SEO Basics - What Is SEO? How SEO Strategy Can Boost Your Blog Traffic?
Search Engine Optimisation a.k.a SEO is the life of any blogger. Mastering it will get you to the peak of success but ignoring it will take you nowhere. No matter what topic you write on if you don’t practice SEO in your articles then you will not get even an impression on first page of google search. In this SEO guide, I will discuss SEO basics & SEO importance for your own blog or website. I will simplify SEO so that you can quickly start implementing it in your articles. So without any further adieu, let’s get started!
SEO Basics
What Is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. Back in days there used to be web directories where users used to submit their content. It was time-consuming for searchers to get the relevant content from directories. Web directories also had spammy content. But now we don’t use directories but search engines to find approximately everything on the Internet.
Every search engine has set of rules that it base search results. And the practice of those rules is called SEO.
For example, almost all search engines first look for search keyword in headings when presenting search results. There are said to have more than 200 rules that search engines base search results. In this SEO guide, I will specifically talk on Google for demonstration. Remember that your journey to SEO starts from here, not ends here. You’ll need to learn more SEO techniques for ranking your sites up. But don’t worry I’ll cover SEO techniques & tools in my future SEO strategy guides.
Why SEO Techniques Are Important For My Blog?
Today most blogs receive majority of readers from Search engines because it is the place most Internet users search for any kind information. Almost everyday all Internet users Google for something. The reason I am talking about Google is that it is the king of all search engines. We now use Google as a synonymous of search. “Google it!”. Google receives 100 billion plus searches in just a month. Per second Google serves approx 50,000+ searches! It is bigger than any other search engines out there including Microsoft’s Bing, Yandex, Yahoo and any other that exist.
One may think getting handsome number of impressions from Google is easy as they have the largest number of searchers. But that is not always true. Just imagine you have a technology blog. There are millions of searches per day for different kind of technology related stuff. At the same time, there are billions of pages providing similar technology related information. Though there are millions of searches but billions of pages providing similar information. Now think yourself the chances of your page coming up in the first page of Google search. Quiet low! What! Impossible? Well, don’t loose hope. Just keep reading! Though the competition is high but not impossible.
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SEO Basics – How Search Engines Work?
Don’t be afraid after knowing that the huge number of pages search engines index. If you know how search engines work and what are the rules of their search result listing, it will be easier for anyone to follow up and sky-rocket the chances of coming up on first page. The good news is that you don’t need to follow up rules of all search engines. I recommend you learn Google rules of listing and it should work for all other search engines.
Let’s start with Matt Cutts’ video explaining how Google works. Matt Cutts is a head of Google’s webspam team.
There is not much to explain on how Google search works if you watched the above video. The two things that I want to focus on are the page authority and on-site optimisations.
(i) On-Site Optimisations
Search engines like Google looks for two things to rank a site. First On-Site optimisation and second Page authority. Let’s talk about what is on-site optimisation.
On-site optimisations are the important things that we need to include in our articles. For example, to rank for a keyword, you need to use that keyword in the artilce’s title. Search engines first look for the keyword in the title and then in the content of article. So you also need to use that keyword in at least one of the sub-headings, in paragraphs, in the ALT tag & filename of images etc. There are other important steps to know but in this SEO basics I’m not talking about on-site optimisations in detail, it’s the topic for another day for SEO techniques.
(ii) Domain Authority Or Page Authority
Other than the on-site optimisations, Google also looks for domain or page authority. Google ranks each website based on how many links point to your domain or page. It is also called backlinking. The more backlinks your website has the more Google ranks it. But don’t try to fool Google by posting too much of your site links in the forums, social networking sites, guest posting sites etc. To rank a website or blog Google only considers backlinks from the quality websites. So if hundreds of low quality and spammy websites link to your site, Google won’t consider such links. Instead, it can harm your site’s ranking.
Don’t Worry, Start Implementing SEO In Your Content
Once you know what SEO is, don’t waste your time thinking how hard it is to rank on first page. Search engines are very smart so if you are practising SEO, your website will surely beat others. Keep learning SEO techniques from SEO guides like this. Be sure to check out our latest articles on SEO.
