Many of us are well aware of SEO. There are many, who are still unsure about it. 

Despite its popularity among website owners and content creators. Many people think SEO is too hard to learn and it’s not worth the time and effort it requires to be implemented correctly.

If you own an affiliate blog, an e-commerce website, a lifestyle blog, or any other kind of website. You should at least learn the basics of SEO.

Why is SEO vital for any website’s success?

According to Google’s organic search stats, Almost 57.80%of traffic on a website is sourced from Google’s organic search results.

Learning SEO is just like learning any other new skill. You start from the very basics and build up from there.

Start with learning and implementing the most basic of concepts, and your skills will get polished over time.

With time you’ll learn what works best for your website and what doesn’t.

What is SEO

Search Engine Optimization is the process of optimizing your website according to search engine guidelines.

Search engines are not like human beings; they can not determine what a website is about by going through the junk of information dumped on that website.

The content of your website must be organized in a specific way so that the search engines can understand the purpose of your website and web pages.

Search engines like Google and Microsoft Bing sent Robots to crawl websites and gather information about them. This information then helps index the contents of a website, which is called website indexing.

Bots crawl millions of web pages to find the most relevant content. However, the content of your website, despite being relevant to a search, will not pop up in search results if search engine crawlers are unable to understand the content properly.

To determine the order in which websites will appear if a search is done, pages in the index are analyzed using different algorithms. These algorithms then determine how high up a website should be in a search result.

To understand SEO, first, you should know how many types of searches are there.

A search can be LOCAL, IMAGE, VIDEO, or VOICE.

Now you’ve got the basic SEO knowledge down. Let’s move forward.

Types of SEO

There are three main types of SEO

• On-page SEO
• Off-page SEO
• Technical SEO

On-page SEO

On-page SEO refers to optimizing content inside your webpage or website to make it more accessible for search engines and visitors.

On-page SEO will require optimization of the Title tag, Metadata, headings, and much more.

 Off-page SEO

Off-page SEO refers to any steps taken outside of your website to improve its search engine rankings. It is associated mainly with link building.

Technical SEO

For the Technical SEO of a webpage, you need to make sure that you follow all the guidelines provided by search engines so your website is accessible to crawling bots.

Without getting into too much detail about types of SEO, let’s move onto some Important attributes of websites that can help improve search engine ranking

Responsiveness OF A Website

Users don’t always browse websites using a laptop or a desktop, which are known as big screens.

Nowadays people prefer using smaller screens. Therefore, websites that are not optimized for smaller screens can face problems in search engine rankings.

Mobile optimization

The number of mobile users recorded by Statista in 2020 was 4.28 billion. This entails that almost 90% of internet users are browsing the internet on their mobile phones.

Mobile optimization means making sure your website has been coded so that it responds to mobile screens differently than larger screens.

Due to the smaller screen size, large images do not load properly on mobiles. Images can be large in terms of their dimensions as well as their file size.

Due to lesser ROM, Mobile phones are unable to load content with large file sizes.

It is essential to keep smaller screens in mind when you are choosing content for your website.

Another important thing to keep in mind is, Google prefers mobile-friendly sites.

Google has the knowledge that most people browsing the internet are using their mobile devices. Therefore, Google will always prefer showing those websites in search results that cater to most of its users’ needs.

Making a website responsive is more than just adding a few media queries. First, you’ll have to learn which kind of content appears better on mobile phones and use it on your website.

Mobile users also don’t like reading paragraphs upon paragraphs to find an answer to one question. So make sure you make are not adding extensively long blogs or articles on your website; it can bore the user, and they’ll move onto another website.

Content Relevancy

Google processes approximately 6.8 billion search queries every single day.

Far gone are the days when search engines ranked keyword-stuffed websites on the top. Instead, search engines have become incredibly advanced, and they now rank websites that provide actual value to the customers or users.

Keyword stuffed irrelevant content can only achieve one thing for you, and that is A Google penalty.

To rank well on search engines, your content needs to be audience-centric.

Audience-centric means your content should reflect your customer’s choice rather than your own.

Keywords and title tags may help a website get ranked in the short term.

But to get a loyal customer base that will stick with you in the longer run. Your content must provide some value to the visitors.

Content optimization

Keyword stuffing can get your website flagged, and the ratings can drop, but it doesn’t mean that keywords are no longer relevant.

Keywords help search engines in classifying your content into specific categories.

Using keywords naturally and inflow is vital for your webpage’s ranking.

Adding keywords in the title, headings, and a couple of times in the paragraphs will help Google come up with your website in its search results whenever a relevant query is searched for.

Image optimization

According to Google, image search has increased almost 60% in the past two years.

Image optimization is just as important as content optimization.

From bloggers to article writers to affiliate website owners, everyone uses images to appeal to their content visually. Images breathe life into the content.

For better optimization of your web page, the images used should be relevant to the content on your website.

Images should be sized according to the user’s screen.

The file size of images shouldn’t be very large; large images take a lot of time to load and result in lesser website traffic.

Relative Alt tags and image captions should be added. It will make your website more inclusive for your blind audience.

UX

UX, also known as User design, has similar goals as SEO.

Both are about maximizing the value provided to the end-user.

For better UX design. Focus on the following strategies.

• Use a good layout strategy.
• Create concise and useful content
• Create relevant content
• Maintain consistency on your web pages.
• Use hyperlinks
• Include white space
• Optimize page speed.

Backlinks

Backlinks are very important for SEO; they are a component of off-page SEO.

Backlinks are a link to your website page that is displayed on someone else’s website.

MOZ defines backlinks as “A vote of confidence” in favor of a website.

Backlinks assure search engines that your content has some worth. They increase the credibility of a website. Pages with a high number of backlinks are ranked better in search engine results.

Make sure you upload very valuable content on your website, so other website owners are compelled to mention your website in theirs.

Bottom line

 Getting started on your SEO journey may require a lot of hard work initially, but all this effort will be very fruitful for you in the long run.

You don’t have to be an expert in SEO to get started; just learn the basics, and start implementing them. Your strategies will improve with time.

What important strategies are a part of your SEO plan?