Optimize your SEO with the latest guidelines
Rajendra Zadpe
What is SEO?
Quite simply, SEO is the umbrella term for all the methods you can use to ensure the visibility of your website and its content on search engine results pages (SERPs).
SEO or Search Engine Optimization is the process of optimizing a website’s visibility on the organic search engine results pages (SERPs) for a target set of keywords/key phrases.
SEO Optimization tips:
Search engines use algorithms to calculate how worthy a page is to a relevant search query. There are hundreds of factors (Google uses over 200 ranking factors) that are used to calculate the authority of a webpage, and PageRank (based on a scale of 0 – 10) is one of them.
Algorithms
Search engines use algorithms to calculate how worthy a page is to a relevant search query. There are hundreds of factors (Google uses over 200 ranking factors) that are used to calculate the authority of a webpage, and PageRank (based on a scale of 0 – 10) is one of them.
Crawling
Search engines use bots or “spiders” to crawl billions of pages across the web by following links they find from billions of pages around the web.
Indexing
Search engines then store the information it collects into its index.
Ranking
When a search query is entered, a search engine digs into its index for pages matching the user’s search query, then sorts and displays the most relevant results to the user.
As beginners guide to seo, given below are the major points what are search engines look for:
1. Relevancy
Search engines try to provide the most relevant results to a searcher’s query
2. The quality of your content
Do you regularly publish helpful, useful articles, videos or other types of media that are popular and well produced? Basically, stop worrying about keywords and focus on the user experience.
3. User experience
You need an easily navigable, clearly searchable site with relevant internal linking and related content
4. Site speed
How quickly your webpages load is increasingly becoming a differentiator for search engines
5. Cross-device compatibility
Is your website and its content equally optimized for any given screen size or device?
6. Internal linking
It provides your audience with further reading options
7. Authority
An authority website is a site that is trusted by its users, the industry it operates in, other websites and search engines
8. Meta descriptions and title tags
The meta description is the short paragraph of text that appears under your page’s URL in the search results, it’s also something you should have complete control of in your CMS.
9. Schema markup
You can make your search results appear more attractive by adding Schema markup to the HTML of your pages. This can help turn your search results into a rich media playground, adding star-ratings, customer ratings, images, and various other bits of helpful information.
10. Properly tagged images
By describing your image in the alt text as accurately as possible it will increase the chances of your images appearing in Google Image search.
11. Evergreen content
More thoughtful, helpful, and practical-advice-based articles can lead to huge long-term wins in terms of driving traffic and occupying highly visible positions in the SERPs.
12. Domain names
You should use sub-directory root domains (searchenginewatch.com/category/seo) instead of sub-domains (searchenginewatch.category.seo.com) as this is better for your overall site architecture.
13. Headlines and permalinks
The headlines for your articles should be under 55 characters to ensure their complete visibility in SERPs.
14. Comments
Do not turn off your comments system. Having a thriving community of regular commenters engaging in dialogue under your posts shows that visitors care enough about your content to either make their own relevant points or to praise it or to ruthlessly eviscerate it.
15. Local SEO
Increasingly Google is serving results to users based on their location. You should register with Google My Business and ensure that all of your information is accurate and up-to-date, such as opening times and contact information’
16. Social
The most obvious way that you can raise your site’s visibility through non-technical SEO means is of course through social media marketing.
Search engine optimization (SEO) can be competitive, but it is still by far the most effective way to drive sustainable traffic to your website.
Moreover, the efforts you put in optimizing your website for search add up over time, helping you get even more traffic as long as you’re consistent with SEO.
To achieve this, remember to follow the five tips of good basic SEO:
- Find relevant keywords with good search traffic potential
- Create and optimize pages for search engines and users alike
- Make sure your website is accessible to both bots and humans
- Build relevant links from other high-quality websites
- Track what matters