Search Engine Optimization
Are you a blogger or affiliate marketer who wants to earn money from his blogging skills?
Or are you a business owner who wants to increase his website visits & create brand awareness about his product or service?
Well this blog is for you. There we will try & understand
| – The Importance of SEO – How Google algorithm works – The Factors of Search engine optimization – 5 reasons why Google will rank your website |
The Importance of SEO:
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It should be very important & integral part of your Digital Ecosystem. In simple words SEO is a process which makes your website ready for engines so that your website gets maximum organic reach from targeted keywords. Traffic generated from Search Engine Optimization efforts remains organic in nature & it comes to your website absolutely free.
SEO has 3 main components:
How Google algorithm works:
What is Algorithm & how Google algorithms works:
Algorithm is a set of step by step instruction that is used to do certain task. Google has 8 main algorithms as listed below:
- Fred
- Possum
- Raink Brain
- Mobile
- Pigeon
- Hummingbird
- Penguin
- Panda
Google uses series of algorithms to give you the desired search result. They look at many factors sometimes it ranges in count of 100+ factors like the Search query, How relevant is the search query to the page, The authenticity of the source etc. Whoever the importance of each factor is not the same.
Broadly these factors are divided into 3 main parts
- Technical / onsite SEO
- Onpage SEO
- Offpage SEO
The Factors of Search Engine Optimization
Technical SEO:
Domain name:
It is very important to match your domain name with the content of your website. By doing this it make it easier for visitor to relate to your website & it create top of mind recall.
You can book your domain name & web space from any renowned domain registrars like Godaddy, Blue Host, Big Rock etc
Page speed:
It is another very important aspect of your website. Longer the page load time higher the bounce rate. One can also explore Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) to increase page speed on mobile devices.
To check website speed you can try Google PageSpeed Insights
404 error:
404 error usually come on particular page after it get removed or get moved to different location. It means this page does not exists. We should also create custom 404 page on website to ensure better customer experience. Custom 404 page can contain error message along with list of other relevant links.
Broken link:
These are the links which sends visitor back to a page that no longer exist.
There are couple of free tools available in the market which provides list of broken links of your website.
Mobile friendly and responsiveness:
Responsive websites changes it’s structure & adapts to screen size. This makes website load faster on any device with consistent user experience. This helps reduce bounce rate & increase page views.
Robot.txt:
This file acts as a index file for Search engine crawlers & it tell them what page to crawl & what page not to crawl.
You can tell search engine not to crawl & index pages like CMS login page, employee portal or customer portal page etc.
Onpage SEO:
Quality content:
Quality & originality of content is very important for google to rank your website on search results. Google also penalize your website if it finds out that your content is directly taken from any other website.
Optimized keywords- Primary & secondary keywords:
It is a process of researching & selecting the best keyword to drive traffic fro search engine to website.
HTML Heading – H1 to H6:
H1 to H6 tag represents the importance of Text to search engine crawlers. Example: content written in H1 tag is considered to be the heading of the page & start reading the entire page with reference to this heading.
Light Images with Alt tags:
It is very important to use lightweight images on the website. This ensures lesser load time & better user experience.
While you compress the image you have to make sure that it doesnot get pixilated.
You can try Tinypng.com to compress the image.
Internal & External links in posts:
Internal links are links which comes from one page of website to another page of same website. It interlinks the content of all pages of website.
External links are links which comes from one page of External website to your website.
Here logic is Google crawler flows links to read content on website & show this content in search result. The more internal & external links to the one particular content the more priority it gets on Google search results.
Title Tag & Meta Description:
As the name suggests, the title tag & Meta Description are considered as title & summary of particular web page. It is usually written for Search engine crawler to make them understand the content of the page for better search results.
Title Tag should not be more than 60 characters.
Meta description should not be more than 150 characters.
Offpage SEO:
Link Building:
In link building process one website tries to get reference (recommendation) from another website which has got high credibility in the internet word. This reference can be in the form of a Hyperlink.
Conclusion:
Content is King. You have to understand one very important thing & i.e. Google works on algorithms & being machine it can never understands the difference between good & bad content. It only learns from the customer’s behavior with your content. Its looks for few basic parameters before it ranks the content i.e.
- Quality of website
- Engagement of content with users who consumes it
- Shareability of content
- How many other websites refer to this content on their website
- How easy is for it’s crawlers to read this content