Understand What is SEO in 10 minutes

Do you want to learn what SEO is and how it works? It might sound a bit intimidating for businesses that are just starting to build their website or going through a website redesign. But, there’s nothing to worry about. Even if you do not have experience in SEO, you can still learn and start making some positive changes that will help you improve your search engine optimization. With a little SEO knowledge up your sleeves, you can improve your brand’s search engine ranking in no time.

In this article, we’ll provide an answer to all your queries related to SEO and how it works. Here’s your guide to understand what is SEO in 10 minutes.

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What is SEO and How It Works

SEO (search engine optimization) is the process of optimizing your site to gain organic, or un-paid, traffic from the search engine results page. SEO is all about optimizing your website, content and SEO services for attaining better ranking and getting more traffic. Your business comes up on the search rank in the search engine, and shifts from trending locally to trending globally. From your target audience to a genuine customer base, SEO helps your business grow in a smart, calculated way. In other words, SEO involves creating certain changes to your website design and content that makes your website more attractive to a search engine. Though search engine optimization can become quite intricate when it comes to all the different factors that impact your ranking, the basic process is not as difficult to understand.

Factors that impact on-page and off-page SEO

1. Content Marketing

Content is known as the king in this digital era and is effective in both attracting the search engines and helping your business make connections with site visitors. The formula for content is simple – the more engaging and effective content you have on your website, the more likely your visitors will be to spend some quality time on your website. The secret to creating SEO friendly content is to create a variety of content pieces that are well-written and on topics which are most relevant to your audience. You can include blog posts and articles, social media content, E-books and whitepapers, how-To Guides and Tutorials, videos and audio recordings, and Infographics or other visual content.

2. On-Page SEO

The on-page SEO is about those things that you have complete control over, meaning that you can work to improve them over time by following best practices for SEO. Below are just a few of the on-page SEO factors that can help you improve your search ranking:

• Title Tag – The title tag is of 70 characters or less, and tells the search engines what your page is about. It includes both the keyword your content focuses on and your business name.
• Meta Description – This tells search engines a little bit more about what each page is about. The Meta description should include your keyword and also provide enough details to tell the reader what the content is about.
• Sub-headings – Not only these make your content easier for visitors to read, but it can also help improve your SEO.
• Internal Links – Internal links help search engines learn more about your site. For instance, if you are writing a post about the value of a specific product or service, you can add a link of the product or service page in your blog post.
• Image Name and ALT Tags –This helps search engines better index your images, which may appear when users do an image search for a certain keyword or phrase.

3. Off-Page SEO

Apart from On-page SEO, Off-page SEO is there to help you in building a reputation of your business in the market. You may not have direct control over these off-page factors, but there are ways to improve your chances of having these factors work out in your favour.

• Trust – Reliability is an increasingly important factor in a website’s Google ranking. Google determines whether you have a genuine site that visitors can trust. One of the best ways to improve your credibility is by building quality backlinks from sites that have authority.
• Links – Backlinks are the best ways to build your off-page SEO. Build relationships with influencers and fans that create quality content and ask them to link back to your site in their own content.
• Social – Another important off-page SEO factors are likes and shares. When it comes to improving SEO, you want to look for the best shares from influencers. The more quality content you publish; the more likely you will get people to share your content with others.

4. Black Hat vs. White Hat SEO

There are two different approaches for SEO that are used to optimize business websites for the search engines. These two are black hat vs. white hat SEO. Black hat SEO involves strategies that focus on optimizing content only for the search engines. This means that businesses are not considering the human visitors that will read and navigate their site content. These organizations will break the rules in order to improve their site rankings.

Black-hat approach to SEO produces pages that are often tough for people to read and look a whole lot like spam. Though these sites may rank more quickly, they are often penalized or banned by search engines rather quickly. On the other hand, white hat SEO is an operative approach to optimizing your website for search engines and building a workable business online. This approach to search engine optimization includes focusing on the audience that will be clicking on and reading the site’s content. The goal of this type of SEO approach is to produce the best content possible on a website that’s easy to read and navigate.

Summing Up

You are now ready to take the first step towards working SEO and make changes to your site in order to improve your rankings on the search engine results page. Keep in mind that there are a lot of factors that impact your SEO ranking, but the most essential thing to consider is whether your content is valuable and relevant to your target audience.