The Basics of Search Engine Optimization – Know How To Optimize Your Website

You may have heard the term Search Engine Optimization(SEO) but how much do you know about it? Guys, Here is an opportunity to improve your knowledge!!. Hope this will help you to know more about Search Engine and SEO. Search engine optimization is part of Digital Marketing. Digital Marketing covers all the promotional efforts made via internet, mobile phones, social media and digital and television channels.

Search engine optimization is all about optimizing a website to gain increased visibility and relevancy in search engine rankings. SEO is essential for building a successful web presence of your business or institution. Just look into the brief description of SE and SEO

What is a search engine and How it is working?

The Search Eengine is a software that enables users to locate information on world wide web. The major search engines are Google, Yahoo, bing, etc. There are three basic steps present behind the working of Search Engines, they are crawling, indexing and retrieval.

I. Crawling – Crawling is the process of fetching all the web pages linked to a website. Crawling by Google is done by a special program or software know as crawlers or spiders.

II. Indexing – Indexing is the process of organizing the crawled web pages into a giant database.

III. Retrieval – When a request comes, the search engine compares it with the indexed web pages and the best-matched result is retrieved

What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization is all about optimizing a website to gain maximum visibility within search engine results. So the goal of SEO is to develop and design a website to attain high rank in search results.

Ways of optimization

I. On page Optimization – On page optimization refers to all the techniques and measures taken directly within the website. It includes providing good content, relevant keywords, giving meta tag, HTML code etc. While crawling, the search engine will go through the content of the webpages and it indexes based on the intensity of relevant keywords. So provide good quality content with relevant keywords.

II. Off page Optimization (Link Building) – link Building is one of the important tactics used in SEO. It is the process of getting hyperlinks to a page on your website from an external domain. These links are known as back links. Back links are important to increase the popularity of your website. Before the indexing, the search engine will measure the number of external links coming to your site, so the good quality back links definitely help your site to rank high.

III. Social Media Optimization – It is the process of increasing the popularity and awareness of a product using social media sites. Most of the people use the social media sites before buying products, so the impact of social media is a crucial factor for doing any business. Moreover, you can also create your own product brands.

SEO Techniques

There are two types of SEO Techniques

I. White Hat SEO: It refers to all the practices that follow search engines guidelines for improving the website performance. For eg providing good quality content and webpages, placing keywords on right places, providing alt tags etc

II. Black Hat SEO: These are the techniques and tactic whic are used to improve the page ranking without following search engine guidelines. It is also known as Spamdexing.

• Redirecting a page different from the ranked web page
• Placing hidden text into the web page with the same background color

SEO Essentials

1) Keywords
A keyword is a term that should match with the query that the user enters. Keywords are the words that appear the most in a page. Keyword is one of the basic building block of SEO. There are a number of online tools available for selecting relevant keywords. The selected keywords should be included in the title, meta and content of the web pages.
2) Meta Tags
The proper use of tags can be used to boost the website traffic. Title tags and meta tags are considered as the most important factor of On page optimization. These tags are included in the header section of the web pages.

I) Title tag
Title tag defines the title of your Page. Title tag tells the search engine and people about what your website is. So you should provide an attracting page title to increase the click through rate.

• The title tag should be less than 60 characters, for Google displays only the first 50-60 characters of your title.
• Always Remember to use keywords in the title tag.
• Use unique title for each page on your website.

II) Meta Description Attribute
Meta description tag is used to summarize a web page’s content.

• Meta description should not be longer than 135-160 characters.
• Like the title tag, meta description must be unique for every web page.
• It is important to place relevant keywords in meta description. The search engine will highlight in bold where it finds the search query in your description
• Keyword stuffing is a bad practice, meta description must not be overly stuffed with keywords
• Meta description should match with the webpage content.

III) Meta keyword Attribute
It is very important to add keywords in your meta keyword tag. If the crawler finds the same keyword in meta tags and website content then search engine will index that web page to a higher rank provided the content is good. The most important thing is that search engine index only the first 20 words, so don’t use more than 10 keywords.

3) Links
Links are the major off page ranking factor used by search engines. The search engine will measure the quality of external links in addition to the number. The value of external link determined by the following factors

• Popularity of the linking page
• Anchor test used in the links
• Relevancy of content between source and target page
• Domain Authority
• Page rank

4) Robot.txt
It is known as the robot exclusion standard or simply robot.txt. This standard used by the website to communicate with search engine crawlers. Robot.txt file need to put in the same place as of index file. Robot.txt file indicates those parts of your site that does not need to be accessed by search engine crawlers.

To exclude all robots from the entire server
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Allow all robots complete access
User-agent: *
Disallow:

5) Sitemap
A sitemap helps google and other search engines to easily understand the structure of the website while crawling. You can use an xml site map generator for creating the code, once code is generated upload it to the root directory of your website.

6) SEO Tools
The SEO tools are used to monitor the website performance. There are several analytical tools available online that too for free. Google analytics and webmaster tools are commonly used SEO tools. Both are free services provided by Google. By using tracking code these tools can tell you, where your visitors have come from, the most popular pages of your website, and much more.

Search engine optimization is an ongoing process, because of the dynamic nature of the web and the market. So it is necessary to continually optimize your site. It takes Time. If you have a blog or website SEO can definitely help your business to grow and achieve the business objectives.