So whenever you search for something on Google, let’s say you searched “How to write a Blog?“, then you see a list of websites in the search engine. These websites come to the top because they use Search engine optimization.

We know that there are billions of websites, but not every website ranks on a Search engine, right?

Search engine optimization is a key part of online marketing because search is one of the primary ways users navigate the web.

SEO is what helps you rank your page on the top google Search Results. This is the ultimate guide that has everything that you will need to know about Search Engine Optimization, or SEO.

What is a Search Engine?

Search engines are also called Web search engines or colloquially search sites.

A user enters a query (information request) into a search engine, which sends the request to a web server, retrieving information based on the user query.

The results are then presented to the user, usually as a list of links to sites that either meet or closely relate to the query. Search engines help research information and find data on the internet.

Don’t worry, this is just the definition, let me tell you with an example, you want to know about the best places to visit in America?

To get the information, you will search on Google, Yahoo, or bing. These are Search engines. A search engine takes your query and returns you the answer to your query.

So if we know about Search engines, now we can learn about what is Search engine optimization?

Know more about Search Engine.

Now we know the definition of search engine optimization, we discuss some terms we use for further learning.

Terms we will use for learning Search Engine Optimization

What is Keyword?

What is Keyword in Terms of SEO

Keywords are the words and phrases people type into search engines to find what they’re looking for.

For example, if you were looking for Digital marketing agencies in Indore, you might type something like “Best digital marketing agency in Indore” into Google.

Even though that phrase consists of more than one word, it’s still a keyword.

Now, whenever I say keyword, that means the search term you entered in google.

What is Google Snippet ?

Snippets are meant to give users a preview of the information that appears in the search results so they can determine whether they want to click through to your website.

Snippets are not meant to promote any one result over another. The idea is that snippets provide additional context and allow users to decide more quickly whether the search result is relevant to their needs.

It is also called the zeroth position in search engines.

What is Traffic in terms of SEO?

Web traffic or web hits is the number of visits to a website. There are several methods of calculating web traffic, but all involve counting hits on a website.

Hits are generated when an internet user opens a page or files on a website.

In simple words, the number of people who visit your website or webpage. It could be through social media, organically, or by Ads.

Why is SEO Important?

Do you have the same question? Why are we learning this complicated but not so complicated skill of SEO?

See, there are two types of people, one who asks the question and the other who provides the information.

So many people ask about something, and many give answers about that particular keyword.

As Google is a search engine, it wants the relevant answer for your keywords.

And let me tell you how google decides which website provides the right information? The answer is the website that uses Search engine optimization.

Google has many criteria or rules, which everyone should follow to get a higher ranking.

People use SEO for business, online presence, eCommerce, branding, etc.

It builds trust for the people who are seeing the results on the top, and it helps businesses grow.

So SEO is important for those who own a website, have a social media handle, or a youtube channel.

Every platform has different techniques to rank on that particular platform. In this blog, we are discussing website SEO.

Get free Seo checklist – Click Here

Important terms before Learning about the Types of SEO

Meta Title in Terms of SEO

Meta titles are the most important on-page SEO element for a webpage. It is the first thing people see and read when searching for a specific keyword.

This is why we should try to develop a creative yet relevant title for our webpage.

The meta title is one of the most important elements of on-page SEO, and it can help our page rank higher in search results if done correctly.

Meta Description in terms of SEO

In simple words, a meta description is a piece of content in a web page that intends to describe your page’s content and provide detailed information about it.

It is visible in search results, and if someone sees your page there and clicks on it, this meta description will also be shown as preview text in search results.

What are the Types of SEO?

There are 4 types of SEO

• On-page SEO
• OFF Page SEO
• Local SEO
• Technical SEO

We will discuss everything one by one.

What is ON Page SEO?

On-page SEO is the process of optimising your content. This means strategically using keywords and phrases that potential customers are searching for in order to drive traffic to your site.

All of this information is organised into a variety of fields, including meta titles, meta descriptions, headers, body copy and more.

Anything which you update or delete in your website, and follow the criteria of google that is ON page.

Criteria for ON-Page SEO 

Meta Title

As we discussed, meta title is the title of your webpage, title is a very important factor in SEO, by Meta title Google identifies what your page is all about.

Titles should be catchy and have some positive or negative emotion words like, best, Top, affordable, cheap and much more.

Meta Description

Meta description is the short description, which we have to set in for your page. It is the second most important factor that affects your Webpage SEO.

It should be convincing, and have a keyword in it, if you mention the keyword in it so in search results it gets highlighted so people are more likely to click on the website.

Headings

It is important to arrange your content with headings and subheadings, Headings are important for user interaction and also for Search engine Optimization.

If more than 300 words of content is without the heading, then it is very bad for users. Google prioritises the webpages if they use Proper headings and subheadings.

Images

Images are one of the most important factor for SEO, People stays on your webpage more if you have images in your Website

Search engines prioritise the sites who include images in their webpages, it looks attractive and better for user interaction.

Know About Image SEO.

Alt Tags

The tag you should include with the image you have uploaded, it tells google what the image is all about.

If you include Keywords in Alt tag then there are chances that you also appear in Google image.

Image SEO is also an Important part of SEO to generate traffic because some people try to look for images and if they like your image then they visit your website.

Importance of alt tags in Image SEO

SEO Friendly URL

Simple URLs provide the best user experience. Optimise URLs with descriptive keywords that provide a clear understanding of what the page content is about.

The SEO-friendly URL is the one that is easy to read, user friendly and search engine friendly.

For example, do you have a page that talks about “the different types of cats”? A user might type in “the different types of cats” in the search bar and your page will be displayed. However, if you don’t have a descriptive URL, it might not be found by search engines.

Internal Links

Whether you manage a single page website or a large-scale corporate website, internal links play an important role in SEO (search engine optimization). You can think of internal links as the glue that holds your site together.

Internal links enable search engines to crawl your website continuously and efficiently. And they allow visitors to easily navigate to other pages on your site.

Outbound Links

An outbound link is a link that goes from one site to another. The destination site could be anywhere on the web, but the important thing to remember is that it’s external to your site.

Outbound links are an important part of your website’s navigation and structure.

If you only have internal links on your website, then visitors will not be able to browse through all of your content quickly.

By linking out to other sites, you give them options to explore more content related to your niche without having to leave your site.

What is OFF Page SEO?

Off-page SEO is the cumulative effect of all of your efforts to rank on search engines for desired keywords.

Most people think of off-page SEO as link building, but it’s so much more. It includes social media, local SEO and much more.

All of these efforts share a single goal: to improve your ranking in search results. By improving your ranking, you’ll have a better chance of attracting new visitors to your website.

Off-page SEO is one of the most important parts of an effective SEO strategy. It’s what will move the needle in terms of organic traffic.

When done right, off-page SEO can be a huge factor in increasing the number of people who visit your website and actually take action, whether that action is filling out a form or buying something from your site.

With all that said, there’s no place for black hat tricks with off-page SEO. If you’re not careful, you could end up making it harder for yourself to rank in Google’s eyes than if you’d done nothing at all.

What are Backlinks?

Backlinks are links on other websites that point back to your website. The more high quality backlinks you have, the greater the number of people reaching your website.

Because search engines like Google rely heavily on backlinks to determine how reputable a site is, the more backlinks you have, the higher your rankings will be in search engine results pages (SERPs).

Quality over quantity is the name of the game when it comes to backlinks. You want to create a mix of different types of backlinks so that you’re not relying on one method for most of your links.

Backlinks should be relevant and related to your niche. For example, if you’re running an e-commerce site selling women’s clothing, you shouldn’t be getting a ton of links from sites about men’s clothing even though they both relate to fashion and clothing.

Types Of OFF Page SEO

• Social bookmarking
• Guest Posting
• Image submission
• Web 2.0
• Directory submission
• Google my Business

Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking is the practice of saving bookmarked web pages to a public website for others to see and use.

Social bookmarking is one of the most popular uses of the internet, with sites such as Digg, medium, StumbleUpon, Reddit and Delicious all allowing users to create lists of links to relevant websites.

Bookmarks can be added by anyone and usually remain active even if the original source is removed or changed. The tags created by users help categorise these bookmarks so others can find related content.

Social bookmarking helps people save links they like while helping them discover new websites they might otherwise have missed.

Guest Posting

Guest posting is one of the best ways to get more exposure and traffic to your website, blog or business.

And it’s a great way to build relationships with other influential bloggers, industry experts and potential customers.

Trying to figure out how to get started with guest posting?

Here are some tips for doing a great job at it.

Guest Posting Guidelines

Understand that you’re a guest. Even though you’re contributing content to another blogger’s site.

Readers may not always see you as an outside voice especially if your blog is newer and less established than the blog you’re guest posting on.

Always keep this in mind when writing for other sites, and be sure to thank the host blogger at the end of your article.

Use fresh content and create new articles specifically for each site you contribute to, even if your piece is similar or exactly the same as what you’ve written elsewhere.

Image Submission

Are you an online retailer? If so, you can use image submission to boost your search rankings. Here’s how.

What is Image Submission? 

Image submission involves placing images related to your website on various image hosting sites (such as Flickr and Pinterest).

It entails choosing the right image, alt text, file format and description.

Why Use Image Submission? 

Image submission can help improve your SEO ranking by boosting your link popularity.

Research has shown that Google uses images to determine whether a page is relevant to a particular search query or not.

By linking to relevant images, you are actually giving Google a clue on whether your website is truly related to the query or not.

This puts you in good standing with Google and increases your chances of ranking well in search results.

Web 2.0

Web 2.0 sites are the next step in website creation and development. Web 2.0 sites have a lot of unique features that you cannot find in other types of websites.

These sites let you upload your content and share it with people around the world.

This lets you make friends, establish business contacts and stay up to date with what is happening in your industry as well as get useful information from other people.

By using Web 2.0 sites you can create free blogs which allow you to share pictures, posts and articles with others who are on the internet at the same time as you are.

There are many different types of Web 2.0 sites that you can use to meet new people and share your interests and hobbies with them.

These include forums, communities and social networking websites.

Some of these websites have been created specifically for people who want to meet new people while sharing their interests or hobbies while others have been designed to help businesses sell their products by providing a platform for them to connect with their customers.

List of Web 2.0 Sites for backlinks –  whiteelephanttech@gmail.com

Directory submission

Directory Submission is the most important web marketing technique for any website.

Search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing give high priority to Backlinks from quality web directories.

They are one of the best off-page SEO techniques for boosting your search engine rankings and increasing website traffic.

Directory submission is a process of submitting your website URL to various web directories with the aim of building backlinks thus increasing business growth.

This is the off-page SEO technique, used to generate outsider links for your website.

The success of directory submissions depends on many factors such as which directories you submit to, how many good quality links you can get, and how much time you spend on getting them.

Google My Business (Local SEO)

Google My Business listings are designed to help people find local businesses.

They’re free and easy to set up, which is why many business owners have already claimed theirs.

Whether you’ve claimed your Google My Business page or not, we recommend that you review this information.

Here are a few things you should know about Google My Business

Google uses location signals to determine which businesses are most relevant for local searches.

To make sure your business appears in the most relevant searches, claim your Google My Business listing so people can find you when they search for local businesses on Search and Maps.

Claiming your business on Google can help improve your business’s online presence and can affect how it appears in Search and Maps.

If you choose not to claim your business on Google, there may be other ways for customers to find you.

For example, if someone has the phone number for your restaurant, they can call it directly from Search or Maps.

Technical SEO 

What is Technical SEO?

Technical SEO is a term that refers to the optimizations you make to your website and server setup to help search engine spiders crawl and index your site so that it can be more easily found and ranked for relevant keyword terms.

Why Technical SEO is Necessary 

For most websites, the technical SEO aspects are usually the most important part of your SEO strategy.

This is because while content and links are important, they don’t really matter unless Google can crawl, render and index them correctly.

If any of these three things break down then you’re sunk.

Of course it’s not that simple.

Getting technical SEO right is not a one-size-fits-all proposition. And there are many technical SEO optimizations you can do for your website.

What is Crawling in terms of SEO

Crawling is the process used by Googlebot (one of Google’s web crawlers) to find pages on the web and add them to Google’s index.

As the Internet grows, it’s important to understand how search engines crawl websites in order to optimise content for inclusion in the index.

What is Google Index in terms of SEO

Many people confuse the terms “index” and “rank.” They are not the same.

When we talk about a web page being indexed by Google, we are referring to Google’s ability to find your page.

This means that when you or your users search for a certain term, Google can pull up your site in its search results.

(By contrast, ranking refers to where your site appears on the SERPs — the search engine results pages.)

Technical SEO Checklist

Get your technical SEO right, and you’re helping to ensure that Google and other search engines have the best possible understanding of your website and can reward it with higher rankings in search results.

There’s a lot of debate about how much technical SEO impacts rankings, but there’s no doubt it plays a part and failure to configure your site correctly can lead to a range of issues that directly affect the user experience.

To help you improve your technical SEO and avoid such issues, we’ve put together this checklist of important steps you should take.

SSL is important

When it comes to web browsing, the majority of us are pretty savvy about the importance of security.

We know that we should never, ever enter our credit card details on a website that’s not encrypted with SSL (even if it’s a well-known company).

We know that we should avoid using public wifi networks for online transactions.

And yet, there are still plenty of businesses out there who are not using SSL on their ecommerce sites.

This is despite Google’s announcement in 2014 that they wanted to see ‘HTTPS everywhere.’

This was followed in 2015 by Google announcing they were going to begin prioritising secure websites in search results, which means non-secure sites could get pushed down the SERPs.

How HTTPS works

When you visit a website over an unsecured connection, any information you send and receive can be read by anyone else on the same network as you.

This means they can see your username and password when you log into your email account, and even session IDs which could reveal information about what you’re doing on the site.

Make your Website mobile friendly

The best way to ensure that your website is mobile friendly is by using a responsive web design.

This is a system that automatically adjusts the way your site appears on screens of different sizes.

It means that you don’t need to try and make separate sites for mobile and desktop users.

To check if your site is responsive, you can use Google’s ‘Mobile-friendly Test’ tool, which will tell you whether or not Google considers your site to be fully responsive.

Don’t Compromise with Speed

Google has stated that page speed is a ranking factor.

Search engines are interested in delivering the best possible search results to their users and this generally means faster sites with less resource consumption.

The better your load times, the more likely you are to be perceived as a high quality site and this will lead to improved rankings.

URL Structure

URLs are the address of your website. They tell search engines what pages to index and direct users to the information they want.

They should be easy for both humans and search engines to understand.

There are no hard and fast rules for creating web addresses, but there are some standards that will help you in search engine rankings and usability that we’ll discuss below:

Use friendly URLs. Friendly URLs are easier for users to remember and understand.

The URL should describe the page content or purpose. Ideally, friendly URLs also include keywords that describe what a user will find on a page.

For example

Use www.example.com/dog-breeds-list 

instead of www.example.com/listing-1 or www.example.com/product-detail/123456789?

How you can Speed up your Speed

Use reliable Hosting

When we talk about the best web hosting providers, there are a lot of companies that come up. And it’s no wonder why.

The demand for top quality web hosting is constantly growing, and the industry is advancing to meet the needs of its customers by offering unique and innovative services.

So, when we talk about picking a web hosting provider to help you create an online presence for yourself, how do you go about it?

It helps to have a clear idea of what you want to achieve with your business or personal website, and this will help you determine the type of web hosting plan you’ll need.

Remove Unusable Files:

Unused files take up extra space on your site and slow down the speed at which your page loads.

This is a problem most commonly seen with old WordPress themes and plugins, so it’s important to check in and make sure you’re not running older versions of either.

Do you have any plugins that you are no longer using? Get rid of them! One thing I like to do is keep a “test” directory where I can upload plugins that I’m testing out or reviewing.

Minify your code

The code of your site has to load before the end user can see it, and that means that a lot of the time they are seeing nothing.

Make sure you’re not wasting any of that time by minifying any HTML, CSS and Javascript.

The easiest way to do this is with a tool called Google Minify (found here: http://code.google.com/speed/minify/).

It will take your code and remove all unnecessary spaces, line breaks and indentation but only where it doesn’t affect how things work.

This makes the file smaller, allowing it to load quicker for your users.

Optimise your images

Optimising your images is not just about reducing the size of your images.

It also includes making sure images are the proper size and dimensions so they don’t impact the speed of your website.

Image optimization is a key part of SEO, too. Google has stated that site speed is now a ranking factor, and if your website is slow because you have enormous images, it will hold back your rankings.

Avoid using large images that could be compressed without losing quality (as seen with some stock photography sites).

Connect your website with Google Search console

The main purpose of Search Console is to provide information about how your site is doing in search.

It can help you identify any technical issues, as well as optimise your content for SEO. It’s a must-have tool for every site owner!

With Yoast SEO Premium you can easily verify your site with Google Search Console.

This will make sure all the features of Yoast SEO are working properly and you can fully benefit from connecting your site to Search Console.

Search Console is a powerful tool and with Yoast SEO we want to make it easier for you to get the most out of it.

That’s why we have added a new feature that lets you connect the two in just a couple of steps. Let’s see how that works.

Update Sitemap

A site map is a list of pages on your website. Search engines use site maps to index your website and make it easy for users to find the information they are looking for.

The site map is one of the most important parts of SEO because search engines rely on it to crawl and index your website.

When you add a new page to your site, you should always add it to the sitemap as well.

Adding a new page or adding a new section to an existing page will require you to update the sitemap.

If you want to keep your old URLs, use the 301 redirects (URL redirection). They tell search engines that the URL has moved permanently and they should update their records accordingly.

Search engines use robots (a computer program) to find and index websites.

You allow them access by creating an XML file that contains links to all of your pages. This file is called a site map.

Upload Robot.txt file

A robots.txt file is a text file placed on your website that gives instructions to search engine crawlers about which pages you want them to crawl and which ones you don’t want them to crawl.

It’s like an online set of house rules for any web crawler that visits your site and if you don’t have one, Google can penalise you for it.

Conclusion

Search engine optimization is a MUST in today’s world as every business wants to rank 1st on SERP.

We hope the points we have covered in this blog will help you learn SEO.

Now, we’d like to ask few things to you:

What’s your favourite tool while doing SEO?

What was your favourite expedient from the blog? Do let us know in the comment section below.