In this blog, we are going to talk about SEO for beginners. How beginners can do SEO for their site, for that let’s first learn What is SEO and why we have to do SEO. Here we will also talk about how you can rank your website at the top of Google.
What is SEO?
“SEO” stands for search engine optimization, SEO helps your site increase organic traffic and also helps to increase site reach. SEO is part of digital marketing, if you are searching for “what is SEO” then you might be interested in doing SEO or want to start learning it.
In simple words, SEO is the best practice for optimizing web pages and improving their appearance and position in SERPs or Search Engine Result Pages.
Types of SEO
We know basically three types of SEO:
- White hat SEO(Most Important)
- Grey Hat SEO
- Black Hat SEO(Not recommended)
Here we will talk about white hat SEO only because it is a long-term solution for businesses or websites and it follows all guidelines given by google. It is a lengthy process, lengthy means it takes time to rank your website or business at the top.
Also as a beginner, you don’t have to think about Grey hat and Black hat SEO. Your focus should be on how you can do SEO and rank your website.
Why do SEO?
As a beginner, this question might come to your mind “why do SEO?”. The answer is just simple, if you want to rank your website on google you have to do SEO. If your website is ranking #1 on google for some keywords, you will get some quality traffic from there.
Here are some more reasons for you to know why you have to do SEO for your website:
- Organic traffics: Organic traffic is the unpaid traffic that comes to your site through organic searches. You don’t have to pay anyone for that traffic.
- Organic Results: Organic results are results that are shown to users by search engines according to their queries. For example, when a user submits a query to a search engine, then the search engine shows the most relevant results to the user’s query, these results are shown by the search engine are organic results
- Paid results: Paid results are the results that help you to show your website on top of SERPs by paying some amount of money to the search engines like Google, Bing, and others. But it can’t help you in a long run and also you cannot rank higher by paying any search engine, if you want to rank higher you have to do proper On-page and Off-Page SEO.
- Quality of Traffic: Quality of traffic depends on the user and their search query, if your website has the answer to the user’s query then your website will rank on the top of search engine results pages. For example, if a user looking to buy a mobile and you are selling a mobile phone then it is relevant to the user query, but if you are selling some other products then this is showing irrelevant results, here SEO comes into action and helps search engine to show relevant content to their users according to their query.
Hope you have learned something about SEO and got some good reasons to do SEO let’s now know how it works and how you can rank your website on google.
How does SEO work?
Search engines like google, Bing, and Yahoo use their bot to crawl web pages, collect their information, index them according to their category and show them in their search engine result pages according to their algorithms.
To tell the search engine bots about a website we use SEO. SEO helps search engine bots to easily crawl websites and helps to understand the purpose of the website and index them accordingly. After indexing your website will be ranked based on how Google understands your content.
How to rank organically on google
I am assuming that you are a beginner and don’t know too much about SEO and how to rank a website on google. Here we will discuss some important SEO factors which will help you to understand how to do SEO and how to rank organically on google.
First, you have to complete the basic on-page, technical SEO after doing these two right go for Off-page SEO and build your website authority.
On-Page Optimization
On-Page optimization refers to the optimization which you have to do on your own website to rank higher in SERPs, here are some On-page steps that help you to increase your SEO score:
- Content optimization
- Use short and descriptive page URLs
- Optimize title(max 50-60 characters) and meta descriptions(140-158 characters)
- Optimize heading tags (Include your keyword in Heading tags)
- Optimizing images (resize big images and optimize alt-text)
Technical Optimization
Technical optimization is the practice of improving your site for crawling and indexing, it is a part of On-page SEO. In this step, we optimize the website’s infrastructure for better performance. Below are the steps for Technical SEO that help your website to rank on google:
- Optimizing robots.txt file
- Optimizing the 404 error page
- XML sitemap and SSL certificate
- Website speed
- Mobile-friendliness
- Implement Schema – You can implement different schema based on your website and requirements.
- Submit to Google search console – Submitting your website will help Google to index your website and crawl your website to rank it.
The above two steps will help you to rank on google, so doing them correctly will help your website to rank organically.
Off-Page Optimization
Off-page SEO is an optimization that takes place outside of your website and helps in improving the rankings of your website. In off-page, you have to build high-quality backlinks and share your website on social media platforms that can help your website to increase its authority and popularity.
In off-page, we have many techniques that will help you to grow your website or brand online. Below I am sharing some of the off-page techniques that can help to increase the website’s authority and rank organically on google.
- Social Bookmarking – Social bookmarking is the best way to get instant visitors or traffic to your website. You have to just write some quality content and tagline and share it on some of the top social bookmarking sites.
- Image Submission – In image submission, you have to share your images on popular image submission sites and optimize them with title, description, and informative alt text.
- Infographics Submission – Infographics submission is a popular off-page technique, submit your infographics on high authority infographics submission website and give a link to your blog or website.
- Document sharing – In Document sharing, you have to create attractive PPT or PDF with unique content and submit them to the document-sharing websites
- Forum Posting – In forum posting you have to participate in forum discussion relevant to the service you offer. Search forums that give do-follow links.
- WEB 2.0 – Web 2.0 is another off-page technique where we get a new subdomain in high authority websites like medium Tumblr, blogger, WordPress, and many others.
- Blogging
- Article Submission
- Guest Post – Guest posting is the most effective way of earning backlinks for your site, in a guest post you have to contribute to others’ blogs or websites that are open for guest posting. You can search guest posting sites by typing Keyword + “Write for us” OR Keyword + “Become a contributor”, etc.
- Social Media Engagement – Building a social media network is a very good off-page strategy to increase the reach of your website. Because if your content is providing value it will start getting shared across multiple platforms and become popular.
- Question and Answer – Question answer is all about writing quality content and sharing it with the right people who need it on some popular question-answer websites like Quora and StackOverflow.
- Video Submission – Videos give a boost to your website ranking and help to improve ranking faster. You just have to put the proper title, description, tags, and reference. Video Submission is one of the best ways to get high-quality backlinks from high-authority websites.
- Micro-Blogging
- Press Release
- Classified listing
- Business Listing
- Google my business
- Search Engine submission
- Ping Submission
- Directory Submission
- Blog commenting – Commenting on Blogs and leaving your site link was a fast way to get backlinks for your website, but nowadays irrelevant comments on irrelevant blogs are of no use and google takes it as spam. But it can still be effective if you do it in the right way.
Some of the techniques written above like Blog Commenting, Directory Submission, and Ping Submission are outdated nowadays, but many people are still using these techniques. If you use all these techniques your website will definitely get a boost in SERPs.
Most important thing is to rank on google organically above are some ranking factors that can help any website to rank organically. On-page will help you to rank and off-page will help you to be on top of SERPs.
Conclusion:
Let’s take a quick overview of what we learned in this post about how to rank your website organically on google. To rank a website you have to know about SEO, if you have high-quality content, you will definitely rank on google.