What is SEO?: The ultimate Guide to Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization shouldn't sound new to online marketers especially bloggers. Why? because we all know that majority of people who surf the internet start their online journey using search queries. Everyday, people make searches on Google and other search engines.

In fact, as at the time this article was written, over 2 billion searches have already been made on Google that day alone. Not considering a host of other search engines. This is why it is important to optimize your content or website for search if you want to become a successful blogger, digital marketer or whatever job description you adopt.


A smart blogger and marketer knows and treasures the presence of his/her website on SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). Because traffic generated from search engines alone can measure up to 60% of your blog's audience, expectations have it that you would do anything considered necessary and right to get your web pages on top of search results related to your keywords.

What is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, an integral part of your marketing campaign that must be done if your site would compete with others on search engine's result pages.

Search engine optimization is the process of optimizing your contents so that it appears at the top of search results especially when users make search queries related to your keywords.

To give you a clearer picture, assuming you have an article about "How to make Jollof Rice". If you want search engines to display this article when people search the keyword "Jollof Rice", Search engine optimization  is the magic tool you need to achieve this most treasured feat in the world of digital marketing.

The thing about SEO is that: it is as much about the people you are writing for as it is about search engines.

What do I mean?

A successful SEO endeavor involves two parties.

First is your Audience,

• what are they searching for online?
• What answers are they seeking?
• Which words (keywords) are they’re using ?
• What type of content do they like to read?

Knowing these things will allow you to connect to the people who are searching online for the solutions you offer. That is about your audience

The second party involves Search engines themselves. After knowing how to craft contents that connect with your audience, you need to know how to deliver such contents in ways search engine crawlers or bots can find and understand.

In this guide, expect to learn how to do both.

Why SEO is important

Although, display ads, social media or other online platform generates a lot of traffic to websites, majority of online traffic are driven by search engines.

Moreover, aside from generating high traffic, those traffic are very specific, high intent traffic. I mean they are directed towards people who are already searching for what you offer which means a purchase decision or conversion is likely to be the end result.

Search engine optimization is also one of the only online marketing channels that, when set up correctly, can continue to pay dividends over time. If you provide a solid piece of content that deserves to rank for the right keywords, your traffic can snowball over time, whereas display or social media advertising needs continuous funding to send traffic to your site.

Optimizing your website will help deliver better information to search engines so that your content can be properly indexed and displayed within search results.

How Search Engines Work

Though it is imperative you stick to the idea of curating contents streamlined to the needs of your audience, Knowing how search engines work will help you decide how best to optimize your contents, incorporating the important elements in ways that search engines require.


There are three basic stages in which search engines operate

1. Crawling:

This is a process by which search engines send out robots or spiders in order to discover what is being published on the world wide web. It is your choice however to decide whether you want these robots crawling your site or not. SEO allows you to instruct the robots on how they crawl your web pages.

When these robots crawl your web pages, they discover links through the help of tags like HREF. These inks are then added to the list of sites to be index

2.Indexing:

Indexing is the process by which the crawled data and pages are organized to be displayed with relevance to search queries.

Anytime a page is crawled, a copy is sent to data centers to be stored and organized. it is these stored, organized data that are displayed on search result's pages (SERP) when you make search queries

3. Ranking:

Ranking is a process by which search engines display results according to the order of relevance to search queries using what is called The Algorithm. The Algorithm is often a closely guarded secret of various search engines. But we do know that it is some kind of complex equations through which the value of any given site is calculated in relevance to a search term

Categories or Phases in Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search Engine Optimization can basically be broken down into two Basic phases, which when gotten right, will have a positive bearing on your search engine ranking.

They are:

• On-site or On-page SEO
• Off-site or Off-page SEO.

I would like to illustrate this phases using you as an individual.

Lets see:

To be considered lovable, you need to possess a great personality. From the the physical aspects of beauty to the non physical qualities like Humility, honesty, intelligence, self sacrifice and so on. The process of improving yourself (Your website pages and content) in order to attract people to you, can be likened to On-site SEO.

Now, Because of your endearing personality, a number of important people want to be associated with you. This increases your reputation and how people talk about you. In fact, they would easily recommend you to other people. This in SEO is referred to as off-page SEO. The external links and recommendation you get from other sites.

Unfortunately unlike on-page SEO,  you dont usually have complete control over Off-page SEO.
Now lets take them one after the other.

On-Page SEO

On-Page SEO refers to every steps you take to optimize individual pages of your website to enable them rank higher for relevant keywords  in search engines Although there is nothing like a perfectly optimized web page because ranking algorithms keep changing. Which is why you constantly have to keep improving the quality of your pages.

But there are undisputed aspects of your web pages you need to always pay attention to. They are:

Site Architecture

A good website architecture ensures a great user experience for anyone who visits your page. starting from a safe connection to fast loading times, and a mobile-friendly design. These are what keeps them on your site. And the longer they stay, the better it gets.

You also need to make sure your site is ready and easy to crawl for search engine bots.

Content

Every marketer would tell you 'Content is King' and they are about a 100% right. Even google rewards you for uniquely crafted contents that provides optimum value by indexing your pages on search engines.

So when SEOs tell you to focus on improving your contents in order to increase your ranking on SERPs, they are never wrong.

What makes up a good content?

Quality!

The effect of quality in your content should never be underestimated. In the course of search engine optimization, Writing relevant, in-depth  and easy to understand contents that answer the questions of your audience is a kick-starter.

Be mindful of the readability of your articles so as to reduce bounce rate. When searchers find it hard to understand your copy, they are prompted to leave your website almost immediately. This can hurt your SEO dreams

Keywords

Keywords constitutes a very high percentage of SEO efforts. They are one of the main elements of Search engine optimization. Keywords as the name implies, are words or phrases that sums up what the content of a web page is about. When used well, they attract relevant, organic search traffic.

If you are going to do well with keywords in search engine optimization, you need to understand both the search intent of your target audience and what they are typing on google while making search queries.

Afterwards, you need to understand how to strategically place your keywords on your page in order to attract search engines bots

HTML

Like Neil Patel said, running an online business without knowing the basics of HTML would be the same as driving without knowing what the colors of traffic lights mean.
Inasmuch as you don't have to be a professional coder to excel, you still need to understand the basics of HTML.

Fortunately, there are sites like W3Schools or Code Academy where you can learn everything you need to know for FREE

There are four HTML parts you must endeavor to optimize every time you create contents. These are

1. Title Tags: Title tags are the headlines of your content. They show up at the tabs of your browsers. A web page can have only one title tag. In HTML, title tags are often referred to as h1-tag meaning heading of the first order
2. Meta Descriptions: Meta descriptions are what shows up as excerpts when your page appears on google results or social network. If you optimize a meta description result, Google will never cut it off and end with “…” or make it seem like it ends mid-sentence. Optimized meta descriptions also often mention the content’s keyword up-front.
3. Schema: Schema is the result of a collaboration of several search engines. It’s basically just a subset of specific HTML tags that will improve the way the search engine result pages display your content.
4. Sub Heading: Sub headings are the h2, h3 h4, h5, h6 tags that help format and structure your content and give your readers easy reference points. they have less SEO power, but they still matter. Hence, you should use them.

Now, having seen how you can improve your site from the inside, Lets now see how you can optimize from the outside.

Off-Page SEO

Off-page SEO refers to the techniques that help a website feature at the top of search results. Like I said, you have limited control over this phase of SEO.

This phase is centered around building a rich inbound link profile and attracting links from high-authority websites. The main intention of this practice is to show search engines that your website is reliable in your niche.

Gaining Search engines' Trust is a very important factor to your SEO game. But how do you build trust?. Here are a few ways:

Authority

Increase your domain and page authority by getting quality back links from authoritative sites. This can only be achieved if you create top-notch valuable contents. These contents might come in form of articles, videos or infographics.

Decrease Bounce Rate

Another way to build trust is by making people stay more on your site.  Bounce rate refers to the measure of how many visitors of your site left immediately after viewing just one page.

So many factors can determine if people will stay on your site and consume more contents.
How fast does your website loads?

How useful and relevant are your contents?

Are you attracting the right readers to your site? if not, they don't have any business staying long

Social Shares

Another way to boost trust is the amount of social shares your articles gather especially from top influencers. Everyone's dream is to see their contents go viral. To achieve this, make sure your contents are share-worthy

White hat vs Black hat SEO 

There are two strategies or techniques marketers often practice in Search engine optimization. These are

• White hat SEO: This refers to the techniques and strategies of improving a site's rank on site engines by abiding to site engine rule. People who practice white hat SEO are primarily focused on providing value to their audience.

• Black hat SEO: Black hat SEO refers to strategies and techniques that are practiced in a bid to fool or outsmart search engines. While Black Hat SEO works, it puts websites at risk of being penalized or de-indexed from search results. So they are often practiced by people after a get rich quick scheme.

However, if you want to build a sustainable business, white hat SEO is the way to go. Focus on your human audience, give them the best content possible and play according to search engine's rules

Search Engine Optimization Guidelines

Google Webmaster Guidelines

Basic principles:

• Make pages primarily for users, not search engines.
• Don't deceive your users.
• Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website to a Google employee. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"
• Think about what makes your website unique, valuable, or engaging.

Things to avoid:

• Automatically generated content
• Participating in link schemes
• Creating pages with little or no original content (i.e. copied from somewhere else)
• Cloaking — the practice of showing search engine crawlers different content than visitors.
• Hidden text and links
• Doorway pages — pages created to rank well for specific searches to funnel traffic to your website.

It's good to be very familiar with Google's Webmaster Guidelines. Make time to get to know them.

See the full Google Webmaster Guidelines here 

Bing Webmaster Guidelines

Basic principles:

• Provide clear, deep, engaging, and easy-to-find content on your site.
• Keep page titles clear and relevant.
• Links are regarded as a signal of popularity and Bing rewards links that have grown organically.
• Social influence and social shares are positive signals and can have an impact on how you rank organically in the long run.
• Page speed is important, along with a positive, useful user experience.
• Use alt attributes to describe images, so that Bing can better understand the content.

Things to avoid:

• Thin content, pages showing mostly ads or affiliate links, or that otherwise redirect visitors away to other sites will not rank well.
• Abusive link tactics that aim to inflate the number and nature of inbound links such as buying links, participating in link schemes, can lead to de-indexing.
• Ensure clean, concise, keyword-inclusive URL structures are in place. Dynamic parameters can dirty up your URLs and cause duplicate content issues.
• Make your URLs descriptive, short, keyword rich when possible, and avoid non-letter characters.
• Burying links in Javascript/Flash/Silverlight; keep content out of these as well.
• Duplicate content
• Keyword stuffing
• Cloaking — the practice of showing search engine crawlers different content than visitors.

Guidelines for representing your local business on Google

If the business for which you perform SEO work operates locally, either out of a storefront or drives to customers’ locations to perform service, it qualifies for a Google My Business listing. For local businesses like these, Google has guidelines that govern what you should and shouldn’t do in creating and managing these listings.

Basic principles:

• Be sure you’re eligible for inclusion in the Google My Business index; you must have a physical address, even if it’s your home address, and you must serve customers face-to-face, either at your location (like a retail store) or at theirs (like a plumber)
• Honestly and accurately represent all aspects of your local business data, including its name, address, phone number, website address, business categories, hours of operation, and other features.

Things to avoid

• Creation of Google My Business listings for entities that aren’t eligible
• Misrepresentation of any of your core business information, including “stuffing” your business name with geographic or service keywords, or creating listings for fake addresses
• Use of PO boxes or virtual offices instead of authentic street addresses
• Abuse of the review portion of the Google My Business listing, via fake positive reviews of your business or fake negative ones of your competitors
• Costly, novice mistakes stemming from failure to read the fine details of Google’s guidelines

Conclusion

At this point, i'm sure you have realized how important search engine optimization is for your online business. If done well, you stand to achieve real success in the digital world.

For questions and additions, please use the comment box below