What Is SEO? A Beginner’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization

We all know that Google is king in today’s globe. With almost all of our inquiries, we turn to the search platform. It’s no surprise, therefore, that everyone is doing everything they can to make their content searchable on Google. That’s exactly what SEO is: the process of optimising your content so that it appears higher in search results.

Implementing SEO strategies may require a lot of time and effort, from building a website to providing the necessary metadata. Unfortunately, merely getting your knowledge out there isn’t enough. According to studies, the top three search engine results receive 75% of all clicks. That is, only about a quarter of all clicks are dispersed among the hundreds or thousands of other results. To put it another way, you want to make sure you’re in the top three.

That is why it is critical that you pay close attention to the tiny things on your website. This post will go through how to put all of those features in place and ensure that they comply with SEO guidelines.

What is SEO?

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the practise of improving websites so that they rank high in organic (non-paid) searches on search engines. For every firm, this is one of the most important kinds of marketing.

In other words, specific indications that platforms like Google search for must be met by your website. Because Google aims to give the greatest possible information to its searchers, it wants to display the best possible information. The technique of ensuring that search engines perceive your material as the finest information on the web for a certain search query is known as SEO.

How do search engines work?

As you may be aware, SEO is the process of satisfying search engines. However, how do search engines function? How do they know what’s on your website?

Robots explore web sites throughout the internet to discover what material they include for search engines. They add these pages to their index once they’ve acquired enough material. The system then matches a user’s search query to relevant material in its index, giving them with a precise answer to their inquiry.

It’s crucial to remember that Google doesn’t reveal details about their algorithm, therefore it’s difficult to tell for sure how different SEO tactics are weighed.

On-page vs. off-page SEO

A variety of things have an influence on SEO. Because it’s impossible to determine which factors have the greatest impact on search engine results, experts advocate a mix of techniques in your SEO plan. Those strategies may be divided into two categories: on-page and off-page SEO.

On-page SEO refers to the tactics you use on your own website, such as the design and text, as well as metadata, alt text, and other elements. The measures you take outside of your website are referred to as off-page SEO. External links, social media posts, and other website marketing tactics are examples of this.

On-page and off-page SEO are both critical for increasing visitors to your site and, eventually, communicating to Google that your site is important. You can help your pages rank higher and generate more traffic by letting Google know that your site is significant and that people are interested in knowing more about what you have to offer.

How to implement SEO

While this may seem self-evident, it’s worth noting that the first step in applying SEO best practises is to build a fantastic website. Make sure your website is simple to use, offers a positive user experience, and properly displays the information you want to convey. This guarantees that you’re off to a good start when it comes to delivering outstanding answers to searchers’ questions.

However, SEO is much more than just having a well-designed website. Here are a few of the most important SEO strategies to consider:

• Keyword research
• Mobile friendliness
• Page speed
• Authoritativeness
• External linking
• Internal linking
• Metadata
• Alt text

01. Keyword research

Doing keyword research is perhaps one of the most essential aspects of knowing and executing SEO. The process of selecting the finest and most relevant terms to utilise on your web pages is known as keyword research. You may learn how people across the world look for topics relevant to your product or service by conducting some research and using expert keyword research tools. Choosing the appropriate phrases for your web pages may have a significant impact on the amount of traffic your site receives.

Let’s pretend your name is Jenny and you work as a florist. Jenny’s Flower Store is an obvious choice for a page title. However, a fast keyword search reveals that the keyword “flower store” is searched 2,000 times per month on average, whereas “flower shop” is searched 30,000 times per month. As a result, utilising the word “shop” rather than “store” on your web pages will tell Google that your site is exactly what visitors are looking for.

However, keyword research doesn’t stop there. Using the flower shop as an example, you may observe that the search results page for “flower shop” is dominated by large name brands with which your tiny business cannot compete. Instead, you may consider focusing on your geographic region (local SEO) or a certain specialisation. By including this information on your web pages, Google will recognise you as a viable choice when people are looking for something particular that you provide.

02. Mobile friendliness

Another important aspect of SEO is making sure that all searchers can find your site and have a good time there. In today’s world, mobile devices account for more than half of all traffic. As a result, ensuring that your site is mobile friendly is definitely worth your time.

This will not only help your business by ensuring that customers looking on their phones can find your site, but it will also benefit Google. The search engine frequently uses mobile first indexing, which entails crawling the mobile version of your site to decide how it should rank in its results. As a result, the mobile version of your website demands your full attention.

03. Page speed

Page speed, or loading times, is one of the variables that Google considers. The speed with which your website loads is critical to the user experience. Users may abandon your site before ever seeing what it has to offer if it is too sluggish. As a result, it’s critical that you pay close attention to this and ensure that your website’s speed is optimised.

Not cluttering your site with media or features, optimising your picture sizes, and keeping to one or two typefaces throughout are some of the simplest methods to ensure that it loads quickly. These will make your site seem cleaner and more professional, as well as reduce the time it takes for it to load.

04. Authoritativeness

Proving your authority is a crucial part of earning trust from both individuals and Google. We have a tendency to believe experts, so we seek guidance from those who are highly skilled in their profession. The same is true for Google. It evaluates which sites have the greatest knowledge and credentials to report on a specific issue, then presents them to searchers in a prioritised order.

Obtaining authority may be accomplished in a variety of ways. The easiest method is to correctly explain the thing or service about which you are most knowledgeable. As an example, if your service is an online flower store with a blog, you should probably cover subjects related to flowers and flower care.

Another crucial element is the number of high-quality connections. We’ll go into linking techniques in more detail later, but in a nutshell, this refers to other authoritative sites or pages connecting to your website.

It is also possible to become an authority on a topic by following a few easy steps. Make sure your website’s material is up to date. If you offer an answer for a specific issue, but it was published in 2010, you are likely no longer the expert on that page. Although the freshness element isn’t always the most crucial SEO technique, it is still a good idea.

05. External linking

When other websites connect to your site, this is known as external linking or backlinking. This is a crucial SEO strategy since it increases your site’s authority. It also increases the number of people who visit your sites and learn more about your product or service.

Genuine and natural external links are the most effective. When another platform notices you and decides that your site can offer value to their material, this happens. As a result, they link to your site in order to assist their own readers or users. The higher the authority or importance of the other site, the more valuable their connection is. While there is no quick way to get authentic external connections, the ideal approach is to constantly produce high-quality content.

06. Internal linking

Internal linking, or connecting to pages within your own website, is another linking method. This aids with the flow of visitors between your website’s pages, highlighting all of your assets. It also adds value to your users by making your site more accessible and ensuring that they can discover what they’re searching for quickly.

Internal linking can also serve to increase the authority of a website. By connecting less-visited pages to more-visited pages on your own site, you’re signalling to Google that both are essential.

07. Metadata

Metadata is the information you give Google to describe the contents of your web page. When you do a search on a search engine, each result is given with a headline and description that informs you about the type of information that will be found on the page. Metadata is the term for these headlines and descriptions. You may give such information to Google to assist both users and Google identify the most important portions of your website.

Many SEO professionals believe that your meta titles, also known as title tags, and meta descriptions, are among the most powerful SEO signals you can send to Google. As a result, it’s vital that you use your title tag to incorporate your most relevant keywords.

Metadata has an underlying SEO benefit as well. It allows you to customise the text that searchers view when they first arrive at your site. More hits to your website may be gained by including attractive language that clearly answers the searcher’s question. The more visitors who click, the more Google recognises that your site is a strong match for their queries and ranks you higher.

08. Alt text

The alt text, or alternative text, that you add to the pictures on your site is a brief description. It is a crucial SEO component that is incorporated in your site’s HTML. Because web crawling bots can’t read photos, they rely on alt text to tell them what they’re looking at. This has a number of significant SEO implications:

Alt text increases the likelihood of your photos appearing in Google searches, both in the Google images area and increasingly at the top of normal search result pages. Images are getting more and more common in Google searches, and the better your alt text, the higher your image’s chances of ranking. Of course, the higher you rank, the more exposure your site will have and the more visitors it will receive.

Web pages using alt text are also considered to be more widely optimised by Google. This can help search engines see your site more favourably.

One thing to think about is how to write alt text correctly. When you look at an image, you may probably come up with a number of different ways to explain what you see. It is advised that you think carefully about your alt text for SEO purposes and attempt to add some keywords to help your site stand out.

Next steps

You might be wondering what to do now that you know what the primary SEO tactics are. You may begin by looking through these procedures and making sure they’re followed on your site. Using Stridec SEO tools like the SEO Wizard is an easy method to achieve this. This tool will provide you with tailored SEO advice based on your website’s requirements. Of course, any of the techniques may be implemented on its own.

If you’ve implemented all of the strategies above, you’re off to a terrific start. SEO effort, on the other hand, does not end there. Another key aspect of SEO is upkeep. You’ll have to keep checking in on your site to make sure everything is up to date and operating correctly. Slight modifications to your site can frequently break links or cause site malfunctions, which is why it’s critical to check in and maintain your site.

Finally, it’s a good idea to monitor analytics on a frequent basis to see how your site is progressing as a consequence of your SEO efforts. To obtain a feel of the immediate impact of your optimization, use SEO tools like Ahrefs to evaluate your site ranks. To put it another way, you might see if your site’s rating has increased and note which keywords it is performing well for. You may also use Stridec site traffic analytics tool to figure out how much traffic you’re getting and from where it’s from.