SEO or Search Engine Optimization is the process of increasing the quality of your website position and page rank through effective keywords and quality backlinks. SEO is an effective way to earn more traffic and improve the ranking of your website to make it more visible.
Most people use Google and only look at the first page of search result pages. Most people click the first three results in the results pages. To understand how to rank high or possibly first in the search engine results, you need to know how SEO works.
How Does SEO Work
Google is one of the major search engines and has a more defined initial search result page. The results are based mainly upon the authority and relevancy of pages it has included and crawled in its web index, to users query to give the best answer.
Google has a considerable team of experts that evaluates the quality of search results and gets fed into a technology learning algorithm. Google uses PageRank, a hyperlink based algorithm to calculate the authority and popularity of a page and SEO involves making sure a site is reachable with the help of proper keywords.
Reputable and relevant website linking to other websites is a strong indicator for Google to include your website on it’s SERPs (search engine results pages) for queries. Also using Google trends to strengthen your SEO efforts will help to increase the traffic.
How To Do SEO
SEO involves innovative and technical activities that are grouped into Off-Page SEO and On-Page SEO. These terminologies are quite dated, but it’s useful to understand, as it defines specific practices that can be done on a website or away from a site.
These practices require multiple individuals who have basic skills and set goals to carry the business into a profitable state. These individuals can develop their skills while on the job. Hiring a professional SEO agency or SEO consultant is also another good option.
Off-Page SEO
Off-page SEO also known as off-site SEO, refers to activities outside the website that impact the rankings within the search engine results pages. SERPs are web pages that help a user when they search for something using a search engine such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.
Optimizing for off-page ranking involves a user’s impression of a website’s popularity, authority, and relevance. Off-page is also referred to as link building, which aims to increase the number of links from other websites. As such, here are some ways of doing off-page SEO:
- Outreach and Promotion – This activity includes contacting bloggers, journalists, or influencers about a brand, content, or resource to earn coverage and links to your website.
- Content Creation – Creating excellent content will help attract links. This might include a story, how to guide or news with compelling data, a video, sound byte, etc.
- Digital PR – An online strategy used to increase online presence. It also involves gaining high-quality backlinks from other online publications and websites.
On-Page SEO
On-page SEO, also known as on-site SEO, is the process of optimizing elements on a website. On-site SEO refers to the optimization of the content and HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) source code of a page. In order to earn relevant traffic from search engines and getting rank higher.
Essentially, good on-page SEO helps search engines to understand what a human would see if they visited a page. On-page involves activities on a website to improve organic visibility. With that said, here are some ways of doing on-page SEO:
- Keyword Research – Analyzing the types of words used by customers in search engines to find products, services, or brand. Keyword research aims to use these specific words to optimize them.
- Keyword Placement – putting the keyword in the content and using the proper keyword that is suitable to the theme of the content.
- Meta Tags – a text that describes a page’s content. The meta tags appear only in page’s code and not on the page itself. For instance, a description meta tag is used to display a description of a page in the search results.
- HTML Code – Hypertext Markup Language is the standard markup language for creating web applications and web pages.
Takeaway
Almost everyone is relying on search engines to find anything online. If you’re into an online business, then you need SEO to manage and optimize your website. Knowing how SEO works and what activities are under Off-page site and On-page site will guide you why some websites are ranked high in SERPs.
Remember, there are a lot of factors needed to be considered to have an impact on your ranking. Always put in mind that SEO takes time to effectively work. In fact, following SEO practices by creating high-quality content that focuses on helping your audience is an efficient way to have a recognizable online presence leading to a thriving online business.
