What is SEO/Search Engine Optimization? [Learn SEO Process to Rank Your Website on Google]

 

SEO strategy is the key to ranking your website on Google. Read this step-by-step SEO guide to improve your online business.

If you have your own business and you want to monetize or promote your online content via search engines, this step-by-step SEO guide is for you. This guide is also for you if you want to work as a SEO expert or specialist for several companies, this super guide for you. 

What is SEO?

 

May be you think you have created your site for only your human users. Did you think there are another users who are not human? If didn't think let me introduce you. Search engines, yes, search engines like Google is one of your users that help other users to find your site for specific purposes. Google crawl all websites on the internet and index them in its server. When people search queries on Google it provides the most relevant website based on the search queries. 

 

There are lots of websites and are being created and published a lots everyday. These websites may be small or large and may be for different purposes but SEO process are same for all types and sizes of websites. Here in this step-by-step SEO guide you will learn the best practice of SEO that will provide you more organic traffic from search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and others. 

So let's start. 

SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization”. In Simple terms, SEO is the process of improving your websites rank as much as high at the top of the search engine results page (SERP) like Google, Yahoo, Bing and other search engines. 

 

This process helps to increase the visibility of your websites when people search for products or services related to your content on different search engines. This practices help to improve both the quality and quantity of your websites through organic search engine results. You should not mix SEO and paid advertising as a same term. There is a quite difference. The main difference between search engine optimization and paid advertising is that you can get organic traffic (visitors from anywhere) for totally free through SEO without any types of payment. Simply, Search Engine Optimization means taking online content and optimizing so that people can find your sites on the top of the search results when they search for something on search engines like Google. 

 

Many people want to rank their websites at the top of the search engine results page quickly. You should keep in mind that you cannot be a SEO Expert/Specialist within a day and you can not rank your website at the top of the search results page over a night, You should keep in mind that SEO is a practice and a continuous process to rank a site as much as high at the top of the search results page. Proper implementation of SEO strategy is a long-term process.  

 

Working Process of a Search Engine-Crawling, Indexing and Ranking

 

If you create and publish a website you need to reach potential audiences but your audience will not know that you have a website. They even don't know the URL of your website. Actually this happens for all website owners. People start searching with a keyword using search engines like Google. You have to better understand how you can rank your website higher in search engine. To understand this process you need to first understand the working process of a search engine- how it crawl, index and rank any content. It is informed that about 75 percent of searches start on Google. Search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo are are called answer machines but it is a complex process to provide most relevant answer for a specific search topic or keyword. The process involves Crawling, Indexing and Ranking. First step of a search engine is crawling. Search engine like Google and Bing crawl pages on the web using their bots- Spider for Google, collect information about all the pages going site by site using link found on a page, and then put them in an index. When someone hit a search for a specific keyword search engine's algorithms determine the order pages with most relevant information that should be appear in the search results for that particular query or keyword. You should know the ranking factors or signals and understand properly because the search engine algorithms supply search results base on thousands of ranking factors or signals. Google uses over 200 ranking factors in theirs algorithms. Search engine's crawlers or bots collect:

• Title tags
• Permalinks
• Meta tags
• Image Alt tags
• Page speed
• Inbound links or internal links
• Backlinks 
• Social signals etc. and many more.

 

If you want to be an SEO Expert you have to think and analyze everything critically and creatively. To optimize a website you should consider a lot of things to take action for the SEO best practice. When you  hit a search to get information about a specific information Google and other search engines want to provide high quality and most relevant content based on the searcher’s queries. Search engines index different websites in several categories in theirs server after crawling different websites. When you see different websites' links in search engine results page actually search engines shows the best quality and the most relevant results from the indexed sites of their server based on your search keywords. Search engine also check the website user experiences, loading speed, and content quality. It always wants to provide user-friendly sites at the top of the search results.

 

Why SEO is Important and Benefits of SEO?

 

Proper implementation of SEO strategy is very important for your business and there are several benefits of SEO that improve your business. Actually, SEO is a fundamental part of digital marketing because people conduct trillions of searchers every year. You can get traffic from paid advertising, different social media and other online platforms but most of the organic traffic comes from search engines. If you can setup SEO strategy properly using keywords then you can get more and more traffic continuously over time but paid advertising methods need to be funded continuously to get traffic to your sites. By improving your SEO your sites can rank at the top of the search results that helps you to reach and engage potential customers. Additionally, by creating more and more SEO friendly content you can make chance to get potential targeted traffic to your sites.

Types of SEO

 

If you want to deep dive in SEO you can find three different types of SEO: 

 

1. On-Page SEO 
2. Technical SEO
3. Off-Page SEO 

 

On-Page SEO

 

On-Page Optimization happens on your website and this action implements based on Keyword Research. You have full control on On-Page SEO. Firstly, you have to select most suitable keywords that mostly related to your niche. Then put these keywords in your content’s title tags, meta description, image Alt tags, h1 tags, permalink during writing your content. You need to write high-quality content regularly on your business niche and make sure to put keywords in above stated sections. 

You can control up to 99% even 100% factors of on-page SEO. So don't ignore on-page SEO and you should have a solid foundation on on-page SEO. 

 

SEO is an ongoing process so you should do on-page SEO even if you rank #1 in the search results page. You should keep in mind that the first position in the search results page is not reserved for anybody. Anybody can take the position after 1 or 2 hours when you are ranking the #1. 

 

Check this On-Page SEO Complete Guide to get free organic traffic from Google and other search engines. 

 

Technical SEO

Any types of technical tasks to optimize a website refer to technical SEO. This process can include any types of performance to make easy to crawl and index website for crawlers or bots. For example: reducing image size so the loading speed of a website can increase, or creating user friendly theme, layouts etc.

 

Check this Technical SEO Complete Guide for your successful SEO implementation. 

 

Off-Page SEO

 

Off-Page SEO strategy implements away from your website without making any changes in the content. You have no control in website that would be ranked. This task is related to earning backlinks. It includes social media marketing, guest blogging, brand building etc.

 

SEO Strategies: Black Hat vs. White Hat

 

Every SEO strategy works to rank websites as much as high at the top of the search result pages. Actually, you cannot rank your site over a night. It is a long term and continuous process to optimize a website. Sometimes people try to rank their sites quickly taking some unethical ways that called Black Hat SEO. The people who use Black Hat SEO strategy use some sneaky tactics like keyword stuffing and link scraping to rank their website quickly. You may get some traffic quickly to your site in this way and earn money but in a long-term Google can understand your strategies that results your site be penalized even be blacklisted so you can never rank. The people who use Black Hat SEO strategy make content only for search engine not the visitors. 

 

On the other hand, White Hat SEO focuses on the visitors and gives them more value. It is the proper, standard and ethical SEO strategy. If you follow White Hat SEO then you will give more value to your targeted audiences and in this way you can make a sustainable online business. In this way you will try to create evergreen content for your audiences not only for the search engine. Then search engine automatically recognize your site for ranking. So again and again give value to your audience. If you follow White Hate SEO then you will give more value to your targeted audiences and in this way you can make a sustainable online business.

 

DON'T MISS: How to Create an Effective SEO Strategy [Learn SEO Strategy Step-by-Step]