SEO Guide: For Beginners
An entire subindustry of marketing has grown out of the you-me-all tendency to seek information on the Internet. It is colloquially known as SEO. You may want to work on it, but don't know where to start. Learn from this step-by-step guide about all the important and basic aspects of search engine optimization. After that you can try to learn better about these things on your own.
Who will this guide to learning SEO work for?
This guide is for you, if you:
- Want to take training to be a digital marketer.
- Want to get a basic understanding of SEO.
- Want to increase customers of your online business, product or service through SEO.
How will this SEO learning guide help you?
After reading this guide you should:
- Learn what and why search engine optimization is important.
- Learn how search engines generally work.
- You can use the basic methods of creating quality content.
- Learn to apply some of the technical methods of search engine optimization.
- Learn how to get links from other websites.
- Get a clear idea on how to work more on search engine optimization.
SEO Basics
SEO Guide contains: SEO Basics
Not knowing exactly what search engine optimization means and for what purpose it can be used, many people jump into optimization directly. This can lead to problems later that cost a lot of time or money to fix.
There are a few things to keep in mind to avoid confusion about SEO. For example:
- SEO is all about focusing on your users. Search engines are only part of that job.
- SEO is not the same as advertising on search engines.
- SEO is a long-term and ongoing process. It is impossible to achieve and maintain good results in just one attempt.
What is SEO?
When we search for something in a search engine, a list of results is displayed. Most of the time our attention goes to the links at the top of the list. They are also more likely to be clicked. However, some of these links may be advertisements. The rest are common links.
The overall process of improving the ranking of a website, application and content in search engine results without using any kind of advertisement is called Search Engine Optimization (Search Engine Optimization) or SEO (SEO). Note that the person who does this optimization is also known as an SEO or Search Engine Optimizer. That is, in this case work and work are the same name!
Many understand SEO as advertising on search engines. But that is not the case. The main purpose of SEO is to increase the ranking of your website or content in search results so that the right users find it and come to your site. That is, to place as high as possible in the organic search results. On the other hand, the promotion of products, services and websites through direct advertising on search engines is called Search Engine Marketing or SEM. A link with an “Ad” or “Ad” tag on the results page. But it has nothing to do with search ranking.
It is not possible to change search engine results overnight through SEO. This requires long-term planning and strategy. You will come up with regular changes in that plan and strategy according to the needs of your target audience or customers.
Why is SEO important?
Let's say, you sell mobile phones. You want people to know about your business when they search the internet to buy a phone. But other phone vendors want the same thing. In that case, it becomes a matter of competition as to whose business users will know first in the search engine results. SEO can be a great way to stay ahead of the competition.
SEO is important because it:
- You can promote a product, service or organization for a long period of time with a relatively low investment.
- It is easier to gain the trust of potential customers,
- You can increase website traffic.
Search engine optimization is not limited to online businesses or services. It can be used by any organization of any size to run a campaign. Even if you don't have your own website, SEO can be ensured. However, this guide mainly contains information on website optimization.
What are the types of SEO?
There are generally three types of SEO in terms of work:
- On-Page SEO or On-Site SEO
- Off-Page SEO or Off-Site SEO
- Technical SEO
- On-Page SEO or On-Site SEO
The process of arranging and presenting the content of a webpage according to certain rules is called on-page SEO (On-page SEO) or on-site SEO (On-site SEO). Through this, you will present the content of your webpage clearly to the site users and search engines.
Some important aspects of on-page SEO are:
- heading,
- original content,
- Links used in the Content,
- Images and videos used in the content,
- Meta tags etc.
These issues are discussed in detail in the On-Page SEO chapter.
Off-Page SEO or Off-Site SEO
To increase the acceptance and popularity of the website to the users and search engines, some work needs to be done outside the main website. For example, getting links from other websites to your website or social media marketing. This process is called off-page SEO (Off-page SEO) or off-site SEO (Off-site SEO). However, most of the emphasis is on getting links.
How you can earn links from other websites will be discussed in detail in the link building chapter.
Technical SEO
The process of using certain technical methods to increase search engine ranking is called Technical SEO. Its purpose is to ensure the ease of use of your website by users and to make it easy for search engines to find the site.
Technical SEO includes:
- Website speed,
- Website structure or structure,
- Website performance on mobile devices,
- Crawlability (known as 'Crawlability') of websites by search engines;
- Facilitation of website content analysis and inclusion in results by search engines (known as 'Indexibility').
- Website security measures etc.
We will discuss technical SEO in different chapters of this guide as needed.
White Hat SEO and Black Hat SEO
There are basically two types of SEO based on whether the SEO is being carried out according to the correct rules or not.
White Hat SEO: The practice of using different methods of search engine optimization according to the guidelines of search engines is called White Hat SEO. You can ensure this practice by acquiring quality content and links from other websites.
Black Hat SEO: The practice of using methods that go against the guidelines of search engines is called Black Hat SEO. For example, creating content through software. This way it is possible to get good ranking in short term but it is harmful for your website in long term. So avoid black hat SEO.
Gray Hat SEO: There are methods of SEO that do not directly break the guidelines set by search engines. Again, they are not fully compliant with the guidelines. The practice of using such methods is called Gray Hat SEO. For example, buying links from other websites.
Black Hat or Gray Hat SEO may benefit you in the short term. But in this case the possibility of damage is more. If you really want to benefit from search engine optimization, you should always follow the guidelines set by the search engines.
Search Engine Basics
SEO Guide Chapter: Search Engine Basics - Bohubrihi Blog
You don't have to be an expert in the engineering aspects of search engines to improve search rankings. But if you have a basic understanding of the whole process of displaying search results, you will understand:
- How Search Engines Find Out About Your Site
- Factors taken into account by search engines decide to display your site's content.
- How search engines can present your site's content in search results.
How do search engines work?
Whatever you write or say in the search engine to search for information, it is called a search query. Against this comes a page listing various links. If you don't find the information you want on the first page, you can go to the next pages. These pages are known as Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).
Search engines use special algorithms before displaying any links or results in front of you. For example, the case of Google is taken into account:
- The type of information you are looking for,
- How relevant the webpages are to the information you seek;
- Content quality of relevant webpages,
- How user-friendly the potential webpages are,
- Your search settings, device, location, etc.
- Search engines follow three simple steps to show quality and relevant results:
- crawling
- indexing
- Select results
crawling
Search engines use spiders or bots to gather information and data from a website's text to images. If these web crawlers find a link on a page, they go to the link and look for information and data. This process of scanning the entire website is called crawling. Through this, the search engines get a chance to know about the existence and updates of your website.
indexing
After scanning a website, search engines organize all the information collected in a database. This process is called indexing.
Whenever you make changes to a webpage, web crawlers add those updates to the index.
Select results
As soon as a user searches for information in a search engine, a list of indexed, relevant and quality web content comes up in the results. The search engines keep secret about the exact algorithm used for this. But it is possible to get enough idea in this regard from their guidelines.
How does search ranking work?
No one can say with 100% certainty what criteria search engines use to determine the ranking of search results. The good news is that search engine optimizers and marketers have identified various ranking factors by conducting experiments. Let's know here about the ten factors chosen among them.
Relevance of content
Whether or not your content provides the information a user is looking for is very important to search engines. For example, you do phone business. You have some web content comparing the pros and cons of different brands of phones. Now someone typed “Xiaomi vs Samsung” and searched. From here it is clear that the user wants to know the difference between the two brands of phones. If you have optimized web content on this topic, search engines will find it relevant and may show it in search results.
Content quality
Content should not only be relevant, it is equally important to be of good quality. There are some questions to consider in determining content quality. From the previous example, these questions can be posed:
- Does your content mention the most important features of “Xiaomi” and “Samsung” phones?
- Has the user been given detailed information about the features in simple language?
- What kind of service will be available against the price of the phones, what is said in the content?
- Has anything been written about what users should pay attention to when buying phones?
- If you can provide all the useful information to the user in your content, then he may not have to search for it again. As a result, the chances of ranking higher in search results will also increase.
Content innovation
There is a lot of similar content on the internet. So if you come up with new quality content on a regular basis on a topic, you will gain prominence in the search engines.
Organic Clickthrough Rate
The percentage of clicks on an organic search result and the number of times that result is displayed is called the Organic Clickthrough Rate.
Let's say an ecommerce site's headphone product page is shown 40,000 times in organic results after searching for “Buy a headphone”. In contrast, it was clicked 20,000 times. That is, the organic clickthrough rate of that page is 50%.
The higher the clickthrough rate of a webpage, the more likely it is to rank well. However, if most users return to the search results without finding relevant and quality content after coming to the page, the page's ranking may go down.
Website topics and categories
When you have a dental problem, you go to the dentist, not the eye doctor. That is, subject knowledge is very important in solving a problem. This also applies to search rankings.
Ranking can be determined based on the topic on which a website regularly publishes quality content. For example, you regularly share a variety of recipes on your site. If someone searches for recipes, your webpages are more likely to appear in the results.