This article will help in gaining basic insights about SEO. It also touches base on what a search engine is and how it ranks your website.
Background of SEO
The term SEO was first used in 1997 as per Danny Sullivan, an industry analyst. According to him, Bruce Clay was one of the first people who popularized SEO. Since then it’s popularity has steadily increased and today this term is searched by 100,000 to 1 million people on an average monthly basis (according to Google Keyword Planner).
Meaning of SEO
The term SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and is the process of optimizing your website so that it ranks higher in a search engine to increase its visibility and generate more traffic. A surge in organic traffic means a business can generate more leads without shelling out exorbitant amount of money on advertising its products or services. This can be ensured by the usage of right keywords and optimizing the content’s quality so that it appears at the top of SERP (search engine result page).
What is the need of ranking higher in a search engine?
You might be wondering the reason of ranking higher in a search engine? Well, according to a study conducted in 2014, a whopping 67.6% users open the first five links, while only 3.73% users open 6-10 numbered links. This makes it inevitable for a digital marketer to make sure they stay at the top. A lot of effort, time, money and creativity goes into making of a website. No one wants to see that effort going down the drain and their business failing miserably. Thus, search engine optimization is the answer to that.
How Does A Search Engine Work?
Before we delve deeper into the world of SEO, let us take a step back and understand how does a search engine work and look at the popular search engines out there with their market share.
There are 3 major factors on which a search engine works.
- Crawling
- Indexing
- Ranking
- Crawling – In order to gather information from different websites, a search engine like Google sends out its bots to scan a website. It uses sitemaps to navigate through different webpages. A search engine does this to gather fresh content or update existing database. Once a site is crawled, the information is downloaded and stored in a huge database. The collected information could be in the form of images, texts, or videos.
- Indexing – The huge database with all the URLs collected by a bot is what indexing means. Whenever a user searches for something, the bots will fetch the information stored inside the database. This results in quick displaying of the results. Hence, saving reader’s time.
- Ranking – Based on the collected information, a search engine will rank the results according to the quality of the content, usage of keywords, backlinks, user interface, mobile optimization and many other factors. There is a list of algorithms that determine where the website will rank.
Famous Search Engines
Below is the list of search engines by popularity.
*Popularity is determined with the market volume and average monthly searches.
1. Google
Whenever we talk about a search engine the first name that comes to the mind is Google. It has been around for more than two decades and leads the market from the front. Ever month Google handles 100 billion searches. Now that’s a mind boggling number. The total market share of Google is around 90%.
2. Microsoft Bing
It is second most popular search engine. However, it captures under 4% market share. This marks a huge difference between Google and Bing. Keeping this aside, Microsoft has lately integrated generative AI tool called Copilot which has made it quite easy for users to search for information online.
3. DuckDuckGo
Another search engine which has 3 billion people use it to find whatever information they’re looking for. It’s USP is that it doesn’t store or share your search history. This particular feature has helped them garner a massive user base.
4. Yahoo
There was a time when yahoo was the undisputed choice of customers whenever they wanted to look up for something on the internet. But, their business strategy did not keep up pace with the technological developments and failure to acquire firms like Google, Yahoo was left far behind. Only 700 million people use it to fetch information.
Types of SEO
Let us now look at the different types of SEO.
1. On-Page SEO
In order to rank your website, there are certain factors that are under your control like content quality, title tags, image optimization etc. Optimizing such factors to make your website look better, your content more relevant, authentic and authoritative results in higher ranking of the website. This is what on-page SEO means. Taking cognizance of the tasks that are holding your ranking back and making changes to them will result in better visibility of the website. Let’s look at them in detail.
i. Content Quality – To ensure your website or blog post ranks higher, write high-quality content. Most of the search engines back quality content based on relevance to the user’s query, its authority and trustworthiness. If you are a content writer, you must create a strategy or a framework about the topic you’re going to write on. It will be of great help and will make sure you cover topics of importance.
ii. Keyword Research – For a blog post to appear in the top results, keywords have a pivotal role to play. When any search engine crawls your blog or website, it basically looks for the keywords used in the page which have high search volume. To check the search volume of a keyword, you can use Google keyword planner, Semrush keyword research tool, Ahrefs Keywords Explorer, Ubersuggest and Askthepublic.
iii. Title Tags – Whenever a user searches something, the blue color links that show up in the search results are the title tags. It helps in getting into a website. To make the title tag work include your primary keyword in your title. This will again help with the listing of the blog post or website.
iv. Image optimization – Gone are the days when people would read your blog if it had no images. It is essential to include images in the blog to make it attractive and engaging. Resize the images so that they don’t look absurd when added. Also, compressing the images is really important as it make sures the loading time doesn’t go up because if it does, it will be detrimental in ranking the website.
v. Internal linking – To give the users ease of navigating between different webpages, internal linking is essential. It acts as a bridge between various URLs. As a website developer you want the user to remain engaged and spend as much time on the website as possible. Internal linking will make sure of that.
vi. Meta descriptions – Google strongly recommends writing a meta description. It is the text you see just below the URL with a brief overview of what the article is about. It aids in getting more clicks and adds to the score of SEO.
2. Off-Page SEO
Off-Page SEO means to work outside the scope of the website. It ranges from creating useful backlinks and growing social media footprint by creating authoritative and trustworthy content.
i. Generating backlinks – The term ‘backlinks’ means to link other websites to your site. Doing this will greatly enhance your site’s visibility and is an excellent way of establishing trust in the eyes of a search engine by sending them a signal that your content is relevant. This doesn’t mean any backlink will work. The website you’re linking with should be related to your niche. Only if it is, a search engine will consider it.
There are different ways of doing this. First, you can directly reach out to the websites requesting them to link to your content. Second, finding broken links in a website and offering them to replace it with yours. Third, connecting with journalists and see if they’re ready to help you out by giving you useful backlinks. It is recommended to do a diagnosis of the backlinks. There are various tools that can be used like Moz, Ahrefs or Semrush. These tools have their own metrics to evaluate the quality and quantity of backlinks and how natural they look.
Building Broken Links – There might be occasions when your backlinks do not work properly. You need to scrutinize which links are not working properly and ask the website to replace it with yours. This can be done by using Backlink Analytics tool. You can detect the links you can suitably replace.
ii. Boosting Social Media Engagement – It’s a great idea to have a holistic presence across different social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter) and LinkedIn. Posting your content regularly will draw attention of the users. This will get them to know you and your content better and will bring them to your website, thus increasing your website traffic. In order to do this, you can create a content calendar. It will be your guide on when and what to post on different platforms. It will also make sure that you never miss any date.
iii. Promoting Content Through Influencers – Also known as influencer marketing, finding, connecting and promoting your content through influencers who have a large base of followers will benefit your online presence greatly. However, the key is to choosing the ones with the relevant audience.
iv. Guest Blogging – Another way of strengthening your digital presence is by collaborating with other websites that welcome guest bloggers. The key again is to find the right websites. So you have to be thorough with your research. Needless to say, the quality of your content should be outstanding.
v. Local SEO – Whenever someone searches for something in an area where you have your physical office or you offer your services, you want your enterprise to rank at the top. This is what Local SEO is all about. Optimizing the website in such a way that your business is visible in local searches.
3. Keyword Research
Whenever a user searches for any information on a search engine, the words they type in the search box become keywords. It could be one word, a short sentence or a question. Keywords help us understand what people are searching for on the internet and their intent behind their search.
We can use these keywords accordingly in order to rank better in a search engine.
All the search engines work on algorithms. One of the algorithm is to look for keywords so that when a user searches for something, your link ranks up at the top. While choosing keywords, keep in mind their search volume, competition and keyword difficulty.
4. Content Marketing Strategy
Content is the heart of SEO. These are not two different entities. They go hand-in-hand. Curating high-quality, relevant and engaging content is pivotal to the success of your website’s ranking. It can help in getting solid backlinks and aid in social media presence. The key to acing this strategy is by being original and by doing a thorough research into the topics of your choice.