What is SEO | Why SEO is important for business
What is SEO? SEO stands for “ Search Engine Optimization”, it makes easy for search engines like google, bing, yandex, etc, and users to access the site efficiently. SEO could increase brand awareness, build the reliability and trustworthiness of the websites.
In order to increase the quality and quantity of traffic coming to your website, one has to do SEO.
Role of Search Engines:
Search engines scour the web and index the pages according to their ranking on SERP (search engine ranking page).
The SERP is mainly categorized into:
- Paid results,
- Organic results.
To rank on the first page of search engines, it is very significant to optimize the page because the first three ranking websites get almost 70% of organic traffic.
How do search engines determine rankings?
There are hundreds of factors that determine the ranking on the search engine page, some of them are listed below:
Relevancy:
The search engines provide the results according to the users’ intent therefore it’s very important that the content on the web page should be optimized subsequently.
Efficiency:
It should be easy for the users to get the results that they are searching for. The site shouldn’t be complicated.
Page speed:
This plays an important role in driving traffic to your website. It is recommended by Google that page load time should not be more than 2 sec.
Mobile-friendliness:
With over 7.1 billion mobile users around the globe, it’s very important that the site should be optimized for mobile users as well.
There are 2 ways to improve the site’s performance:
- ON-PAGE SEO
- OFF-PAGE SEO
ON-PAGE SEO:
It can be defined as the measures that are taken within the website to improve its ranking. It is done to optimize the content on a webpage which results in increasing site traffic.
Let’s dive in to learn more about On-page SEO:
1. Install Plugin:
There are various plugins used to optimize the site, for instance, the Yoast plugin helps to optimize the title tag, meta description, URL, keywords, etc.
2. Keyword Research:
The tools which can be used for keyword research are:
- Paid tool: Semrush
- Free tool: Google Keyword Planner.
3. Connect your site to Google Analytics:
It helps to give data of users coming to your site. For example: session duration, pages per session, bounce rate, average engagement time, source of traffic, conversions, etc.
Optimization of the Blog post:
- Always start writing your blog post with a question so that search engines and readers should be aware of what they are going to get in the blog post.
- Make sure to provide an internal link within the first paragraph of your post that helps to reduce the bounce rate.
- Headings should be optimized, the H1 heading should be associated with the title tag, whereas H3 should be associated with the sub-headings.
- Provide 3-4 internal links throughout the post. For internal links, the text can be an exact match, partial match, brand name, URL, or miscellaneous like read more or click here.
- The image should also be optimized as it makes blog posts more interesting and engaging to the users. It will also help in reducing fatigue which generates while reading only text blocks. To optimize the image, provide alt text to the image i.e. description of the image.
- The meta-description should be optimized. After installing the Yoast plugin scroll down at the bottom of the page describe the post shortly in less than 160 words.
- In the focus keyword section, add keywords relevant to the post and which you want to rank for.
OFF-Page SEO:
The basic difference between On-page SEO and Off-page SEO is that On-page SEO is within your control whereas Off-page SEO is not. However, there are some steps that can be taken to do Off-page SEO.
Off-page SEO can be defined as the measures which improve the site ranking via
- Blog posting
- Article submission
- Business listing
- Content marketing
- Influencer marketing
- Social media marketing
- Brand building
- Podcast
- Reviews.
Guest Blogging:
According to your niche, write on any topic and ask websites to publish your article, and provide backlinks to your website.
5 points to remember are:
- Check the domain authority of the website to which you are submitting the article. It can be done via a tool namely Mozbar. DA >= 25.
- Check the number of keywords for which the website is ranking for. It should at least rank for more than 100 keywords. It can be done via a tool called SEMrush.
- The website should have a good number of referring domains i.e, Referring domain >=50 (it should be unique).
- Check that the website has a decent amount of organic traffic. Organic traffic >=200 people per month.
- Check that the page is not linking to tons of other websites.
Quora:
It is a question-answer social media platform, where people come and ask questions. This platform provides an immense opportunity for the business to directly interact with the people.
Why is Quora important?
- Quora has 300 million monthly active users.
- It helps to drive high-quality traffic to your website.
- There is a wide variety of topics to write on Quora, which can generate huge opportunities to write according to your niche.
- As there is a direct interaction between business and consumers, it makes easy to sell products and services via this platform.
- It also enables you to share the content of other websites (including your own), related to the query being asked.
These are some of the tips which will definitely help you to improve your site ranking. One of the best digital marketing agencies in Indore has helped various firms in SEO.