Introduction.
Too many people ask me how to sustain their online presence, and I often tell them about SEO, but I discover they usually don't want to listen.
They instead love to hear more on social media than even try to understand search engine optimisation.
Let me say this to the social media freaks out there, there are guided steps to take your business online; the use of social media just happened to be one of them.
Many prefer social media because they feel it is closer to them and brighter, and they can easily handle it.
I never understood the power of SEO in my early days as a digital marketing expert until I started my blog.
So much just seemed to be unveiled now. One of my discoveries is that social media is a short-term marketing tool.
If you want to stay in the face of prospective customers for a very long time without spending your company's profit on paid social media ads, then you need to learn how Search engine optimisation works.
What is SEO?
A simple layman's term for SEO is free and unpaid search engine traffic; the higher the website is, the more people see it. Therefore, if you want to learn SEO, you should be ready for much technical and analytical work.
There are many techniques with different goals. However, the main goal is to rank the search engine result page.
When somebody intends to seek out something on the internet, the first place that they turn to for help is the search engines, most times; we always want to be that person or that solution that the searcher seeks for.
It doesn’t matter whether you sell a product, or service, write a blog, or anything else; search engine optimisation is a thing every online business owner must do.
Why Should You Do Search Engine Optimization?
If you are hearing of SEO for the first time and want to get started, here are very few reasons and benefits of doing search engine optimization.
1. SEO Results to Higher Conversion Rate.
The influential ranking of your site on any search engine website can guarantee you high conversion rates. Your target market will become more aware of you as long as you maintain your top position on the search results.
2. SEO saves you costs.
SEO removes the need for paid advertising. You will continue to stay above the rest of the search results as long as you use relevant keywords.
3. SEO Builds Brand Credibility.
Coming out first, second or third may give your customers the idea that you are one of the top players in the industry. It shows that you are popular, and many users have researched you, too.
4. SEO is a Long-Term Marketing Strategy.
SEO is a long-term marketing strategy if you continue optimising your content and keep improving.
5. SEO Takes You Ahead of the Competition.
SEO is one sure and legit way to help you stay ahead of your competitors. Imagine how far you’ll have aced the competition if all of your competitors are just using native marketing. Keep up with the advancements in the digital world, and you will stay ahead of the competition.
How Do You Learn SEO?
Everyone starts somewhere before they’re considered a pro, all you need is easy-to-follow steps when starting in SEO for the first time.
Trust me it can be a little bit confusing the first time, but as you study and master basic SEO concepts it will start making sense.
Also, make sure to check out online resources and follow experts in the Field to further increase your knowledge.
1. Understand the goal of SEO.
Firstly, you should understand how SEO exists in the first place for you to be able to able to navigate its waters.
Businesses have different marketing goals, but every company shares the desire to boost revenue, and that’s the general purpose of SEO.
Improving your site with SEO allows you to rank at the top of search engine results pages (SERPs), sparking revenue-inducing traffic.
Google and other leading search engines have “spiders” or “bots” that crawl the Internet to find, index, and rank sites.
So, When someone enters a search, search engines deliver a list of websites with relevant content.
2. Learn how the search engine works.
The next big question that usually pops up in the minds of newbies who want to master SEO is how search engines work.
The answer to this question would help you get better at SEO. The Search engine works by following the processes stated below.
1. Crawling.
Crawling means scanning the website, its sections, content, keywords, headings, hyperlinks, and images by thousands of small boats.
The search engine spider or bot initially crawls any data found on the website. Then, bots crawl the whole internet regularly to update the data.
2. Indexing.
A search engine index is a gigantic catalogue or a library full of websites from all over the world.
After undergoing the process of crawling, the next step is to begin indexing data that have been crawled. Bear In mind that indexing can take a lot of time; in my personal experience, indexing takes from 3 -10 days.
You can follow up the indexing of your website on Google by using an online tool called Google Search Console.
3. Results.
This is the final stage of the whole process, and it occurs on the path of the end-user. Once the internet user sends a query via the search engine, the results are dug out and displayed to the end-user via a SERP (search engine results page).
Mind you, the results generated by the search engine to the end-users are based on the keywords entered by the user and how well those keywords are well answered by the content that had been indexed some few weeks or months back.
3. Master the Art of Keyword research
Keyword research is a practice that every SEO expert should learn and understand perfectly; Keywords are just a set of excluded words that have been queried on the search engine continuously over some time.
The Google search engine is designed to index this keyword in its engine and start seeking out relevant content that answers these queries, seeing it as a question-answer kind of thing.
There are two kinds of keywords — long-tail keywords that span three or more words and short-tail keywords that hold only one or two words. Long-tail keywords focus your pages and generate better interest.
Here is an article I recommend you read to help you get started with Keyword Research; make sure to read this article and then come back to this article.
- How To Do Proper Keyword Research.
4. Know the difference between on-page and off-page SEO.
SEO happens in two places — on-page and off-page. What takes place on-page is what you can directly change when you learn SEO, while what takes place off-page is up to other sites.
It’s not surprising that on-page SEO is an easier topic to cover and understand.
You manage multiple parts of your pages to please visitors and search engine bots, but in the end, you have little to no control over what happens to your off-page SEO practices.
1. On-Page SEO.
On-page SEO is the tradition of optimising different web pages to rank more eminent and earn more consistent traffic in search engines.
So now you know what on-page SEO is, it's time you get started with hacking your way around on-page SEO.
1. Title Tag.
The title tags are usually in the form of Html H1 Tags. Title tags are presented on search engine results pages as the clickable headline for a produced result and are essential for usability, Search engine optimisation, and sharing on social media. The title tag of a web page is meant to be an accurate and concise description of a page's content.
2. The content of a page.
The content of a page gives it deserving a search result spot. It is what the user came to see and is therefore very relevant to the search engines.
Most bloggers write weak content and try to get backlinks, but I must tell you that the game has changed.
As such, it is essential to create good content.
I wrote an article on how you can get started with content that ranks on Google.
- How To Write A Blog Post That Ranks On Google.
3. URLs.
A URL (Uniform Resource Locator), more commonly known as a "web address", specifies the location of a resource (such as a web page) on the internet.
The URL also specifies how to retrieve that resource, known as the "protocol", such as HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, etc.
URLs are a minor ranking factor search engines use when determining a particular page or resource's relevance to a search query.
If you are using a content management system such as WordPress, you should make sure that you edit your URLs to suit keywords to rank on Google.
Here is an article that helps do keyword research.
- How To Do Proper Keyword Research
4. Design responsive websites.
Making your website more mobile-friendly can help you rank well on search engines.
An Unresponsive website makes it hard for the search engine bot to crawl correctly, making your website not rank on Google.
5. Implement Schema Markup.
Search engines speak and understand a language, and it's essential to understand it if you want to succeed in SEO( search engine optimisation).
Schema markup, also known as structured data, is the language of search engines. It is code used to provide information to search engines to understand your content more clearly.
This helps provide users with better, more accurate information in the rich snippets that are displayed beneath the page title.
The photo used in illustrating this section is an example of a review schema used to give back results on Google.
I wrote a comprehensive guide on Schema Markup, check out the link to the article below to learn more.
- What is a Schema Markup and How Does it Boost Your SEO?
2. Off-Page SEO.
Off-page SEO site refers to actions taken outside of your website to impact your rankings within search engine results pages (SERPs).
Optimising for off-site ranking factors involves improving search engine and user perception of a site's popularity, relevance, trustworthiness, and authority.
Other reputable places accomplish this on the Internet (pages, sites, people, etc.), linking to or promoting your website and effectively "vouching" for the quality of your content.
Link building is an essential part of SEO; Link building is a process of getting links from other websites. The links are crawled by search engines which allows them to index the web content.
How then do I start doing off-page SEO?
1. Deep-link building.
This involves linking similar content in your website together. This link building is one of the most important, and SEO Experts use it. Therefore, you should try to link related content together as much as possible.
2. Guest posting.
Guest posting means writing and publishing an article on someone else's website or blog. One important fact you should understand about guest posting is to always guest post on a more website with a more high domain authority so that it can add more relevance to your website.
I wrote a comprehensive guide to help you get started with guest posting; click the link below.
- How To Guest Post For Blog Traffic.
3. Blog Commenting.
Most blogs allow the reader to comment on every post and leave their website alongside, but make sure that you are not trying to spam such content with links because you might be blocked.
4. Use social media.
Another way to build solid trust in your brand or blog is by being active on social media. Posting on social media like Facebook and Twitter can help your blog the most, especially if you have a lot of people sharing and engaging with such content.
Here is an article I recommend you read to help you maximise the use of social media.
- How To Grow Your Business On Facebook
- How To Grow Your Business On Instagram
5. Post on forum or Repurposing your content.
Posting on forums can help you get backlinks to your website; all you need to do is include relevant links to your website and then publish a post on the forum. Here is an article on how you can start posting on Medium.
- How To Make Money Writing Articles On Medium
6. Claim Your Google My Business Listing.
Google my business was launched by Google to help small businesses rank on Google locally.
Your Google My Business listing is a great place to focus your early efforts if you're just getting started with local SEO.
After all, when people search for a product or service near them, they're usually very close to making a purchase.
Conclusion.
Knowledge of SEO can help you go a long way as a web developer, you need to understand the rudiments so as to develop with SEO in mind when creating a project for the web.
SEO is a marketing strategy every web developer should understand.
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