Is SEO an alien concept
to you? Do you have very limited knowledge of SEO? This small but comprehensive
guide will provide you all information that you need to have at the beginner’s
level of SEO Wisdom. Study this and step into the world of professional
Search Engine Optimization.
What actually is Search
Engine Optimization?
Search Engine
Optimization or SEO has been defined in a dozen ways by different internet
marketers. Someone has coined it has the process of enhancing visibility in the
online platforms for all organic and natural search processes. A few others
have reiterated that it is a strategy for increasing search traffic to any
particular Website or Page. It is overall a comprehensive set of strategies and
performance to increase non paid traffic for search engine results. It involves
both technical as well as creative aspects, which are necessary for driving
more traffic, for improving rankings in different search engines.
SEO is an ongoing
relentless process and it is not only about making a particular website search
engine friendly, but also to follow up with competent
strategies in order to achieve an improved visibility and
ranking. This extensive SEO guide will act as a hand-book for beginners and
share all the universal aspects related to the search engine craft.
Why Do you Need SEO?
One common question is
why does your blog or website need Search Engine Optimization? Well, the topmost
search engines Google, Bing and Yahoo drive
the most of the traffic into the online portals throughout the world. There is
no question or doubt about it that you could also drive traffic to your website
through Social Media platforms and a few other places. But, the major
commercial search engines are the most common sources of traffic navigation.
Most internet users are guided and driven by these search engines, no matter
what your site provides. You may be dealing with online shopping, information
sharing, providing services- everything is influenced by them.
These search engines
don’t work in random. They give to people what they have been looking for. They
connect the dots between what you have been offering and what people have been
looking for. They act as the bridge between the finder and the provider. If
your site is not listed properly or on the topmost places of these search
engines’ databases, then you are missing great traffic opportunities to your
website. The search engines respond to the queries made by the individuals on
the internet and try to connect them to the most relevant results depending on
these queries. So each single word used in a query carry some precious value.
Similarly what is inside your website in form of content, keywords may have
great impact. This has also the ability to make or break your online business
or existence.
SEO tactics give
you the capability to provide publicity and generate revenue, which no other
channel can provide. That is why investment in the right SEO plans is
considered to be an extraordinary investment- as the return is multiple times
compared to other kinds of business investments.
Without proper/correct
SEO, search engines cannot find your site!
The search engines work
on a number of principles. These certain principles are governed by laws. These
major search engines are smart enough to crawl throughout the web and bring
back improved results to their end users. But there is a limit too. You must
also help the search engines to figure out what your website is about and allow
it to connect it to the right set of audience. Doing the SEO in correct way
ensures the increase of traffic by manifolds. You will start to notice more
attention of traffic when you have the right moves. Wrong moves can even bury
your website deep down in the oblivion.
In this ever increasing
competition in the world of internet, you must use the right techniques to get
found easily. The agency or organization that performs the SEO for you has
great responsibilities and may give you an edge over other competitive websites
in terms of increasing your customers or visitors.
How about Self Induced
SEO?
Any smart person would
like to take the matters in own command and perform tasks that set things
right. Willing to perform the SEO jobs for yourself is one of the basic
instincts that you will experience at the beginning! You may do it for a while
using the hit & trial methods, but when things go out of hand, like- your
rankings going down way too low; you will have no option left, but to take help
from experts. SEO work is too complex. It is easy at the outset and many people
can understand the basics well, but that doesn’t guarantee success in the long
run.
However, if you are
committed and too determined that you will learn and grasp even the complex
nature of jobs involving this, you may begin to witness improved results for
your websites. So we suggest that you should study this guide step by step and
have added advantage over the ones who would be doing it from a general
perspective and on the other hand you will have a very specific approach for
it. We have tried to keep the guide as much practical as possible for beginners
& common users.
Lesson #1
FIGURING OUT HOW SEARCH
ENGINES WORK
A concept must be
corrected at the outset. SEO does not only work to bring in free traffic. But
that is not the only reason for what SEO works. They actually have two primary
tasks, which we see as gathering of free traffic. These tasks are:
1.
To Crawl and Build an ongoing Index.
2.
To provide a list of websites to the search users based on the
Index Rankings.
The world of Internet
has billions of pages, documents, files, pictures and more. The major Search
Engines crawl through each single file or document and figure out the best
relevant route by organizing the most relevant ones. The path available through
similar paths is also known as- LINKS. Linking helps to bind and keep all pages
on the internet together. To do this, Search Engines use Automates robots,
which are also known as “Crawlers” or “spiders”- they reach
millions and billions of web documents, which are in a way interconnected to
each other. The massive database where all these information is stored can only
be imagined!
When a search query is
made, the search engines recall the page/document from their massive database.
This is performed in fraction of a second. Most Search Engines have their data
centers all over the world where monumental records are held. The end users are
generally impatient, they want results real fast. Even a few seconds delay may
generate un-likeliness towards a Search Engine.
#Answering Queries
The search engines are
real fast answering machines. When an internet user makes a search or a query-
a particular search engine checks through billions of documents and files and
gives back to the client the most relevant results. These results are ranked
into a list based on the popularity and relevance factor of these files.
Relevance for a search
engine would mean locating a page or a file that has the right content matching
the query. This has been the basic search engine technique since long before.
Earlier, the search engines did not use any more technique than finding the
matching words or content. But over time, technical people have devised even
better techniques to find results matching the queries of the users. In today’s
search engine operation- almost half a century factors have to operate to
influence the relevance factor. Popularity is one big factor in preparing a
relevant list. The search engines tend to produce the most popular sits/pages
on the top considering that they have the most valuable information. To
determine relevance or popularity, the search engines generally use some
equations known as “Algorithms”. Using it, the rankings are prepared.
The algorithms are not
easy to understand. In fact these are so complicated that even most of the
engineers involved do not understand most part of it. But for the layman and
search engine practitioners, an insight into the matter itself can help to
acquire better results. The best techniques of optimization are made based on
these insights.
Search Engine Marketers
have studied web search for so long and have done so much
experiments that they have learnt how to extract the right information and how
to rank better. These techniques are used by them to rank their clients’
websites at higher positions.
# Finding Solutions
through Experiments
Experimenting is the
most common method that most of the webmasters adopt while researching with the
websites and search engines. Testing, discarding and remodeling help them to
achieve stable and improved results. Sometimes these experimentations require lots
of patience, knowledge and foresight to reach the levels of success that have
been aimed for. One common format of experimenting is given below:
1.
Get a new website registered with random and meaningless
keywords such as- tarrenbihlia, hobberpenny.
2.
Take time to generate pages for that website. Make those pages
target meaningless terms such as technicurrant, luscidrass.
3.
Try to keep the pages similar altering only single variables at
one time. Try to experiment with the text placement, formatting, keywords etc.
4.
From the crawled, established pages at other domains- direct
links to this domain.
5.
Now note down the rankings of these pages on different search
engines.
6. Once again make changes to these pages and find out the impact
on the search results. Find out which factor is helping to move the result up
or down.
7.
Ensure that you are recording any results, which you find to be
effective. You should also re-test these techniques on other pages/domains
using other terms. If you find similar results using the same techniques, there
is a possibility that you have become able to discover a pattern that works.
Live Testing and Experimentation are steps that search marketers must adapt to, in order to
gain high traffic and better rankings for their clients. Without having a clear
understanding of the basic elements of search engines and the critical
components that influence website rankings & visibility, it is not possible
to become a successful search engine marketer.
LESSON # 2
INTERACTING WITH THE
SEARCH ENGINES
To reach out to a large
audience, you must be able to catch its nerve! Unless you are certain about
what your target audience is looking for, it will be very difficult to provide
what they want!
Search Engine Marketing
is all about meeting the requirements of the users. The users have various
types of requirements, which could be broadly classified into three categories:
1.The first kinds are the queries where the user wants to “Do”
something. A user may want to accomplish something, do any activity, listen to
any song, purchase a train ticket etc.
2. The second queries are related to “KNOWING”! These queries are
centered on collecting information or data about something. While a person
maybe looking for information about his favorite author, another one may be looking
for best shopping options in a particular city.
3.The third kinds are the navigating queries. This includes the
search queries which are done by users to reach any particular target location-
website or URL.
It is the responsibility
of the search engines to classify the searches and to provide the end users the
results accordingly. Their primary motive is to satisfy the need of the
visitors. These engines receive thousands of queries every day and finding the
most relevant results is their priority. So as a search engine marketer, it is
your soulful duty to find out what your target audience might want and plan
your search engine strategies based on it.
UNLEASHING THE POWER OF
INBOUND MARKETING THROUGH SEO
As we spoke at the
outset, many people are not certain about why money, time and effort should be
invested on SEO. Well, the power of SEO is so gigantic and compelling that it
surpasses the usual and brings forward the most recent and relevant results to
the visitors based on your search engine performance. Let us look at a few
search engine trivia before moving ahead-
§ Google alone constitutes
around 65% of the searches done around the world. Yahoo is at the second
position with nearly 18% and Microsoft is at 13%. This means most of the
traffic that we see comes from Google Searches.
§ Forget the world
netizens; the American users alone perform around 20 billion searches every
month. Among this, Google gets around 12-13 billion searches followed by Yahoo
and Microsoft.
§ Google constitutes 67%
of all the search queries whereas Bing powers the rest 26%.
§ The Online Marketing
world is a gigantic one and the total revenue for the same will reach around
$77 billion in 2016 itself. Out of this around 25% will be the budget for
advertising.
§ Out of the total number
of search queries, around 76% searches are used to find local information.
Other searches include social networking, news, media information etc.
§ Since 2002, there has
been a staggering 60% increase in the number of Internet users. This is a
voluminous figure and cannot be ignored when it comes to internet marketing.
§ The average click
through on the top ten results is around 53%. So now you can understand why it
is essential to be at the top positions in any search engine, particularly at
Google, which provides almost 90% of the search results.
All the points discussed
above show how significant search engine marketing is! The number of searches
is increasing by 20% every year worldwide. To achieve better results, it is
very important to lay concrete foundations of SEO. Through this Guide, we are
trying to give you as much concise andpractical tips as possible.
