Business Owner Starting Guide to SEO

Search Engine Optimization, or "SEO" for short, is a process that can be used to increase the visibility of a website in search engine results pages (SERPs). The higher a site appears in the rankings, the more likely potential customers are to find it. SEO can be a complex and ever-changing field, but there are some basic principles that any website owner can use to improve their site's ranking.

Search Engine:

Google became the favoured search engine because the quality of the search results far surpassed the other options. Google is a pattern detection program. When you search for a keyword phrase, Google is going to provide you with a list of websites that match the pattern that's related to your search. when you are doing a search on Google, you’re not searching the live web. You are actually searching Google's index of the web, the stored copy of the sites that Google has crawled. Search engines like Google use algorithms to rank websites.

What are Algorithms ?

Google's algorithms are a complex system that are used to retrieve data from its search index and deliver the best possible results for your search. The algorithms are constantly updated and adjusted to ensure that search results are the best they can be. The algorithm will look at a few hundred different factors that influence relevancy, like the content on the page, the number of other sites that link to that page, and the overall quality of the website.

How Google Discovers Content on the Internet?

Spiders are little software applications that Google uses to crawl the internet and find content. A spider will begin on one page, scan the entire page's content, then follow any links to other pages and scan their contents.

The servers of Google keep a copy. This is Google's index, which is organised so that the search engine can easily browse the billions of pages it contains. SEOs try to persuade. The list of sites Google recently pulled from the index is examined by an algorithm, which ranks the pages according to their relevance.

The benefits of SEO for your business:

• More traffic to your website: By optimizing your website for search engines, you can increase your website’s visibility, which will lead to more people finding and visiting your site.?
• Improved brand awareness and reach: As your website’s ranking in search engine results pages improves, so does your brand’s visibility. This can help you attract new customers and grow your business.?
• Increased leads and sales: If you are a business that relies on generating leads and sales through your website, then SEO can be especially beneficial. By bringing more traffic to your site, you will also be able to increase the number of leads and sales that you generate.?
• Higher-quality traffic: One of the benefits of SEO is that it can help you attract higher-quality traffic to your website. This means that the people who find your site are more likely to be interested in what you have to offer, which can lead to increased sales and conversions.?

How to improve your website's SEO ranking?

When you start thinking about improving your website’s SEO you should consider many factors:

1.Technical SEO

You need to make sure that the connection between your computer and the website is encrypted. HTTPs is not just security and privacy, it also has a ranking signal in Google’s algorithm.

50% of users expect a website to load in less than 2 seconds. Site speed is a small ranking factor in Google's algorithm. Google's spiders will be able to crawl more pages in the allotted time available for crawling your site.

Sometimes developers want to prevent the search engines and bots from crawling up their sites. Robots.txt can block entire sections of your site like a folder containing admin assets. The meta robots tag can remove a page from Google's index. Pages missing from the index, they're either blocked with robots.txt or the robots meta.

Structured Data is on-page mark-up that helps search engines to understand? the content on your website. Schema.org is the most commonly used structured data mark-up for SEO – it's the result of a collaboration from Google, Bing, Yahoo!, and Yandex. You can add schema to reviews, recipes, ratings, products, events, and even local businesses.

2. Link signals

The most important indicator of relevance in Google's algorithm is inbound links. Without creating or acquiring relevant links to your website, it is hard to do SEO. An inbound link is seen by Google as a signal that the information on your website is valuable.

First step in building links is to analyse links to determine the quality of links. It's a manual job but there are some tools that will help like Moz, Majestic and SEMrush and each of these tools pulls a different subset of links. It’s recommended to use all 4 tools together. Check the link profiles for your competitors as well.

?There are two strategies that will help you build links:

• Broken link building strategy sites change and disappear all the time so you can find a broken link and answer the question or need with new content then reach the authorised website and let them know about your link.
• Unlinked mention strategy looks at any site that mentioned you without? links so you reach to this site and ask it to link your site.

There are also links you should avoid. It could be a spam signal, or in extreme cases, actually get your site penalised. Links to avoid:

• Paid links should be earned.
• Number of links from foreign sites.?
• Reciprocal links: easy for google to detect.
• Links from bad neighbourhood like online casinos, adult websites, or pharmaceutical sites.
• Links from any sites that have been hacked.

3. On-page signals

You should start with solid keyword analysis to determine which keywords you are targeting and out of this list get the most search volume ones. The broader a term is, the more traffic it's likely to see. Google's Keyword Planner is one of the best sources for keywords located in the AdWords interface. You can look up keywords based on location and seasonally.

When you are writing your content you should truly answer the questions that the user is asking. You should care less about matching keywords and more about matching the intent.

The process you can use to write a content:

1. Categorize a list with keywords.?
2. Figure about what content will answer the intent of each group of keywords.
3. Figure out what the content will look like.
4. Write your content.
5. Read your content aloud it should sound? conversational.

?If you're not already investing time and resources into SEO, now is the time to start. Trust us - your business will thank you for it!