What is SEO and How Does it Work? [Absolute guide for Beginners]

What is seo – Do you know that there are currently more than 1.7 billion websites on the internet today?

Now, how do you ensure that people find your website when they search for anything on Google, Yahoo, Baidu, or Bing?

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Your website must be reliable, it must contain good contents that meets the need of people, and a well designed website is a plus on the other hand.

All of this is discussed in the world of seo which simply means search engine optimization.

If you are new to SEO, don’t worry much.

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In this post I will discuss the basics of SEO, everything you need to know as a beginner even if you are already quite familiar with SEO, i encourage you to also read as well.

i will be giving you guidelines on how to run SEO, all by yourself and the goodnews is that, it’s actually free.

Now lets dive in proper.

What is SEO?

SEO simply stands for search engine optimization and this seo, is what explains the logic behind the ranking of a website when you search for a particular content (which is known as keyword in SEO terms) on any search engine like Google, Bing DuckDuckgo, etc

In short, you can say that SEO is a digital marketing strategy that helps increase the amount and quality of traffic to your website.

If you own an online business, you might be thinking you don’t really need SEO. But the truth is you need SEO to up your sales or services that you may be offering on your website.

Please Read: Beginners Guide To Search Engine Optimization For Small Businesses

This SEO Optimization technique includes a number of steps you can take in order to rank higher on Google to get free traffic.

This free traffic is known as Organic traffic in SEO terms.

Note that I said the steps, which means that if you follow each step (and be patient) you will get see great results.

Although it may seem a little bit boring and painful at first glance, SEO can actually be very entertaining and easy to implement on any website.

The best way to understand SEO today is to decipher its meaning. from different angles and perspective or should i say aspects?

So, lets see

SEO as a Marketing Discipline

seo marketing — image by narciso1 from Pixabay

Understanding SEO is very important for all your marketing strategy because it can drive traffic to your website and generate leads and conversions which you can also call sales.

You do not only have to write content that Google likes, but also good content that appeals to your prospective audience.

These contents are exactly what you need to do the talking and further convince your audience to purchase your products or services.

Here is a link for Small business owners who are interested in running SEO on their website. I assure you.

Doing just a few steps of the seo strategy explained in this article will definitely Scale up your sales.

Read: Beginners Guide To Search Engine Optimization For Small Businesses

SEO as a Service Description

SEO SERVICES — Image by mohamed Hassan from Pixabay

It’s very important to know the best practices for optimizing your content and website if you want to compete for organic traffic.

People who know the revenue and costs of search engine optimization are in high demand because, the return on investments which they bring is usually very high.

So learning SEO optimization can actually serve as a skill or should i say paid Job. I get alot of emails from individuals who are interested in ranking on search engines or probably want to scale up their business page’s visibility on search engines.

The need for people who posses this search engine optimization skill is indeed, really in high demand, so what are you waiting for?

Next is,

SEO as an Exciting field

I don’t know about you, but for me it super amazing to create contents and see them appear on search enginesn not to talk about attracting new customers.

I also like the ever evolving nature of SEO and the fact that bloggers like me have to learn new changes to search engine’s algorithm and ways to build up more strategies.

For visual learners, here is a simple and cool video that describes SEO in its full details.

How does SEO work?

How seo works — Image by EstudioWebDoce from Pixabay

When people search for any term (Keywords) in search engines like Google, Bing, etc the results they present are a number of websites that are relevant to the query (search) and websites with a solid domain worthiness which you can refer to as Domain Authority (including the factors i outlined below).

For example, if you search for “richest man in the world“. the best results are what Google considers to be the best Search Engine Optimized content.

This is mainly due to the fact that search engines use sophisticated robots that collect information on each website and gather all the content they can find on the Internet.

This robots or web crawlers as they are sometimes called will index every website then compare the results gotten with the already laid down algorithm that Google sees as the best SEO practices.

Here is video of Matt Cutts from Google explaining how it works:

What factors influence SEO?

Regardless of whether you want to learn more about SEO or want current ranking techniques to improve the SEO of your website, there are a number of factors in place that Google and other search engines like when ranking people’s website.

Although Google’s algorithm contains more than 200 factors that influence your website’s ranking, the good news is that anyone can improve their website just by doing a few of them.

Eight most important SEO ranking factors

1. Domain Authority

Domain Authority (DA) is an indicator that shows how much trust is built by your domain over time, depending on the website’s connections (Link building) and age.

The more pages that talks about you, the higher your power (DA) will be.
The longer your domain, the higher its credibility.

Another important factor that I found is the relevance of the domain name with the main keywords you are targeting. For example, mydelsu.com is more likely to rank better than delsuaprokoblog.com when it comes to “SEO” website rankings.

Few friends of mine also reported that shorter domain names i.e short website names generally out perform longer domain names (website names).

You can likewise help your domain authority by building backlinks to your website.

2. Watchwords (Keyword)

SEO starts with picking the correct catchy phrases/Keywords (which you can discover utilizing by making use of Google’s Keyword Planner or Ahrefs).

My best procedure with a fresh out of the bag new blog is to begin by picking medium to low rivalry catchy phrases or Keywords and later.

I can start gradually but steadily develop my post to target increasingly searched terms and keyword phrases.

In the event that you are hoping to rank at a very high point you should incorporate LSI catchphrases ( this simply means watch words that are equivalents to your target terms).

For example, a site that talks more on “Education” can likewise incorporate terms, like, “scholarship”, “local scholarships, etc.

All i am saying is that, arrive at a point to incorporate the watch words that you need to rank for in the title and in the sub-headings for impeccable on-page seo ranking.

3. Relevance and Context

Web search tools are more smarter than at any other time you may have known.

They do know the contrast between a relevant page and a duplicated one.

They can likewise separate whether a simply site is about schools or hospitals.

I prescribe adhering to a specialty when working out on a site and simply making content which are explicit to that specific keyword.

For me, my specialty is internet advertising, making money online, forex and SEO.

4. Number of Inbound and Outbound connections.

The more relevant connections your site is getting from other websites, the more prominent your SEO score will be.

Same goes for inbound connections which are now increasingly preferred, particularly in the event that they are originating from esteemed, relevant and well known sources.

You can get backlinks by getting yourself connected to huge news locales for instance.

5. Site Speed

Google truly thinks about how rapidly your site loads.

To accelerate your site you can utilize caching plugins, for example, W3 Total Cache or utilize a CDN (content delivery Networks) to convey your website loading speed in a quicker manner.

6. Clean and responsive structure

These days, the best upgraded sites are the ones that are simple, functional and responsive to gadgets of assorted types and sizes.

Truth be told, Google even favors sites that have mobile friendly designs than ones that don’t have.

In the event that you are utilizing WordPress, you can introduce the AMP module to have your site load blazingly quicker.

Sincerely you will need to figure out how to utilize the accelerated mobile pages project by Google.

7. URL structure

The simpler your url, the better it is for people and web search tools to comprehend what your post is about.

Here are two models:

cybertechguide.com/what-is-seo/ and
cybertechguide.com/documents/12/17/2020/web optimization/?p=23

Obviously the first one is by far better since it’s distinct and also straight to the point.

A SEO few examinations have affirmed that the shorter the url, the better it is over and over again.

Despite everything you need to ensure you are remembering your top catchy phrases (Keywords) for the slug, this helps as an additional SEO boost.

Finally,

8. The Length of your content

At whatever point you are composing a blog post that you need to rank for, you need to ensure you are broadly explaining as much as you are expected to do under the circumstance.

Web crawlers have been compensating long-structure content since 2019, you won’t rank except if you compose at any rate 1500-2000 words for every post.

At the point when you compose long structure content, you allow yourself to investigate, explain and exhaust a theme or topic content from top to bottom.

Which in turn, will build the time that some guest spends on your website and signals Google that your substance is amazing due to its low bounce rate.

A great deal of my audience usually ask me this question:

“On the off chance that I need to start from the very beginning with a fresh out of bag content, how do i go it?”

I in reality recently began trying out different strategy with my new websites.

I picked a specific keyword to test if the SEO standards I write about actually works, and ofcourse they do.

So what is this system i followed?

I secured the whole process bit by bit, however i have succefully summed it up below:

Discover medium-tail catchphrases (Keywords) that have respectable volume.
Make long content that are over 1500 words or more.
Assemble backlinks by visitor posting.

That is it. There’s very little more to it.

However, if you are still willing to undertsand SEO step by step i specially recommend thisarticle.

Please Read: Learning SEO [ A beginners Complete Guide ]

Tools to assist you in SEO

There are numerous acceptable tools out there but my most preferred ones are (the surprising fact is that they are free!):

Ahrefs: to dissect every url and see who’s connecting to them and what watchwords (Keywords) they rank (with the expectation of getting a complimentary form of keyword, despite the fact that I propose getting the paid one).
I place my Keywords in strategic places according to the volume and rivalry of my contents.
Google Search Console to perceive how my site is performing over a period of time.

I utilize those tools, 97% of the time while for the remaining 3%, i make use of backlink building tools and many others.

Advantages of SEO

Extraordinary inquiry.

Search engine optimization can possibly drive huge amounts of valued traffics to your site for absolutely free.

For example, when you search for “bluetooth speakers“, would you say you aren’t bound to turn into a customer of whoever appears first on Google?

This is the intensity of seo website improvement.

It brings you warm leads that you can later convey advertisements to or even offer other items to.

Is SEO better than PPC?

Search Engine Optimization path is better than PPC (pay per click) since you don’t need to burn cash on advertisements to direct people to your webpage.

With PPC, your traffic will stop when you quit paying for promotions.

SEO has a longer enduring impact.

On the flipside, the upside of PPC is that in the event that you have a well-charged traffic over some deals page, you can undoubtedly scale up your deals from day 1 without hanging tight for Search Engine Optimization to kick in months after set up.

The SEM equation is substantially more unsurprising than SEO, yet SEO will pay for more months ahead.

What are SEO backlinks?

Backlinks are basically links from an another website to your own. For instance, when I link to this school blog mydelsu.com, I am producing a backlink for them.

The more top notch backlinks you get, the higher the position and rank of your site.

Hence, building backlinks is a very key SEO task in the event that you need to arrive at page #1 of search engines.

Are these tips only for Google SEO?

Google commands the web crawler space with practically 80% of every worldwide hunt.

Yippee and Bing have about 9% each. Despite the fact that the methods we’ve been talking about here are especially about Google SEO, they apply to all web crawlers the same way.

Are there some other options to SEO?

Given that SEO’s principle reason for existing is to direct people to your site, you can likewise get more visits by methods of promotions (like Google Adwords or Facebook advertisements).

You can likewise drive traffic through affiliate links and get cited on articles in exceptionally highly ranked websites.

How can i learn SEO?

At long last, the most ideal approach to learn SEO is by doing it. The more natural, regular and one of a kind substance you compose on your responsive website, the better outcomes you ought to get.

In any case, the same goes for any other online digital marketing strategy promoting practice, SEO requires time (in any event two or three months to commence) so be somewhat patient and don’t get discouraged.

It took me at any rate a year to start seeing some steady organic traffic on my site.

Most importantly SEO is anything but a one-time work. It is a common methodology that each website should concentrate on.

It can require some investments at first, but in the event that you are willing to learn it will pay off over the long term.

If you are not in anyway joking about learning SEO, look at some of my top SEO performing article by clicking here.