Can you make a guess – What is the most hotly contested topic in the world after international peace? It is- “Is SEO optimization really important for an online business?” Some people claim that SEO marketing is an overrated concept, while stats prove that SEO is far from obsolete.
Let’s leave this to you to decide whether SEO is really on its last legs or not!
Do you know how many people in the world really use the internet? – 59.5% of the total global population.
And, 72% of this population researches about the product/ service on search engines before buying.
To add to your surprise, a recent study indicates that approximately 71.33% of the clicks go to the links on the 1st page of Google. Moreover, 9 out of 10 people choose organic rankings, which equates to higher chances of conversion of a lead to sale.
Now you know how important it is to rank organically? After all, it is not even wise to keep paying forever to stay on the top of search results. But the question remains, how can we make our website rank organically?
Organic ranking is a gift that comes to you when you do some smart SEO. Let’s dive in to know what SEO optimization is.
What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization is the science of optimizing a web page so that it gets shown in the search engine’s top results organically, and attracts high quality traffic. Benefits? Well, with this you get shown to the people who are searching for your product/service, and that too by Google!
But how to become Google’s Favorite?
Let’s understand this with an example. If you wish to read a particular book, you go to the library. There, you find the stack of the same genre as the book you want to read. There you might follow more classifications to finally get your hands on the book you were looking for.
Now imagine, if the book was lying somewhere in the library in an unorganized way, you had to keep searching for it for days, or maybe months. Inconvenient, right?
Like wisely, to save your search time, an SEO search engine acts like a data library. It indexes all the data in high-order hierarchies so that whenever you type a query in the search box, it displays you the most relevant answers in a jiffy.
Now think of a situation, where another interested reader comes by, only to find any good romantic novel that has a happy ending. The librarian, would assist the reader keeping in mind the three factors:
- Good novel
- Romance Genre
- Happy Ending
Based on this, he would proceed to find out the most relevant picks for the reader to choose from. This is exactly how search engines work.
So, if you do the SEO right, Search Engine stacks your web page in the right place, making it quickly available to your potential buyers or the people looking for your kind of product/ service.
There are various factors that are taken into consideration by Google, before showing you in the top results. They are all the words in the search query, relevancy, quality of your webpage, verified location and links. The weight of each of these factors is identified and that decides your position on Google’s SERP. So, if you wish to get more and more traffic to your webpage, then you need to optimize your web page according to such factors.
Although, Google uses somewhere close to 300 ranking factors or more. We do not know them all, but we surely have a clue of some of them. It’s time to understand those factors in an elaborate manner:
1. Fit for crawling:
The ranking comes long after, when Google finds you. So, whenever you put up some content on the web, Google crawls to reach it. Technically, Google reaches your content through the link of your page on the other pages that are already known to Google.
To make it more authentic, Google names this algorithm as Spider. Note down the factors that can block these crawlers from reaching to your webpage or identifying your webpage content:
- There should be a good number of internal links that lead Google to your page. So, work on making good and reliable links.
- The links with “NoFollow” HTML tags are neglected by Google.
- If your webpage has internal links from pages that are “NoIndex”, then those links will not be found by Google. In short, you won’t be indexed by Google as well!
- Protect your webpage from getting blocked by Robot.txt.
To be sure about the aforementioned pointers, run an SEO audit of your webpage and you will be able to see the area of action.
2. Loading time of the page:
GOLDEN RULE TO INCREASE THE RANK: Whether it is opened through a desktop or through a mobile phone, your web page must not take more than 5 seconds to load.
Google wants to deliver the search results as fast as possible. So, if your page is identified to be taking more time in opening, then your competitors with less page loading time will get the better rank.
3. Mobile- friendliness
We barely know someone who does not use a smartphone today. With evolutionary technology, people have become even more mobile friendly.
By 2019, more than 60% of the Google searches came from Mobile devices, and this keeps growing.
Moreover, Google had adapted to this increasing figure, back in 2018, by initiating Mobile-first Indexing, wherein it will first index the mobile version of your webpage. The faster your web page loads on a mobile device along with all its functionalities, the more mobile friendly it is. hence , the higher chances of getting a higher rank in the searches.
4. Keyword research:
- The first and foremost thing is to understand what type of things your potential customers are searching for. This will help you understand what keywords should actually be included in your targeting list. This way you find the ‘SEED’ keywords.
- Now just use these keywords on keyword research tools and know their search volume (the number of times they have been searched monthly).
- Try to align your page with the search intent. Now what is this?
SEARCH INTENT is basically understanding the intention of the search query. Let us understand this with an example:
Suppose someone searched for “eggless cake recipe” and “eggless cakes” separately. Google will be showing a completely different search engine result page to both of these queries because it understands the intention of search.
For the former, the result page will be showing lots of recipes and for the latter it will be listing the eggless cake brands.
So, while you do your keyword research, filter out the keywords as per the mentioned factors to be more specific in the SERPs.
5. On page SEO:
DISCLAIMER: This is not only about keyword placement.
On page SEO is the art of creating a highly optimized content that is liked by the reader and the SEO search engine alike.
- STEP1: To reach your searchers, you have to create good content that satiates their search intent.
- STEP2: Your page published on the web needs to have a descriptive slug (the end part of the URL). Try to make your target keyword as your slug. For example: the target keyword is “indian handmade artefacts”, then you can set your slug like “websitename.com/indian-handmade-artefacts”.
- STEP3: Create a compelling title tag. A good title tag is the best way to grab the attention of the searcher if it is aligned with the search intent.
- STEP4: All the images you use on the web page, must also be SEO optimized. Why so? Because, if your image ranks in Google image search, you still stand a high chance of getting a good amount of visitors to your web page. Follow these three steps to get your images ranking:
- Never forget to compress your images. Google loves pages and images that load the fastest and compressing images will thus help you rank better.
- Add an optimized alt text. This text describes the image. Google finds your image more reliable when this text is also related to the search intent.
- Name the image more descriptively. If the image shows pink ankle boots, make sure the name of the image is pink-ankle-boots.png and not IMG1223.png.
6. Backlinking:
This means getting an acknowledgement from the already existing, verified sites on Google. It kinda tells Google about your existence. Backlinks are an impactful ranking factor, but good things don’t come that easy.
There are smart SEO marketing strategies that help you develop those backlinks with the help of good quality content. Let us help you out:
Do Guest Blogging:
Go write or submit some insightful content on the well established websites, and drop links to your profile/webpage there. You can use online tools to identify which sites get the most traffic for your genre of content.
One-up the existing content:
If you find a particular content piece that is about the same product/service as yours and is performing well, then you can remodel it and use it for yourself. Improve and publish the existing content, this is called the skyscraper technique.
Find competitors’ backlinks:
Understand the link building tactics of your competitors. Check out your competitors page and see their referring domains. You may create better content and submit them to get links from those sites.
7. Content quality and authority:
Links from different web pages are one of the factors that determine the authority of your webpage. These backlinks make a great deal of difference.
POINT TO BE NOTED: Backlinks coming from high-authority pages are more impactful than the ones coming from low-authority pages.
This also emphasises the fact that links should come from high authority and relevant pages. If the relevancy is near to nothing, then there is no point in having that link.
Another factor that has a strong correlation with effective link building, is the quality of content. Do not streamline all your efforts on getting the backlinks from good sites, the content on your landing page also makes a huge difference. Following are the rules you should stick to while creating good content:
- The information should be fresh and relevant.
- The content must have a smart placement of keywords.
- Use shorter sentences and smaller paragraphs.
- Give relatable examples and add links for reference, wherever important.
There you go! This definitive guide is enough for anyone to get started with SEO optimization of their web page. If you start small, you will eventually be able to learn about the technical details involved in the process. Also remember, with SEO consistency is the key. So if you keep updating the content and building links regularly, SEO is going to reap you gold in the long run. We hope you are clear about the basics and if you wish to unfold the complex topics in this context, drop a request in the comments. Also to seek help from search engine experts, feel free to reach out to our technical maestros at Opositive.io
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