Beginner's Guide to SEO [Search Engine Optimization]

What Is SEO?

By the time you finish reading this SEO guide, you'll have an understanding of what search engine optimization is, why it is vital and significant, and how to achieve excellent results in a constantly evolving SEO environment.

The technique of increasing organic search traffic to a website is called search engine optimization (SEO). It allows you to take action to enhance your visibility and position on search engine result pages. Since almost everyone chooses only the top few results, traffic is naturally generated more. In contrast to other mediums, search traffic is efficient and trustworthy and has considerable stability over a longer duration. Therefore, to achieve this, one must understand how search engines generate result pages and index the content that ranks. To describe SEO and its process, here are the key stages:

What are the key steps to SEO?

Keywords in Content

Conduct in-depth research on what people search for on search engines. Highlighting those specific keywords in a referential topic for a considerable amount of time makes it easier to appear in top searches. Craft content in a way that searchers would want to read, and maintain clarity on the page.

Link Building

Build trust not only among users but also among other websites. For this, having a reliable hosted domain is advisable so that it can run robustly, expand as needed, and contain required SEO plugins to enhance ranking efficiency.

Technical SEO

This part of the process involves the technical aspects of how search engines interact with your website or web app. Search engines typically run on three major functions: crawling, indexing, and ranking.

What is a keyword search?

Keywords are the highlighters of any content that make it feasible for visibility, and thus specific keywords in searches attract higher ranks on the search results page. This is frequently referred to as keyword difficulty and occasionally includes features of SERPs; for instance, the difficulty will rise if a keyword's result page is with SERP features. Typically, the competition and work needed to succeed in organic ranking increase with search traffic, but if you set it too low, you run the danger of losing visitors from search engines. Targeting highly specific, lower-competition search terms may often be most beneficial. It is referred to as long-tail keywords in SEO.

What is the working process of SEO?

Search engines are searchable databases of web content that can be categorized as Search Algorithms, which are responsible for matching search index results, and Search Engine Repository, which holds this database. Combining these two, every search engine strives to give users the best, most pertinent results. They acquire market share in part because of this.

What is technical SEO?

Crawling

Search engines utilize a process called crawling to discover new and updated content. This process involves sending out robots, also known as crawlers or spiders, to search for content in various formats, such as webpages, images, videos, PDFs, and more. The key to finding this content is through links. Googlebot is an example of a web crawler used by Google.

Indexing

Indexing involves adding processed data from crawled pages to the search index. This is a crucial step as the search index is what users search for when using a search engine. It is essential to get indexed in popular search engines like Google and Bing; otherwise, users will not be able to find you.

Ranking

Search engines search their index for content that is relevant to a user's search, organize the content, and then attempt to answer the user's query. The ranking is the process of ordering search results based on relevance. Generally, a website's ranking indicates how relevant the search engine considers it to the user's query. Search algorithms compare and rank relevant results from the index. Google's algorithms consider several variables, such as backlinks, to determine a webpage's ranking.

Why is crawling your website important for SEO?

If you have discovered that some of your important pages are missing from the index or some of your unimportant pages have been mistakenly indexed while using Google Search Console or the "site:domain.com" advanced search operator, there are some optimizations that you can implement to instruct Googlebot how you want your web content to be crawled. By directing search engines on how to crawl your website with a high SEO score, you may be able to have more control over what appears in the index.

While ensuring that Google can locate your crucial pages is important, it is easy to forget that there may be certain pages you do not want Googlebot to find. These pages could be outdated URLs with scant information, duplicate URLs (such as sort-and-filter criteria for e-commerce), specific promo code pages, staging or test pages, and so on.

In conclusion, SEO is an important technique for increasing organic search traffic to a website. By focusing on keywords in content, building links, and addressing technical aspects such as crawling, indexing, and ranking, websites can improve their visibility and position on search engine result pages. It's important to understand how search engines generate result pages and index content and to optimize your website accordingly. By directing search engines on how to crawl your website with a high SEO score, you can have more control over what appears in the index. Overall, SEO is a valuable tool for generating traffic, building trust, and improving website performance.