This guide will provide an overview and introduction to search engine optimization in 2021, a must-have marketing strategy if you want your website to be seen on search engines like Google. Additionally, to drive qualified traffic to your website, to make your site search engine friendly, to build links, and to market your site's unique value.

The world of search engine optimization is complicated and ever-changing, but the principles are simple to grasp, and even a rudimentary understanding of SEO may make a major difference.
When you combine this knowledge with some experience, you'll be well on your way to becoming an expert SEO. Let’s dive in.

 

SEO 101 and Its Importance
How do search engines work? – Crawling, Indexing, & Ranking
Keyword Research & Keyword Targeting Best Practices
On-page SEO strategies
Off-page SEO strategies
Technical SEO

 

We'll spend time on each of these topics throughout this guide, but we wanted to start with it because it gives you an idea of how we organised the whole thing.

 

SEO 101 and Its Importance

If you’ve ever searched for something online, you already know more about SEO than you think you do. 
Consider how this works: You use a search engine like Google to type in a term or phrase that explains what you're looking for. Let’s say your search is for specs.

 

You want to find the specs you want.
Your search engine wants to provide you the best, most useful results.
Any business that sells specs – whether online or in a store – wants to be the first result you see when you search.
Making all those “wants” matchup is the job of search engine optimization. 

 

So, SEO comprises all activities aimed at driving quality traffic to a website through organic or natural results for the users’ search query. It basically increases ranking position on search engines.

SEO is important for lots of companies because if people find you via a web search and find what they’re looking for, you can receive lots of new web visitors that can help you make more money. If people can’t find you in a web search, you miss an opportunity – and they might find your competitor, instead. 

SEO is often part of an overall online marketing strategy and complements other tactics like social media marketing, content marketing and more.

 

How do search engines work? – Crawling, Indexing, & Ranking

It’s like magic. The process in which search engines work consists of these main steps:

In Crawling (or reading) search engines a team of robots (known as crawlers or spiders) travel around pages to scan all the internet web pages continuously and to uncover updated content, but regardless of the format, content is discovered by links. 
Googlebot begins by retrieving a few online pages, then searches for additional URLs by following the links and XML sitemap on those sites. The crawler is able to uncover new content by hopping along this trail of links and adding it to their Caffeine index, which is a vast database of discovered URLs that can later be retrieved when a searcher is looking for information that the content on that URL is a good match for.

After crawling a website, search engines analyze the pages, categorise them, and store the information with help of indexing, a massive database of all the stuff they've found and deemed worthy of serving to searchers.

When users type a query into the Google search engine, Google ranks search results based on relevance. Ranking is the process of sorting search results by relevance. However, even with sophisticated algorithms and methods, Google cannot properly rank web sites without the assistance of humans. This is why SEO is used by marketing companies and expert search engine optimizers.

 

Keyword Research & Keyword Targeting Best Practices

 

 

The first step in search engine optimization is really to determine what it is you’re actually optimizing for. This means identifying the Keywords, the words you enter into a search engine to find what you’re looking for. SEOs perform keyword research to determine which keywords would be best to target for a given site. 

There are a few key factors to take into account when determining the keywords you want to target on your site:

Search Volume: The number of people actually searching for a given keyword. The more people there are searching for a keyword, the bigger the audience you stand to reach.

Relevance: If a term is frequently searched for that’s great: but what if it’s not completely relevant to your prospects? If you’re selling specs you don’t want to show up for searches that don’t have anything to do with your business, like “shoes.” But what about terms like “specs kids”? This might intuitively seem like a great description of what you do.

Competition: Understanding the relative competition for specific terms.

 

Take the list of core ways that your prospects and customers describe what you do, and start to input those into keyword tools like 
Google keyword planner 
Uber Suggest 
SEM Rush
SpyFu
Canirank
Seoprofiler
 

Your Keyword Strategy explains how you plan to use the keywords you discovered during the Keyword Research process. This aids search engines in determining which keywords a page should be ranked for.

 

On-page SEO strategies

Once you have your keyword list, the next step is actually implementing your targeted keywords into your site’s content. It's time to dive into on-page SEO, the practice of crafting web pages that answer searcher’s questions. Let’s look at a few critical, basic on-page elements you’ll want to understand as you think about how to drive search engine traffic to your website:

 

Title and Meta Tags:
Titles and meta descriptions must be unique for each page.
The length should be 50 – 65 characters.
The description tag should not contain more than 160 characters.
It should naturally include keywords.

 

Anchor Text:
Put a title on anchor text.
Use broad keywords as anchor text.

 

Image Optimization:
Image filename should be descriptive. You can use keywords in filename.
All images must have an alt tag. Users can use the keyword in the image alt tag.

 

Internal Linking:
Create internal links using anchor text.
Link all important pages to your home page.
Include two to five internal links per page.

 

Off-page SEO strategies

Off-page SEO refers to elements that influence your search rankings outside of your pages. However, just because they aren't on your site doesn't mean they aren't under your control. You can thrive at both off-page and on-page SEO with the appropriate methods. For off-page endeavours, here are some SEO best practises:

 

Earn authoritative backlinks:

The links to your site from other websites.

A backlink from website A to website B to improve SEO.

There is a way you can go about earning high-quality backlinks- High-quality content marketing.

 

Guest blogging:

 

 

Guest writing just for the aim of gaining backlinks is a spammy behaviour that you should avoid, according to Google. But that's only because a lot of individuals generate meaningless, lazy content in order to acquire a link back to their website.

Guest blogging can be a totally valid technique to earn authoritative backlinks as long as you take it as an extension of your own and approach it as a way to introduce your brand to a new audience.

Link building:
Outside of these two tactics, there’s a category of many others that refers to the practice of manually generating links to your content. It’s called link building. Link building strategies include link reclamation, content promotion, outreach, infographics, contributing to crowdsourced content, getting listed in online directories, and many more.

 

Technical SEO

Structure your data with schema markup:
Adding this kind of code to your web pages helps search engines better understand the content on that page. It adds speed, efficiency, and accuracy to the crawling process.

 

Use canonicalization tag:
If you’re publishing the same or highly similar content on two separate pages, you can use the canonical tag to indicate which page the search engine should index.

 

Mobile-friendly website:
A responsive layout
Menu that is easy-to-navigate on mobile devices
Compressed images
No aggressive pop-ups
A readable font

 

XML Sitemap:
Create XML sitemap
Mention all public URLs inside the sitemap.
Include XML sitemap in the root folder of your site.

 

Robots.txt:
Create robots.txt file to authenticate and stop crawlers from crawling anything apart from your home page.

 

Create an SEO-friendly URL structure:
Keep your URL short
Keep the structure simple (1-2 folders)
Include one to two keywords
Additionally, Use SSL protection 

 

Always keep in mind that the ultimate goal of any search engine optimization campaign is to increase exposure and traffic to your company or website's content. Look for ways that search engine traffic might benefit your company and website, rather than chasing after the latest SEO buzzwords or jumping every time Google makes a recommendation that may enhance your search ranks while harming your overall business.