What is SEO? Check out these valuable SEO Tips for Beginners

22 April 2024 | By - Sudha Mariappan

It must be tiring to have your website reach the bottom of the search engine and not reach your audience frequently. But you can always optimize your website with SEO.

SEO, aka Search Engine Optimization, helps improve your website's content, link popularity, and technical configuration. Incorporating SEO into your business will make it easier for your content to reach your target audiences and make it relevant. SEO on your website will help your website rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs), leading to more traffic and potential customers.

What is SEO?

Optimizing your website can make your brand visible. Search engines recommend SEO practices that enhance the user experience and page ranking, such as using relevant keywords in titles, meta descriptions, and headlines. Featuring descriptive URLs with keywords will give your page a better chance of showing up on the first page of SERP.

Search engines such as Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo are a starting point for people searching for information online. Whether it's a product, restaurant, or vacation spot, business owners can optimize their websites accordingly so search engines can offer an opportunity to make the target audience reach their desired search and direct relevant traffic to their websites.

How SEO Works?

SEO is a process which has three stages. The primary stage is divided into two stages, on page and off page seo. Once we are done with the on page optimization we work on technical SEO. Lets understand what is On page SEO, Off page SEO and what is Technical SEO.

On-page SEO

On-page SEO is the optimization of the parts of your website that you can improve in order to stay relevant and reach your audiences. Through On-page SEO your search rankings can stay on top. On-Page SEO includes:

• Title Tags: Title Tags include your targeted keywords in the title tag of each page on your site. You should limit your title tags to 55-60 characters without adding any unnecessary keywords.
• Headings (H1): By adding H1 per page, you can target keywords into the headings of each web page.
• URL structure: If possible, including keywords in your URLs and labelling will make it easier for your directories and folders to keep in a way that makes sense for users.
• Alt Text for Images: Adding "alt text" to all images on your website will thoroughly describe the image. You can be benefited if you add in 8-10 words and include your targeted keyword where it sounds natural.
• Fast-loading pages: Optimizing your pages to load faster, checking site speed factors to minimize HTTP requests, enabling Gzip compression, and prioritizing content loading.
• Mobile Friendliness: Ensuring that your website is mobile-friendly will help the audience to stay on your website more, since the majority of them are mobile users. Use Google Search Console to analyze this type of information.

Off-Page SEO

Off-page SEO boosts a website by acquiring backlinks from other websites. Off-page SEO includes
link building: which is a technique that involves creating one way hyperlinks to a website to improve its visibility on search engines. These backlinks can be made by several strategies, including content marketing and email marketing.
Content marketing: Content Marketing is a great way to gain media attention, and earn backlinks to showcase trustworthiness. Distributing content to different channels is a way to boost off-page SEO.
Social media platforms: They do not directly affect Google rankings. However, they are important to increase attention and traffic for your content. When more people share your content on social media platforms, it can increase traffic and direct you to your website link.
Influencer marketing: It is a strategy that involves collaborating with popular bloggers and social media creators to promote your products or services. Influencers commonly have larger which can be an excellent way to build your brand, promote your content, and reach new audiences.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO refers to enhancing your website to make it more accessible and understandable for search engines. It should have the content, structure, and technical aspects of your website to improve its ranking on search engine result pages.
So by using technical SEO, you can,

- Improve your user experience by making your website faster and more mobile-friendly.
- You can increase your website's visibility and attract more organic traffic.
- Optimizing your website for technical SEO involves learning the basics and best practices.

What are SEO best practices?

SEO best practices are guidelines that can improve a website's organic rankings on search engines, mainly Google. These guidelines help increase website traffic by achieving higher rankings. When your page ranks higher, it is likely that a searcher will click through to your content. The graph below shows a significant difference in the click-through rate (CTR) between the first-ranked website and the remaining positions.

Not only can SEO be used for search engines like Google, but it can also be used for social media, mainly YouTube.

Youtube SEO Search

YouTube SEO is optimizing videos to increase views, gain channel subscriber count, and drive traffic to your website. It is a subset of SEO and aims to generate organic traffic from search engines, just like optimizing websites for Google.

For YouTube video optimization, you need to conduct keyword research to find popular search queries that people use to find information on a particular topic. For example, if you need to learn about parasite SEO, you can look into our Ultimate Guide to Parasite SEO YouTube video containing parasite SEO. Further optimizing your videos using those keywords will help them appear higher on search engine results pages (SERPs).

YouTube's algorithm uses a number of parameters to rank videos in search results and display them elsewhere on the network. Relevance, engagement, and quality are some of these aspects. Keywords determine relevance, whereas metrics (likes, comments, and shares) quantify engagement. Quality is established by the channel's knowledge and reliability.

Improving your YouTube SEO starts with conducting keyword research. You can use tools like keyword analytics for YouTube to help you get started.

Search engine optimization can be a powerful strategy if you choose to utilize it to reach your target audience and achieve long-term growth.

Note that SEO is an ongoing process, so it's important to stay updated on the latest best practices and keep updating your content to maintain a competitive edge.

If you're planning to use SEO for your business, contact us for further details. For more information, you can subscribe to our blog.