What Is SEO? A Simple Guide for a Newbie Webmaster
What is SEO in simple terms?
SEO means Search Engine Optimization.
Search Engine Optimization refers to the different methods or techniques webmasters apply to improve their site’s ranking in search engines so that they represent the closest matches and most reliable resources for users’ search queries.
For any webmaster who needs their site to appear on the top ranking of a Search Engine Result Page (SERP), Search Engine Optimization is very important.
How Does SEO Work?
It is always very tough especially for newbie sites to get noticed on the web even when the sites have unique, genuine important content.
Let us assume a blogger wrote an article on an important topic like Who is an Entrepreneur? In this article, the writer broke down this topic so that even a newbie will understand the concept of entrepreneurship after reading. The writer shared this article with the intent to get people to read it, give their opinions, and even build authority within the niche.
Now, it is assumed that this article is the best and most detailed when the keyword “who is an entrepreneur?” is concerned but when users type in the word on search engines, the SERP returns a lot of sites that have written on the same topic but not theirs.
Why?
This is because the site;
- Might not have been indexed on any search engine
- Is poorly ranked
- Is poorly structured
- Still new with very low domain authority
- Not search engine friendly
- Not mobile friendly
Submit your Site to Search Engines
So the first step is to help search engines find you.
You can do this by submitting your new post manually to search engines through Google or Bing webmaster tools.
Before now, one could submit new posts on almost all the search engines including Google and Bing/Yahoo on free submission sites like free web submission and so on but it is no longer so. You can still make use of this free submission site for other search engines but for Google and Bing/Yahoo, you must log in to your webmaster console to manually submit your new post for indexing. You can also allow the search engine to find you but this may take a while for new sites.
The web page on your site which includes genuine useful information, exciting infographics, or photographs should also have helpful links that can guide your visitors to other needful resources. Like the link above on how to submit your site to search engines.
You should note that if your site is the best resource for entrepreneurship on the web, it benefits search engines to list it high on their SERPs.
So all you have to do is look for a way to show these search engines that your site belongs to the top.
Your site in an ideal World Wide Web should rise to the top of the search engine result page (SERP) based on the content it has alone, but this will take a bit of time before it can achieve this height without SEO, and there is no guarantee of this. To speed up the process and improve your chances, you can leverage white label SEO services, which provide expert optimization strategies to help your site rank higher and gain visibility more efficiently.
For most bloggers who wish to monetize their blogs, SEO is very important. You can get quality traffic through this technique. Blog-for-money bloggers should note that traffic translates into prospects and more prospects more money. It doesn’t matter if you sell directly from your blog, hosting web advertisements, or affiliate marketing.
How to Increase Your Search Engine Position
Search engines categorize web pages based on keywords example “entrepreneurship” which is an important term that your content or article is based on. These keywords are competitive when they are just one word.
Search engine providers do not search out this term themselves as millions of topics are posted and discussed on the World Wide Web daily.
Computer Programs like crawlers and spiders are used to search the web and analyze these individual pages based on major keywords (i.e. queries people key in on the search engine).
For your keyword to be easily identified by this program it should be well placed at some particular positions. It matters a lot, if not well placed in the right places the program might not be able to identify it, placing your keywords at the under-listed position will help its ranking.
Title
This is the title part of your post. The title of your content is one place that should be a must to place a keyword for your new post. You can use a title like “What are the major causes of business failure?” or “Principles of Entrepreneurship“. This helps your site to be found by search engines when there is a similar query on the search engine.
HTags
This is another right place to position your keyword. Most search engines will position your title and header tags together when ranking your web page, it will also help users to easily identify what they are looking for and a header can have a definition of the keyword. Header tags range from H1 – H6.
These two positions are the best places to position your keywords while you still use them randomly on your page.
Image Tags
Most webmasters often underestimate the power of image tags and the prospect of traffic they can send to their site. Using images within your content is very crucial and helps your ranking on SERP, and using an image tag could help drive traffic to your site as tons of traffic also emanates from the Google image search for example. Remember that search engines are not capable of reading images but the tag (keyword) associated with such images can give a clue of what the visitor is looking for.
To check Title, HTags, Image Tags, and other important components of your website, you can use special SEO tools. For example, one such tool is SEO Checker by Sitechecker. This tool audits your website and detects any issues affecting its search engine ranking. Also, this tool will provide you with a step-by-step list of tips to fix all the issues found.
Most search engine programs also consider greatly how many web pages are linked to your page. This is called link analysis.
The programs rank pages according to the pages with more links from other sites discussing the same keyword. If your page is linked to from high-ranking pages, it will most likely be ranked high over time.
This is because the program assumes the content is valuable and worth linking to from other webmasters/authors.
This implies that the site linking to you (mostly do-follow) is giving you big credit for a wonderful post and telling search engines to give you a positive mark—a higher rank. This is another SEO secret.
Most webmasters use every method suitable to them to build backlinks, from submitting guest posts to paying for links or exchanging links with other site owners.
Google now frowns at unnatural link-building practices like buying or exchanging links.
The best links one can get are links earned through sharing great content on one’s site. Google has improved over time they can now detect natural links and unnatural ones.
Link building is vital in SEO.
There are other ways to optimize your web page but they are back-door methods and we do not discuss such methods. These different methods are the black hat approach of SEO and Google and most other search engines frown at those methods. But they can still draw traffic to your site.
You can improve your business ranking through SEO. There are some digital agencies like SEO One Click that assist startups with their digital marketing.
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