A guide to seo for beginners

What is SEO?

SEO is kind of a word we hear most often these days and you must have heard a friend or a relative use this word a lot of times as well. Many times, you must have wondered like, “what the devil is SEO?" However, SEO is literally a magical word for a lot of people who are fully aware of its meaning and significance. For them, who are not at all familiar with its meaning, understanding SEO is going to be a great deal of fun as well and SEO is certainly not very difficult to understand. The term SEO stands for search engine optimization and is an important part of Digital Marketing. Now, before we get deeper into SEO, it is important to understand the transition in marketing. Marketing, as we all know plays a very significant role in promoting a business. However, neither business nor marketing is any longer the same as it used to be ten to fifteen years back from now. Business has had a big leap from being a mere buy and sell activity to a far more advanced stage of e commerce while marketing has had a major transformation as well from being a door to door or brochure based promotion to online marketing.

How it is going to help us anyway?

Interestingly, we have now reached a stage where in marketing has become by far more dependable than what it used to be in the past and eventually, business has got exceptionally confident. The perception of competition has massively changed over the past few years. Despite tremendous competition among the various businesses these days, competition is no longer being able to intimidate businesses. Instead, competition is taken as an inevitable part of every business. However, the magnitude can be lessened to a large extent with the help of Digital Marketing to help business continue to find its way towards more growth and advancement. Since the time the concept of Digital Marketing started, there has been a stunning progress in business in terms of sales. SEO has got pretty popular among all the other Digital Marketing techniques because of its incredible effectiveness in increasing the online traffic for many e commerce websites.

In the current world of online business, it is almost mandatory for every business to have one’s online presence which is of course a website. Now, it is important to understand that websites nowadays not only promote the various businesses but also are important platforms for online sell and purchase which is why e commerce websites are desperately in need of increasing traffic everyday to improve sales and ROI. However, there are numerous e commerce websites these days for every single product which is why the competition level has elevated massively over the years and this is certainly a lot more aggressive than that in the past. This is when SEO or the search engine optimization can unbelievably help a business acclimatize to the intense competition as well as help in accelerating the growth. In fact SEO has already proved its effectiveness over the past few years and this is why some believe that SEO constitutes a major part of Digital Marketing.

How does SEO work?

SEO and SERPs are couple of most widely used abbreviations nowadays in relation to online business and they are of course pretty connected as well. While SEO stands for search engine optimization, SERPs stands for search engine results pages. SEO helps websites to be on the SERPS and if you are still wondering as to why it is so important for a website to be on the SERPs, well, the answer is increased traffic. As a website is increasingly visible on the search engine or SERPs, it will be introduced to more and more web traffic which may eventually lead to an increase in sales. On the contrary, nowadays, being out of sight is literally being with no sales and no business on the part of a website. Now technically, SEO comprises a whole lot of techniques which can be basically divided in two categories; the on-page SEO and the off-page SEO. The on-page SEO deals with keyword research and incorporating keywords in the content while the off-page SEO deals with link building but to understand the most ideal functions of SEO, we need to know as to what the search engines are looking for.

The important aspects that search engines take into account

1. Relevant contents

Search engines try their best to serve their traffic with the most relevant results available and in case, a website has the most relevant content in relation to a particular search, the search engines will certainly like to show up that content. However it is important for the website to make the search engines aware of its presence first and only then it can start expecting some organic traffic from the search engines for its relevant contents. Perhaps, this is why a lot of emphasis is laid upon the various niche and the long tail keywords by the SEO strategists to reach out the traffic better or to serve the traffic better.

2. Content’s Quality

Even though informative websites are now better known as blogs and websites dealing with online business are known as e commerce websites, there is one thing that every website has to pay special attention on and that is the website content. Written content plays a very significant role in websites’ optimization. In fact, the search engines determine the relevancy in terms of the written content. However, only original and valuable contents get utmost importance while copied or duplicate contents are right away ignored. Content is a high quality content if the idea is properly expressed in it and if the content is highly informative as well as grammatically accurate. Most importantly, the content must be composed in such an interesting that it is able to engage the readers.

3. Website’s Loading Speed

A website with a poor loading speed can be a big disappointment for the traffic as well as the search engine which is why there is absolutely no space for slow loading websites on the SERPs. Instead, some of the search engines may even penalize websites if they are found with slow loading speed. From SEO point of view, every SEO technique will fall flat on its face until and unless a website has a proper loading speed. However, there are ways to increase the loading speed of a website and usually, it is done by the SEO strategists themselves so that every other SEO technique falls in to the right place.

4. User Experience

It is important to provide the users with the most convenient and pleasant experience on one’s website in terms of fast and simple navigation, brilliant inter linking, stunning interface, etc. which is partly a work of SEO and partly that of Web designing. It is important for a website to provide its visitors with the things that they are looking for in the shortest possible time.

5. Cross Device Compatibility

It is absolutely important for websites to be equally optimized on all the devices. Websites, nowadays have to be Responsive websites which means having the ability to maintain the same incredibly pleasant user experience on varying screen sizes be it a Mac or an Android phone or a tablet.

6. Keyword Density

2 to 3% is the ideal Keyword Density for any content. For those of you are not very familiar with this word, keyword density is the percentage of the keywords to the total word count of a content.

7. Keyword stuffing

The search engines are very particular about the proper use of keywords and in case keywords are found to be used inappropriately, the search engines will consider it to be keyword stuffing which in other words mean forcefully incorporating the keywords in the content without having any relevance. Keyword stuffing can deteriorate the ranking of a website to a large extent.

8. Intrusive or obnoxious Ads

Website with a lot of ads can get its visitors really frustrated sometimes and probably, give them the worst user experience ever. Visitors who are in genuine need for a certain piece of important information from websites can get terribly annoyed and disappointed as they are being disturbed by intrusive ads.

9. Comments

Search engines pays a lot of attention on the various comments a website has for its various posts. What it really looks for is the kind of engagement the traffic has with the website. Also, good comments are kind of clear indication of the brilliant informative aspect of a website.

10. Meta Descriptions

Using a relevant Meta descriptions about the content in not more than 156 characters and with the keywords incorporated appropriately, you can certainly increase your chance of being on the SERPs to some extent. This is something which must be always treated with utmost importance.