SEO BASICS

What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of making your website more visible to search engines.

In a Summary: The process of optimizing your website in such a way Search Engine’s bots can collect information from your websites, informations includes Content, Images, Videos, Links etc. The collected informations gets organized with the help of search engine algorithms and showed to users who search through search engines for information.

What is SERP?

SERP stands for Google’s Search Engine Result Position (Page). It denotes the place or position of your website’s pages in the listing order of a Google search result derived from a keyword search.

Web pages listing in Google Search Engine Result pages (SERP) usually refers to either paid and organic results.

Paid SERP Result are results that are displayed in Google SERP by an advertiser who bid and pay top position.

Organic SERP Result refers to web pages listing in SERP that gets listed below the paid results. The listing of web pages ranked based on fulfilling the quality guidelines derived by the Google search engine.

Successful businesses combine both organic and paid SEO to be employed in their effective SEO strategies.

Why SEO is done?

SEO is done in order to get a high search engine ranking for your web pages. Through effective Search Engine Optimization your web page can stay in the top positions of Google’s search engine result pages. Being on the top positions in search engine result pages get more visibility and traffic to your website.

How search engines work?

As, we focus more on learning Google SEO, I may share most of the content about how Google search engine works than any other search engine.

Before learning how to rank a website on top of the Google SERP, I believe you must know how Google search engine works. As it adds strong fundamental value to your way to learn SEO.

You are not left alone to learn how Google search engine works. Google has a video, explains how Google search works in five minutes. Take a look below

Once you done with the above video take time to know more in details from their website. I would say, they have done their best in sharing the resource on how Google search works.

Going through the resources will gain you more knowledge on

How Google approach towards providing search result,
How search engine works when you do a search in Google,
And. Finally, Features you see in search engine result pages.
Now, its your turn to discover how Google search works in detail.👇

Discover how Google search works

Later, Matt Cutts explains how ranking in Google SERP and website evaluation process works. Have a look

learningGoogle bots gets information from web pages and show in search engine result page using, Crawling and Indexing.

Crawling
Through crawling, Googlebot identifies new and updated pages that has to be added to the Google index. A huge number of Spiders are used to fetch or crawl several pages on the web. Google’s search engine bots, Robots or Spiders are otherwise called as Googlebot. Googlebot is the program that does the collection of data from web pages.

The sequence of the crawling process begins with a list of web page URLs along with Sitemap data provided by website owners. As Googlebot crawls through all pages, it also identifies the links on all these pages and adds them to the list of pages to crawl. In the process of crawling, new sites, changes done to existing sites and dead links are noted to update the Google index.

How Google finds a page?
While using several techniques, Google uses these two main methods to find a page.

First, it follows links from the website it crawls.

secondly, it reads website’s sitemaps.

To check the recent crawling information from Google type cache: followed by URL in Google search. The pattern is cache:URL

Cache:punith.com

Indexing
While crawling a page Googlebot gathers an index of all the words it sees on the page and their location. Additionally, information from key content tags and attributes are also processed. Googlebot has its own limitation in processing contents in that it cannot process contents of certain rich media files.

Google Search Algorithm Updates

Google makes thousands of changes every year since its inception. Learning those updates can help you to understand fundamantals Google search better. Below are few resources can help you to do that.

Entire list of Google search algorithm updates by Search Engine Round Table since 2003
Later 2022, Google has released a landing page in the Google Search Central. This page details the latest ranking updates made to Google search.

Do You Know?

Google has not revealed how to rank on top of Google search engine exactly so for.
Google search engine release more than 3000 algorithm updates per year.
Google search engine’s primary intention is to provide as much as possible relavent answers to its user queries and not to rank any webpages on top of Google SERP.

HOW TO DO SEO?

Search Engine Optimization process can be done with two major optimization process. They are On Page Optimization and Off Page Optimization.

Some of the key practices to optimize your website for increased visibility in search engines are,

Identifying target search terms.
Selecting pages of your website to integrate or add the search terms.
Adding keywords in Head Tags, Page Title Tags and in Meta Tags.
Taking note of keyword density or the number of times the same keyword is used repeatedly.
Linking structure and strategy.

On-Page Optimization

Definition of On-Page Optimization
On-page optimization refers to the one of the signals that influence the search engines to consider listing your website in its search engine result pages (SERP).

On-Page Optimization factors can be either regulated by the one who has access to edit the pages of a website. On page optimization is generally done on the live pages of a website.

To explain a little more, on-page optimization focuses on configuring and matching the structural elements of your website to how a search engine will review your website when you type a search keyword.

Optimizing your website is essential in order to make the site adaptable to Google’s algorithm. It is also essential to make your site receptive to the guidelines of search engines.

The more you optimize your website in accordance with how a search engine shortlists and rank websites, your website gets a better chance of visibility and ranking in search engines’ results pages.

How to do on-page optimization? and What are the types of on-page optimization?

Let us look at the types of on-page optimization as listed below

Meta Optimization

The word “meta” stands for metadata. Metadata in relation to a web page is the short description about what the web page is all about to the google search engine bots.

Metadata is important to improve the ranking position in search engine. Using meta data and other ranking factors, Google search engine come to know what is on a web page and how the contents on that particular web page is relevant to a given search.

Meta Optimization covers Title Tag and Meta Description

Title Tag

Title Tag is the element of a web page that summarizes what is present in a web page. In other words it is the essence of the content matter of a web page.

Title Tags usually appear in three places. You can find them in browsers, search engine results pages, and in external sites like Facebook or Twitter. Title tags should have relevant keywords and phrases that describe the page.

Suppose the title that you create is not relevant to the subject of the page then Google may show a different title. You would not want this to happen. Accurate and concise title tags helps you to get more clicks. Google’s limit for the number of characters in a title tag is 60-70.

Coding pattern for a title tag:

The Meta Description

Meta descriptions unlike title tags are an extended summary of what is present on the web page. Meta description briefs on what your web page has to offer for the users.

Meta descriptions are HTML attributes. Meta descriptions are usually found in the form snippets (small piece of information) below every search result page in the search engine results pages (SERP). Google now allows a meta description to contain up to 320 characters.

Coding pattern of a meta description:

Heading Tags
Heading Tags in other words are subtitles or various headings found in a webpage. These are also called as Header Tags. The headings or subtitles are denoted as H1,H2,H3…H6 tags. Words in the header tags too, must be search engine optimized.

Heading Tags Optimizations

Moreover, header tags must be placed in a proper sequential order in a page. The order starts with the top most H1 tag. H1 tag must contain keywords that are closely related to the page title.

Then comes the H2 tag or sub-heading that should have keywords similar to the H1 tag. Next in the order is the H3 tag which should be a sub-heading of the H2 tag. In turn, H3 tag contains keywords related to the H2 tag.

It is mandatory that all the header tags are framed grammatically right and are also readable. Caution should be exercised not to stuff keywords (“keyword stuffing” is the process of adding more relevant keywords than required, in order to manipulate your website’s influence in the search engine results). Stuffing of keywords has to be avoided since Google will pry on the manipulation of the keywords and penalise you.

This is how heading tags optimization will look like:

H1 =

Title relevant to main title’s keywords

H2 =

Subheading of H1 with relevant H1-related keywords

H3 =

Sub heading relevant to H2 title’s keywords

Image Alt Text

Googlebot that does the crawling of the information on a web page can only read the text and will not be able to see an image. In order for a googlebot to understand an image on a web page, the text explaining the image should be put in an HTML form or coded text form. This text that is alternate to an image is called “image alt text”.

Image Optimization
Image optimization is the process of slicing of images and reducing their resolution. Such slicing and reduction will fetch files smaller in size, which will in turn enable faster loading of images.

Image optimization in a web page is done to get better rankings in Google search engine. Images are also important when it comes to driving traffic to your website. Remember, People tend to do searches with images too.

Pattern of Alt Text inclusion and optimization:

add alt=”this is your alt text” to your image tag.

Here’s an example:

Things to remember in alt text image optimization:

Alt text – Search engines use alt text to understand images.
File size – Sizes of the files should be small in order to enable faster loading of images.
File name – You have to provide a brief and descriptive file name before uploading your image.
Captions – Caption is the content that describes your image. These captions are powerful enough to impact the bounce rate of your website.
Content Optimization
Content

Content refers to the written material on a web page. In other words it is the text that you see and read on a web page.

Content Optimization

Your written content should be relatable to the user or reader. The written content should be you own original writing. It should be exclusively written for your website audience.

Steps to Optimize your Web Page Content?

Your web page content should be of minimum of 300 words.

You are not supposed to copy contents from other websites

Some of the tools used to identify plagiarised and duplicate contents are, Offline Duplicate Content Checker- (smallseotools.com/plagiarism-checker/) and Online Content Checker – (Copyscape.com)

Add target and related keywords to your content

No stuffing or repetitions of the same keyword beyond what is required

Keyword density is an important criteria in Content Optimization (Keyword Density calculation: Number of Keywords/Total Number of Words X 100%)

Use correct grammar and syntax

Usage of Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI)

Latent semantic indexing is the process used by search engines to find relevant keywords with relation to your main keywords. In other words LSI is the process of finding synonymns of your keywords.

For example if you are writing an article on Facebook then the LSI keyword that you would probably include is “social media network”.

Sitemap
Sitemap is the collection of your web page URLs. This collection or listing tells Google search engine about the organization of your website site pages.

What is the purpose of such listing?
Such listing helps Googlebot to crawl your site more intelligently.

How many types of sitemaps are actually there?
There are actually six types of sitemaps. The two main types are HTML Sitemap and XML Sitemap.

HTML Sitemap:

HTML sitemap is user-oriented. It is actually a graphical table of contents for the website. HTML’s main task is the logical grouping of the website’s content. Also it shows a clear mapping of the website based on hierarchy.

XML Sitemap:

XML sitemap is the structured index specifically created for search engines. The XML sitemap is found in a machine-readable unstyled format.

Following link shows an example of a XML site https://www.punith.com/post-sitemap.xml and style=”font-weight: 400;”>https://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ is the tool to generate a sitemap.

Custom 404 Error Page
There are times when probably some of the pages on your website may go missing. And at this juncture when either Googlebot or your customer hit that particular page an error message stating “404 Page Not Found” will be displayed instantaneously.

Such occurrence is a bad taste for both Googlebot and the website visitors. In order to avoid such unplesant experiences, you can create a custom 404-page having contents or links that may lead them to another appropriate page.

Robots.txt
Robots.txt is server side file that you find in every website on the net. This robots.txt file is designed to work as communication channel between the bots and website pages.

It tells the bots, which pages on your website to crawl and which not to crawl.

Robots.txt is also known as robots exclusion protocol (REP).

Creating effective robots.txt enhances your SEO. Before the search engine visits a target page it will first check the robots.txt for instructions. If you create the right robots.txt page you can tell the search engine bots not to crawl certain pages.

By creating the right robots.txt to tell the search engine bots to spend their crawl budgets wisely. This is really important in SEO.

Example of implementing robots.txt in a notepad is

Open Note Pad:

User-agent: *
Allow:
Disallow: /page-name

Internal Link(navigation) Optimization
Both Your website visitors and Google search engine bots navigate your website’s pages via the internal links. So, it’s important to optimize the internal links in a way both visitors and bots can easily access all the web pages of your website. Make sure the internal link of your websites is not more than 3 clicks away.

Fix Crawl Issues
Crawling error is the failure of the search engine to reach a page on your website while crawling.

Google categorizes crawl errors into two types,

Site Errors: In this case your entire site cannot be crawled

URL Errors: This relates to one specific URL per error.

Fixing of these errors is really important. It important for the site’s maintenance schedule to frequently check for crawl errors.

RESOURCES TO KEEP YOURSELF ON TOP OF SEO

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You can follow a Youtube Channel, Google Search Central (formerly Google Webmasters). Keeping an eye on on this will help you to know information and tools to improve your or clients website(s) in Google Search.

Follow Google Search Central in Youtube

You can follow a Youtube Channel, Google Search Central (formerly Google Webmasters). Keeping an eye on on this will help you to know information and tools to improve your or clients website(s) in Google Search.

Follow Google Search Central in Youtube