What is SEO | A Complete Study about SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a process of increasing the website traffic by using the organic
search engines. In short it is a way of optimizing a site in order to make it visible to the search engines such as google, yahoo and bing and increase the overall rank in Search Engine Result Pages (SERP). 

During earlier days, google ranked website using Keyword density, this lead to a controversial practice known as keyword stuffing. Due to this even high quality websites are placed lower in search engine rankings. To overcome this google decided to give priority to the quality instead of the keyword density. Therefore the same techniques that has been used during the beginning stages of google cannot be used now. Today it is essential for every blog owner to know about the SEO. Whether you are an individual blog owner or running a business site, SEO is very important. Especially it is vital for making the blog reach to the right people and convert the set of visitors into customers. 

However SEO can be sophisticated to the users who are new to the blogging industry, but SEO is not that hard how it seems to be. In fact you can learn SEO for free using online resources. To execute the correct SEO techniques there are many tools available such as SEMrush. Google has their own Search Console that helps you to track the SEO level of your site.

How does SEO works ?

Before we move to the SEO part it is important to know how search engines work. The goal of a search engine is to show the best result to the searchers. Search engines use complex mathematical algorithms to show up a search result. Search engines such as google are trying their level best to keep it secret the algorithm. Even for securing it they take steps to change it frequently. For a common blog user it is difficult to understand these algorithms. 

All the search engines such as google, yahoo and bing has their own crawlers (also known as Spiders / bots) to find pages according to search results. However these crawlers will not treat all the pages equally. Search engines consider different factors before crawling a page. Therefore every blog owner should execute correct SEO techniques for seeing the expected results. SEO takes some time to show its effects. Even though the user will not see the SEO impacts immediately, surely the effects can be seen in few months. Once you apply the SEO techniques and notice an improvement in the search engine rankings you are at the right direction.

Factors Impacting SEO

You would have heard it many times that '' Content is king ''. Because most quality website relies on their content. In order for creating a professional SEO friendly content, right SEO techniques should be applied. But to apply these techniques, the factors affecting SEO should be known as well. When ranking a page, Search engines consider many factors. Google agreed that they use more than 200 metrics to rank pages. While it is not possible to understand them all, there are few of them which is well known for SEO. These factors include both On page and Off Page.



On Page SEO is the factors that can be implemented on the website and which has a direct influence in search engine rankings. Which means that you have the complete control over this. Therefore you can take measures to improve your blog using these factors.

Some of them are,

Title Tag - Title tag is the 1st thing that appears in the search engine result pages. Perhaps it is what a searcher sees once he searches a term. Title tag is equal to the newspaper headlines. If the title tag contains more than 70 characters it will be truncated in the SERP. Therefore make sure that your title tag is not more than 70 characters and includes all the keywords.

Meta Description - Same as the title tag, the meta description too appears in the search engine result pages. Therefore it is nearly as important to the tile tag. People use this description to decide whether to click on it or not. Meta description should be short and summarizes all the content in the web pages. And it is important to include the main keywords in the meta description too. Because meta description used to bold each of the keywords in them which the searchers use.

Alt Attribution - Unlike a title tag and meta description, search engines cannot easily understand images. To know what an image is all about, search engines relies on alt text and image title. Alt text should be descriptive of what the image is about. It is a best idea to include keywords in alt text as well.

Keywords - Keywords are the exact term of how a user searches on search engines. One of the crucial parts of SEO is selecting the right keywords. Therefore proper research has to be done on the keywords. There are free and paid tools for this purpose. Google's keyword planner is a free tool that can be used for choosing the best keywords. Always pick up keywords with high search volume. High search volume means that there are more people searching for that particular term. However keywords with high search volume will have more competition as well. As a result without proper SEO knowledge ranking can be difficult.

Page Speed - Page Speed is the measure of how fast your web page loads. It has a direct impact on both the desktop and the mobile. When a webpage loads slower there is a chance for the user to hit the back button. In fact researches says that the user has a chance of 113% to leave a page when it takes more than 7 seconds to load. A well optimized page loads in less than 3 seconds. Therefore focus on improving the page speed by compressing image, removing unwanted widgets etc.... You can use tools such as Google PageSpeed insights to identify how fast your webpage loads.

Mobile Friendliness - Almost 65% of the google searches are done from the mobile devices. In fact google announced in 2016 that sites those are mobile friendly will have a boost in rank than those which are not. And also anther announcement was made in 2018 that mobile version of the pages will be indexed 1st. Therefore there is no use if you optimize your site only for desktop viewers. There are many testing tools available to test your site's mobile friendliness.



Off page SEO is the SEO techniques done outside the website to promote it. Same as the On page SEO, the Off page SEO too has a direct impact on ranking. Even though you cannot control these factors directly there are still many ways to work on them.

Some of them are,

Link Building - Link buildings are proved to be a powerful technique in SEO strategy. Link buildings are of 2 types internal and external. Internal links consists of pages that link to your own site and External links (also known as Backlinks) consists of links from other well known sites. Links from other sites are more effective in SEO than from your own site. Back links prove that your site is trust worthy and authoritative. The way to get backlinks is through a process known as Guest Posting. Guest posting means that writing posts to other sites in order to get links from them. It is not just backlinks, it is the quality of backlinks that matters. Always ensure that you get backlinks from high authoritative websites.

Social Signals - Another major factor which influences SEO is the Social Signals. This basically means that social likes and shares. When a quality content is posted, people will share your content on social media. When more people share your content it is a positive sign to the search engines. Therefore always post quality content for the viewers.



Black Hat Vs White Hat SEO

Techniques applied for the SEO can be classified into 2 as Black Hat and White Hat SEO. Techniques those are approved by the search engines are known as White Hat SEO. White Hat SEO means that the content created are purely for the users and for the search engines. Generally White Hat SEO techniques are considered safe to be used and long lasting. 

On the other hand, SEO techniques opposed by the search engines are known as Black Hat SEO. Black HAT SEO involves illegal methods those which are used for the sole purpose of improving ranks. Applying Black Hat SEO techniques has a risk of getting banned. Once the search engine finds a site with Black Hat SEO techniques it will immediately penalize them. Therefore it is always recommended to use White Hat SEO techniques to earn the trust of the visitors and stay safe.