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Grow Your Business through SEO

How does a Search Engine work?

Before we start learning about SEO (Search Engine Optimization), it is essential to have a fundamental understanding of how the search engine works. You must have heard about the term Keywords before. It is just the terms people search in google while looking for some information online. Here are a few examples, like "air tickets to London," "luxury hotels in the Maldives," "best travel agency in Delhi," or "best tour operators in Kerala." These are some standard terms, or we can say keywords which people use while searching for hotels, tour packages, travel agencies online.

When someone performs a search like this, search engines scour their index for highly relevant content and then order it to give the result to the searcher's query. It means that the higher the website is ranked, the search engines found those websites more relevant to the query. A lot of factors make a search engine's algorithm before showing the results to the user. To get top rank in google search is all about perfect SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

Functions of Search Engines

The three primary functions of Search Engines are:

Crawl - It the process to scour the internet for content and looking over each URL content they find.
Index - It is the process to store and organize the content found during the above process and then finally displayed as a result of the asked or relevant queries.
Rank - In this process, the displayed result is ordered by its relevance from highest to the lowest, on the search engine result page (SERP).

What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization.

It is the practice of increasing the quality and quantity of traffic to the website through organic search results.

Let us break this definition into different parts:

Quality of Traffic: You can attract every kind of visitor in this world. However, if your sites come at the top in google search saying you are a resource for Apple computers when you are a farmer selling apples online. That is not quality traffic. You are looking for the customers interested in your product offer online.
Quantity of Traffic: Once you start getting the right people clicking through the result in SERP. Your Website traffic will get an increase.
Organic Result: You can see different Ads at the top and bottom of SERP. Those are the paid ads, and they make up a significant portion of google SERP. So, the traffic you received organically, you do not have to pay for it.

Main Factors of Search Engine Ranking

You must have heard about two terms while talking about SEO ranking, i.e., On-Page SEO and Off-Page SEO. These are the two main factors where you need to work for good SEO ranking in Google SERP.

On-Page SEO: In this factor, you need to work on website optimization that includes Content, Website Code, Meta Tags, Heading Tags, Alt Attributes, URL structure, and links.

Off-Page SEO: In this factor, you need to work on website authority by building the right inbound links and social signals.

Other Important Factors to Consider for Good SEO Ranking

Secure and Accessible Website
Responsive Website
Page load Speed
Domain Age, URL, and Authority
User Experience
Social Signals
Unique and Useful Content
Optimized Content
Upload Sitemap

Why Develop Search Engine Friendly Website

Before we start talking about website design, keep one thing in mind that the websites do not look the same way to Search engines as they look to us. Sometimes, it might be meaningless or not even understandable for a search engine.

We will now understand Key Points to remember while designing a website:

Indexable Content

All website designs and development need to be done, keeping in mind that it should be understandable by Google bot or spiders. You should look for a long-term optimization to get stability in google search engine. Despite how advanced spiders may have become, they are still only useful to understand the content in HTML and XHTML. So, keep all the essential elements of your website in the HTML code. Java, Flash files, or images are not read well by google bot or spiders. However, there is still a way to get website videos and images indexed, get and noticed by assigning Alt Attributes or giving a small description of the image. Remember, if Google bot cannot read the website content, it will not be indexed and appear to the search engine.

Title TAGS

It is an essential part of the website. It is ideally a brief description is what your website or pages all about. Title tags are not important only for the search engine, but for users also. First, you need to take care of the length of Title Tag because the search engine shows only 50-65 characters of your Title Tag in SERP. Do not forget that it is an introduction to your website, which will help attract users and search engines to understand how relevant your website content is to the keywords user search in google. So, better to add the keyword to the opening of the title tag or near to start of it. I would suggest using multiple keywords as possible within the recommended title length and using the brand name at the end. It will help you to get better click-through-rates. You can also experiment with using below proposed Title Tag Structure.

Primary Keyword -> Secondary Keyword -> Brand name

Meta Tags

Provides information, instruction, and description to the search engines.

There are many types of meta tags and have their own specific uses and controlling activity.

Index/Noindex: This meta tag instructs the search engine to index a specified page.
Follow/Nofollow: This meta tag instructs the search engine whether to follow a specified page of the website while crawling or not.
Meta description: This meta tag gives a short description of the webpage and lets the search engine know about the page. And it's better not the exceed the limit of 160 characters while writing it.
Header Tags: The use of heading tags is to provide structure to the content of the page. H1 is the most crucial tag as it tells the user what page is all about. You can use the H2 title to cover the main topics on the page. Subsequent Headings H3-H6 serves as an additional heading with the page.

Keyword Usage

Keywords plays the most crucial part of search activity. A website with more relevant keywords can rank at the top in google search. But remember there are lots of other factors too to get a good rank. E.g., If you have 15 relevant keywords used to search your product. And you do not have those keywords optimized on your website. It means you are missing most of the quality traffic from search engine those are looking for your product online. The best practice is to pay much attention to your title tags, Heading Tags, and meta descriptions. But make sure, keywords should not be overused and unnecessarily. Then, it works against the purpose and will not give you the expected result. You can check the keyword density of the page by using free Keywords density tools online.

Link Structure

It is essential to have a link structure that is search engine friendly to crawl your website smoothly. It is one of the major mistakes done by most of the websites, despite having good content. Just because of a lousy link structure, they are unreachable by search engine spiders, and the pages will not appear on SERP. Use HTML wherever possible because Spiders are not good at crawling links in JAVA on the page.

Major Factors of Google Ranking

It is true, saying that Google uses 200 factors in its algorithm while giving rank to search results. We are only aware of a few of them. Google has also provided tools, resources, and guidelines to help webmasters pursue better ranking.

What Affects a Website’s Google Ranking

Some significant factors have a substantial influence on Search engine ranking, i.e., the website's usability, website content, and User experience.

Usability and User Experience: We know well the more website is trusted; the more users will come back. Google works with the same policy, and user experience matters a lot in ranking. It considers that the website must have valued information judging by user behavior. So, it is essential to keep this point in mind while designing the website.
Website Content: Content is the life of the website. Your website should have informative content presented effectively, as google judges your content and engagement metrics of it. It should have something impressive to ready and offer to its user if it is earning links from other websites. Then, Google also rewards you for this popularity by giving you a google rank in SERP.

Tips to Improve Google Ranking?

There are 200 variables to rise in Google Rank. Before we move further to learn tips to improve ranking in Google, remember the basic principle, no optimization with work if you do not have excellent and engaging content for users.

Other Tips:

Try to add keywords in the starting of Title Tags.
Link Relevancy is essential; a Website that links to your site is related to the same topic as your website.
Work on Page loading Speed.
Responsive designs are preferable by Google.
Work on the length of the content and its uniqueness.
Optimized the page with Keywords but avoid over Keyword stuffing.

What is Keyword Research? Why is it Important in SEO?

Discovering the best possible keywords, staying in the trend, and mostly used in queries by users on a search engine called Keyword research.

It is essential to search for keywords before we start optimizing the web pages. It is the process to explore the actual terms which people use while searching for some information and product online. Google Search engine also have their Keyword Search tool "Keyword Planner" available for webmasters, tools which give keywords statistics and other words which are in use most.

With the help of the Keyword Research Tool, you can check the competitiveness of the keywords you want to optimize on your website, and you can check the estimated traffic for those keywords. Additionally, you can check other suggested Keyword ideas.

Points to keep in mind while searching relevant keywords

Identify the keywords relevant to your business.
Do Competitors Keyword Analysis to get new ideas.
Add words to create more phrases.
Check the competitiveness of those keywords and keyword phrases.
Do not use more competitive keywords.
Look for Less Competitive Keywords and more search potential.
List 10 - 50 Keywords and Keyword phrases to optimize your website.

Best Tools for Keyword Research

Google Keyword Planner
Moz Keyword Explorer
SEO Book Keyword Tool
Semrush
KeywordTool.io
Ahrefs Keywords Explorer
Raven SEO Tools
Keyword Spy
KeywordEye
Keyword Snatcher

What is Link Building and How is it Important for SEO?

Link building is an essential part of SEO and popular as a term (Off-Page SEO). It works like someone is giving the vote to certain websites held value in the search engine's eye.

Why Is it Important?

If someone puts a link of your website on their page, it means giving information or an indication to search engine that "this website is great" and can refer for more details or further learning. Remember, it also matters a lot who was saying it. E.g., If Forbes put your website link on their page, it would mean a lot for you because Forbes has an outstanding market value, trust, and tremendous traffic on their website. It will help you to get more traffic re-directed to your site. So, this is how link building becomes an essential factor in search engine ranking. And remember, pick the high Domain Authority Websites for link building.

Types of Links

Natural (Editorial) Links: Natural link is real optimization. It is the links people have made to your website on their own and with their own choice.
Manual (Outreach) Links: These are the kind of links expected to get for the website. In this process, you must reach out to website owners and bloggers to request a link to your website by them. So, in this type of linking better to approach people who are in your field.

Some Best Link Building Strategies

Check Competitors Backlinks
Replicate best Links from Competitors
Get more active on Social Media
Create Infographics to Share
Do Guest Blogging
Get Good Links from Trusted Sites
Work on Broken Link Strategy

Free SEO Tools for Marketing and Analysis

Google Analytics: It helps to analyze in-depth details about the visitors on your website. You can get valuable insights like from where they come, from which country and which page of your website is getting the most traffic etc.
Google Search Console: It helps you to Uncover and fix technical and on-page issues. You can also check your website and Keyword performance in search console.
Keyword Planner - Find and research keywords to target for your website.
Page Speed Insights: Check how fast your site loads. Website loading speed is an essential factor in SEO.
SEO Web Page Analyzer: Check out your pages for search engine optimization.
SimilarWeb: Used to estimates the total amount of monthly traffic to a website.
Google Trends: Used to See the relative search popularity of topics.
SEO Site Check-Up: This tool helps you to audit your website for on-page and technical SEO issues.
Ahrefs' Free Backlink Checker: Will show the top 100 backlinks to any website or web page for free. For an in-depth analysis, you can buy the paid plan.
Yoast SEO: If your website is in WordPress? Yoast is the only SEO plugin you will ever need.

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