Beginner’s guide to SEO: Things you need to know

SEO stands for search engine optimization. It is basically the process of increasing traffic from search engine result pages by optimizing your website. Even a small knowledge about SEO can increase traffic to your website through organic search engine results tremendously.

Importance of SEO

It is very important for any online business, be it a small local business or large scale business. It can create traffic potential for any kind of website. Its importance has increased even more with today’s competitive market.

Most of the users click one of the top five links in search engine results. SEO helps you increase visitors by making you appear in one of the top links.

Good SEO also improves the user interface of a website.

If two websites are selling the same product then, the SEO website will have more customers. Thus it helps to put us ahead in competition.

Types of SEO

SEO can be divided into 3 types:

1. Technical SEO

It deals with crawling and indexing. It makes sure that the search engine can acknowledge what a user needs and direct them to your site if appropriate. If there is a problem with crawling and indexing the ranking will be affected negatively.

2. On-Page SEO

It deals with the content on your website. Your content should answer the user’s query and should be optimized so that it is search engine friendly. Search engines figure out what a page is all about by focus-keywords, title, internal and external links and headings. If it is followed correctly the credibility of a website increases and thus positively affects the ranking of your website. 

3. Off-Page SEO

One of the best ways to improve your website’s ranking is Off-Page SEo. It deals with the promotion of your website or blog so that your ranking improves. You can appear in the top links of search engine results by using backlinks. Backlinks from famous and trusted sites improve your ranking.

DOs and DON’Ts

DOs:

• Choose a title which tells about the content of the page accurately
• Choose a unique title for all your pages. It will help the search engine to differentiate your page from other pages.
• In the META tag use a creative description which summarizes your content. It should interest the reader to visit your page.
• Write the headlines properly. They should be like the outline of their description.
• Make sure that the users can easily find the general as well as specific content on your website. Use external links and in-links in your content to make it user friendly.
• Write easy to read text. Users will revisit your site only if it is well written and organized. Make sure there are proper headings and that your data is up to date and unique.
•  Make sure that you add alt text while adding images.

DON’Ts:

• Using unnecessarily long titles.
• In the META tag avoid using generic information. Example: This is a web page.
• Overusing the keyword in description or copying all the content in your description.
• Having navigation which is only based on images.
• Using generic names for your page.
• Writing text which has a lot of spelling or grammatical errors.
• Copying large amounts of data and writing it without any heading or subheading.

Conclusion:

The best way to learn about SEO is by practicing. Just learning about concepts and theories will not help unless you practice the concepts. Implement what you learn, on your websites and see how your ranking improves. Apply the techniques again and again to till the traffic to your website increases