a clear understanding of how google works and why.

The Three Types of SEO – and why you need all of them

1.    On-page SEO

2.    Off-page SEO

3.    Technical SEO

On-page SEO- On-page SEO involves the page itself and how to make it friendlier to search engines and users. it should be noted that while search engines look at a website as a whole, ranking is performed on a page-level basis. That’s why it’s important to pay attention to the optimization of each and every page on your website.

The most important On-page SEO guidelines are:

Optimize your page titles. this is a critical SEO factor. page titles are shown in the search results and should be interesting for users to click on. the title of a page should also give search engine bots enough clues on what the page content is all about.

Optimize your h1 tag. while the page title is shown in the SERPs, the h1 tag is shown as the top heading of a page. an optimized page has only one h1 tag and usually, it has the same values as the page title.

Optimize your headings. besides the h1 tag a page needs to have sub headings [h2, h3] for the different sections. in the case of long-form content, subheadings make the page easier to read by users and scan by crawlers.

SEO for images. any images used on a page should be properly optimized, otherwise, search engines cannot understand what they represent. things like optimizing the filename, file size, and alt text are critical for image SEO.

Page formatting. publishing a page with text and images without spending time to beatify the content is not a good SEO practice. although google cannot ‘see’ a page like a human, they have ways to understand how a page looks or if it’s full of ads and popups and this is taken into account during the ranking process.

2. Off-page SEO- Off-page SEO is all about promotion. while the previous SEO types concentrated more on the website infrastructure and content, off-page SEO has to do with techniques you can use to promote your website on the internet. popular websites are more likely to rank higher on google than less popular websites.

The most important off-page SEO methods are:

Link building.  link building is the process of getting SEO backlinks from other websites. these backlinks act as ‘votes of trust and increase the authority of the target website [provided that they don’t have the no-follow attribute attached to the link]

Brand promotion. Google likes to rank known brands high in the results because people trust them. Besides promoting your websites to get backlinks, you should also work on promoting your brand and encourage conversations about it in various social media networks and forums. Google can pick up these signals and reward websites that people talk about. 

3. Technical SEO-   technical SEO is exactly what the name implies i.e., technical parameters that affect the visibility of a website in search engines. the main goal of technical SEO is to ensure that search engine crawlers can crawl and index a website without any problems.

The most important technical SEO guidelines are:

•  Check and optimize your robots.txt to make sure that search engines can correctly access your website.
• add and verify your website with google search console and specify your preferred domain.
• use the coverage report to find and fix crawl errors.
• create an XML sitemap and submit it to all major search engines.
• optimize your site structure and URL structure.
• follow SEO-friendly web design
• Create websites that load fast on both desktop and mobile devices.  

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