Understanding the How to of Search Engine Optimization in 2020

I know you are here because of one word – SEO. SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization; in the online business, especially when it comes to digital marketing, this phrase is not strange at all.

But how do I explain this phrase to a layman?

What is Search Engine Optimization?

Like I mentioned earlier, SEO stands for search engine optimization. It is the process at which you make your website friendly for search engines like Google, Yahoo to find. It helps search engines direct organic traffic to your website (organic traffic refers to free traffic).

Let me break it down.

People are searching the internet looking for information about one thing or the other. There are millions of websites carrying this information, and your own is one of them. Naturally, when people search, they stop on the first page of this website like this below

So there is a lot of competition amidst websites to appear on the first page of search engines. These help them become visible and get a click when users are searching. All the activities you have to put in to make your website appear on search engines’ first page is referred to as Search Engine Optimization.

Good, we borrow a definition from Wikipedia; they expressed Search engine optimization is everything you do to improve the quality and quantity of your website that will increase genuine traffic to your website.

Just before we move on to how to increase your website ranking on search engines, it is of great essence we take a Look at another important acronym – SERP.

Every website as a SERP(Search Engine Results Page), this is simply the page where your website appears. The better optimized your website is, the better your SERP and the more visible your website is for a potential customer to find you. It is good we take a look at how to improve your website ranking How to improve your Search Engine Ranking

BLACK HAT VS WhITE HAT SEO

There are two ways you can go about getting website optimization

1 )Black Hat SEO

2) White Hat SEO

Black Hat SEO refers to how organizations and business owners achieve a higher ranking on search engines. They focus on content built just for Search engine ranking, thus neglecting the relevance of such content to humans. These bring a good income but in the short term. Apart from building a business that runs in the short term, your website can also get banned by search engines like Google, this, of course, is not good for both you and your business

If you are interested in building a long and sustainable term business then you should be giving the white Hat SEO a good thought. With White Hat SEO, the objective is delivering excellent content to your visitors. These are easily readable content and navigation between content is seamlessly achieved. To achieve this you must abide by the rules of search engine optimization while you patiently build a sustainable business.

Produce Quality Content 

This is always topmost on my list, Google is a major player when it comes to SEO and her algorithms continue to change day in day out. One thing has remained constant, their demand for quality content. They are always in search of pages that contain concise information that is of high quality around the searcher’s query. They do this by constantly crawling and checking your website content for relevance concerning what searchers are looking for. A good way to ensure that your site consistently pass Google’s yardstick is to always build quality and relevant content.

Search engines will continue to rank your pages higher than your competitors if you consistently build quality content that is relevant, engaging, and effective. If this is achieved visitors will spend more time on your website.

Creating such content is no robot science, it comes from creating content for visitors at the back of your mind and not just for search engines. Your content can be entertaining, educating, or informative; also you have diverse ways you can package your content.

You can package it has:

1. Social media Content
2. Ebooks
3. Videos
4. Articles and Blog Post

One major thing we must take a look at when creating content for the search engine is ourkeyword research for SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Keywords are words or phrases people are searching on search engines, when in need of answers to their questions or in search of products or services.

Engaging these keywords the right way will improve your position on the Search Engine Result Pages (SERP). If the content is released on consistent and regular basses it will go a long way to improve your ranking on the SERP. Apart from content, other things like social media and the likes play a major part in search engine optimization but in this article, we will continue to look at both the On-page and Off-page SEO

What is On-Page SEO?

On-page SEO refers to the who activity on your website directed at search engine optimization. They are factors or things which you can adjust to get a better result rightly on your website, this includes:

Meta Description: this is where you tell both human and search engines what your page is about. In describing your article content you must include your word.

Title Tag : is usually about 69 words long, and it should concisely contain your keyword and content focus.

Subheadings: they make reading easy for readers and with the aid of various tags like the H1, H2, H3, you can improve the SEO of your page.

Internal links are a good way to direct and help both visitors and search engines learn more about other related articles on your website. If you are talking about a product, linking to a review page that now carries your referral link is a good way to go.

Image Name and Alt Tags: images are a good way to add visuals to your website, they increase the ease of readability. When images are properly optimized with the image name and alt tags, it improves the SEO of the overall pages.

Including image name and alt tags are a good way to optimize images, always ensure to include your keywords in these spaces.

I must state this, focusing on one keyword per article and placing this keyword within the content is a good way to go, but we must not abuse this by over inserting this keyword in our post. Using keywords everywhere in your post can lead to Google penalizing your page, this you will not want.

Off-Page SEO

These are basic factors contributing to your SEO status that you don’t have direct control over. Although you don’t have direct control over this part of SEO, you are not going to leave it to the wind; rather you must find a way of improving it.

Below are a few elements and how we can manage them

External Links is a good way to improve your ranking when it comes to search engine optimization, Build a relationship with authority sites known for quality content, so doing you can get genuine links to your site.

Social Media Shares: you will not go about begging people to share your article or content on their social media pages. The more visibility you get, the higher the probability of sharing your content, and this also impacts positively on your ranking they are direct metrics show how relevant your content is.

Trust: here comes the major issue on the list and the summary of off-page SEO. The ranking is al about ‘Trust’. Every activity about ranking on SEO is all about helping search engines to trust your site to deliver quality information to their clients.

As such if you will achieve this using the white hat SEO method you must be patient, that way you will be able to build a sustainable business. This entails creating quality content whose focus is at delivering human-friendly and readable articles.

If this is your desire, join me at Wealthy Affiliate a community with thousands of internet marketers committed to building a steady and robust business of their own.

I will be glad to respond to your questions and comments, kindly use the comment section below