Learn SEO Basics 2020

These days all the businesses are investing lots of money in the digital world through digital marketing and social media campaigns regularly to increase their brand exposure and sell products or services.

Some companies are expanding and making space for the SEO professionals relevant to this job.

They hire the professionals to create a separate department for this work.

A very important category of this digital marketing field is SEO known as “Search Engine Optimization“.

This SEO field is very big which is growing rapidly since last several years.

This is one of the highest demanding skills in freelance marketplaces. Many businesses and companies are developed to offer this particular SEO services.

Those companies have their marketing team and SEO experts, while the other companies are hiring SEO experts from freelance marketplaces.

Types of SEO

Three types of SEO exist on internet

• White-Hat
• Grey-Hat
• Black-Hat

White-Hat SEO is the legal and most prominent SEO.

This is completely ethical and gives long term results.

Categories in SEO:

There are three main categories and skills in the SEO field.

1. On-page S.E.O
2. Off-page S.E.O
3. Technical S.E.O

What is SEO:

Let’s understand what SEO is and what are the basics of SEO?

In simple words, “SEO” is the process of optimizing your website for search engines according to their algorithms respectively.

What does it mean to “optimize your website”?

It’s means to work on your website according to rules and regulations of search engines to make your website helpful and visible for everyone.

Here are some aspects which are optimized during the SEO process.

1. 1. Having high-quality relevant content on your website that matches the intent of the user.
   2. Give the right information to the user as much as possible.
   3. As much as you give benefits to the user your chance gets higher to rank up on “search engines”.
   4. Making sure that search engines can access, crawl and index your website without any issue.
   5. Helping search engines to understand the context of your content.
   6. Use image alt tag properly in your images.
   7. Trying to get natural backlinks (it may take sometimes) if you do spamming or use any unethical way to get backlinks in big quantity Google or any other search engine will penalize your website and put in spam.

1. Giving search engine algorithms a reason to trust your website rank it higher than other websites.

These are some basic steps of the SEO process.

Once you do this all the above steps correctly, your website becomes SEO friendly and emerges as a candidate to rank high on search engines like Google, Bing, etc.

What to do in on-page S.E.O

In on-page SEO you need to optimize your content by using keywords you research and making it relevant for the user.

Put relevant and helpful content on your website.

On-page SEO is a very important process you can achieve stable higher rankings because it provides you organic traffic which is very important for a successful SEO campaign.

Keep focusing on the user because if your website is user-friendly and helps users to get the right information search engines will give you priority and advantage on other websites.

Elements of on-page S.E.O

1. Optimized page titles and description
2. Publish high-quality and user-friendly content
3. The right use of keywords
4. Content Formatting
5. Utilization of all HTML headings.
6. SEO friendly structure
7. Proper URLs of every page
8. Internal Links
9. External Links
10. Page Loading Time
11. Responsive Coding or theme
12. Page Loading Speed
13. Proper use of images and other multimedia put alt tags on it.

Google preference:

Google preferred On-page SEO than Off-page SEO because it produces good quality and genuine content which ultimately helpful for the users.

What to do in off-page SEO

Off-page SEO is the process and technique used to increase the position of the website in search engines with the help of links and traffic from other forums like other websites and social media links.

It is similar to marketing because in this technique you have to promote your brand or website on other platforms and introduce your service or product to the user to get traffic and money.

Off-Page SEO Includes:

• Link building
• Branding Content
• Social Media marketing

Off-page SEO is directly linked with on-page SEO.

If you have done very good with off-page SEO but done nothing with on-page SEO than your effort is wasted.

To get the expected result, your priority should be on-page SEO.

Off-page SEO loses its importance in several years as Google changes its ranking factors.

Reason of Loses Importance of off-page SEO:

There are many reasons why off-page SEO loses its importance which are mentioned below

1. Google changes its ranking factors and gave more importance to on-page optimization
2. Spamming on getting backlinks or external links
3. Because of the importance of this process websites that have a low-quality content rank higher than the websites which have original content.
4. In this process, lots of people took unethical seo methods for taking high rank on search engines while the websites that used genuine and natural methods are way out in the competition.

Importance of Quality Links:

After the update of ranking factors Google now prefers the quality of backlinks instead of quantity.

Now if you get backlinks from a website which is newly launched or a website which’s own value is nothing than the backlink from these types of site is not going to work for you.

To utilize this process, correctly you have to earn a “backlink” from an authority site and also relevant for your context it will get you a benefit.

This is called a natural backlink.

Additional Info:

Educational and Government websites have separate authority.

If you get a link from .edu and .gov websites this link is the most powerful backlinks Google counts.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO is the most important technique in the whole process.

In this process, you optimize your website for indexing and crawling phase.

With the technical SEO, you basically help the search engines to indexed, crawl, access and interpret your website easily.

The main object of this type of SEO is to organize the infrastructure of your website and make it technically correct.

Elements of Technical S.E.O

• Register your website with Webmaster tools of Google or Bing (Depends upon your preferences)
• Optimize your URLs structure
• Fix the broken URLs if exist by using canonical tags
• Enable Breadcrumbs
• HTTPS and SSL certificate to secure your website
• Specify a preferred Domain
• Choose good Webhosting
• Optimize ROBOTS.txt file
• Use of schema tags
• Implement structured data markup
• Optimize 404 Page
• XML sitemap
• Use AMP Validator for android users
• Website and page Loading Speed
• Pagination and multilingual websites

Use of www or http://

Many people are confused about this whether to use www in front of the domain or not.

This is a personal choice for you to use it.

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Laraib Shahzad

Laraib is a young college student and emerging freelance graphic designer + content writer with enthusiasm to provide great content to the readers.

laraib.freelancefront.com

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