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A Complete SEO Guide 2023 - Learn Everything About Search Engine Optimization - Volgum

A Complete SEO Guide 2023 - Learn Everything About Search Engine Optimization - Volgum
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  • Topic : SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
  • Date : 7/25/2021 9:56:38 PM

What is SEO (Search Engine Optimization)?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. SEO is the process of taking steps to help a website or fragment of content rank higher on Google.

The key difference between SEO and paid advertising is that SEO involves "organic" ranking, which means you don't pay to be in that position. To put it a little simpler, search engine optimization means taking a piece of online content and optimizing it so that when someone searches for something, search engines like Google display it towards the top of the google page.

look at it this way. When someone types "vegan lasagna" into Google, they're looking for recipes, ingredients, and instructions on how to make it. If you wrote an article about making vegetarian lasagna, you want people to find your recipe. For anyone to find it, you need to rank above all other websites with vegetarian lasagna recipes. It is not easy, but that is what SEO is all about.

Let's break this down even further: Most online searches begin with a search engine like Google. Actually, 75 percent of these searches start on Google.

To understand how you can make your content rank higher in search engines, you must first understand how search works.
The ultimate goal of this article is to help you understand the ins and outs of search so that you can optimize your content to rank higher on Google and get more attention for your posts.

Know Why Is SEO Important in Digital Marketing?

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is an essential part of digital marketing. Trillions of search queries are conducted on the Internet every year. Most of the time, the motive of these searches is to probe deeper into a topic, research commercial products and services, or find a good product or service for a specific need. The web is presently the main point of contact between online brands and their customers. Therefore, their marketing channels have a responsibility to drive more traffic to their website. Thus, it is important to have more visibility than a competitor and have a tangible impact on your business. By knowing and using SEO effectively, leveraging the power of keywords, reviews, and links effectively, you can elevate your brand's visibility in search engine results page (SERP) rankings. In 2023, SEO is all about using keywords to generate more traffic and using the right strategies combined with other tools to boost online engagement.


How Do Search Engines Work?

Curious to know how Google or any other search engine provides almost correct answers for each of your queries? here you go:

So when a user does a Google search, they are not searching the web, they are searching Google's index of the web. This means that Google has billions of pages stored in its database and provides the best pages from the database, which addresses your query. Google looks at over 200 ranking factors such as how often the page contains your keyword, title and meta description of the website, URL of the webpage, whether the page contains keywords, website structure, backlink quality, and many other synonyms.


How SEO Works?

Now that you know how search engines work to address the user’s query, we can now go ahead and see how your webpage can rank on SERPs. In simple terms, SEO follows all of google’s search guidelines to rank your web page higher on SERPs. Though Google considers more than 200 ranking factors, the most crucial factor is to build quality content on your webpage, which addresses the user’s query. 

Your SEO Team or your SEO Service provider should always follow SEO best practices if they need your website to rank higher on SERPs. Search engine optimization (SEO) takes care of your on-page SEO  such as meta title, meta description, and adding relevant content, URLs, and various other factors. SEO also takes care of off-page activities such as link building from related and high-quality domains. Both these methods when combined with a proper SEO strategy, help Google to understand your webpage which ultimately leads to a higher ranking on SERPs  


Why Does Your Website Need SEO?

Google is the source of over 60% of all search traffic in the world – if you combine this with the pulling power of other search engines like Bing and even Yahoo, that figure jumps to 70%. Another essential online search fact to consider is that if your website is ranking at the #1 position, there is a 40% chance that a user will click through to your website to resolve their query. For example, if 100 users search for a specific query, there is a strong case that 40 users will come to your website if you are ranking in the #1 position. Imagine 40 users with an investment of almost zero bucks. This is the reason why SEO is essential for your website/business. Although SEO takes time and effort.. Here are some of the advantages of SEO:
  • SEO is the biggest source of traffic to the site
  • SEO helps with the higher ROI (return on investment) and conversions
  • SEO is a long-term game. That is, your investment in the SEO of your website will give better results in the future.
  • SEO builds brand credibility and trust
  • SEO enhances the User Experience of your website
  • No need to spend on paid ads
So if you are keen to increase the organic traffic of your website, build an SEO team in-house or onboard a professional SEO company.


Ranking Factors

Google, the world's most popular online search engine, processes approximately 62,000 search queries every second of each day. Have you ever wondered how Google processes your query in seconds and provides you with the best web pages that can answer your query? Google considers more than 200 ranking factors before ranking any webpage on the SERP. Here are some of the important Google ranking factors you need right now:

Updated and Unique Content – As SEO experts say, content is king! indeed it is. The primary requirement for how Google evaluates a web page is updated, unique and relevant content. Google always gives priority to exclusive and updated content on the SERP over old and copied content.

Mobile-friendliness – With more users using mobile devices to search online, your website needs to be mobile-friendly. With the increase in mobile users, Google has also shifted to Mobile-First Indexing to crawl the website.

Optimal page speed – Recent studies have concluded that the bounce rate doubles for every two seconds of delay in page loading. This makes page speed the key factor for a web page to rank high on the SERPs. A page score greater than 90 is desired. You can measure your page speed using the Google PageSpeed Insights tool.

HTTPS - HTTPS became a Google ranking signal in 2014, while in 2017 Google strongly encouraged sites to be secure. In fact, sites without a secure HTTPS connection are now shown as 'not secure' in the Chrome browser's address bar, a definite eyesore for site visitors.

User Experience – User experience is one of the emerging ranking factors that Google is looking at. When users visit your website, Google continuously monitors their behavior. Google monitors the time spent on your site, the number of visitors leaving the site after viewing only one page, the number of other pages viewed, etc.

On-page SEO – This was among the essential elements any search engine would consider before ranking your website on the SERPs. On-page SEO includes web page URL, title and meta description, keyword density, website structure, structured data markup, and many more.

High-Quality Backlinks – Your web page should get links from other high-quality domains. This assures Google that the webpage is authentic and contains useful content for the users. But it doesn't just mean creating high-quality backlinks for your website. Google is smart enough to understand what is a natural link and paid link.

Domain Authority – The Domain Authority (DA) and Page Authority (PA) of a website is also a factor that Google considers when monitoring/ranking domains higher in search results. You can check your domain and page authority through the Mozbar extension.

How to Optimize Your Website?

Step 1 – Do Keyword Research

It is the same foundation upon which SEO is based as it provides you with invaluable insight into what your customers are searching for, wanting, or wanting. You can use Google Autocomplete to find out what users are searching for in relation to your main focus keywords or phrases. Google Keyword Planner and Reply to the Public are other important tools that will help you do just that as well as help you come up with new, useful content ideas. However, it is also important to know about the different types of keywords, informational keywords, LSI keywords, and namely product keywords. While product keywords are directly related to your product or service offering, informational keywords, as the name suggests, provide general information on a topic. For example, if you own a fashion e-commerce website, 'Adidas Shoes' would be a product keyword while 'Shoes Sizing Guide' could be a possible information keyword. Covert Semantic Indexing (LSI) keywords are those that revolve around your focus/primary keywords, eg. If you're writing a blog post on 'styling a denim jacket', then 'what pants to wear with a jean jacket' would qualify as an LSI keyword.

Although there are many other types of keywords, including navigational keywords, transactional keywords, and the like, the above are the most basic and important types. We recommend that after you do thorough keyword research, you choose the ones that have the highest search volume and optimize your website around them. Choosing to tackle long-tail keywords first would prove to be a wise move as these long search phrases involve less competition for ranking in the top SERPs. You can then work your way up to highly competitive, short-tail keywords that often consist of only one search term.


Step 2 – Create SEO-Friendly Content

Second, only to customer and keyword research is knowing what type of content will have the most impact on your site visitors. While there are many types of content you can choose from, you should understand that detailed, blog-like content is not always the answer to all your content problems. Brief articles that quickly outline the extraordinary aspects of your product or services usually adorn your product or services page. Complete lists can include brief pointers about anything and everything, including broad recipes, different things, ways of doing something, etc. A how-to guide or step-by-step article is used to describe a task in detail so that the reader does not need to visit other web pages to find additional information. It is always advisable to get in touch with a content writer and onboard a content marketing company that can help you with great content ideas and write-ups.

Although there are many other types of content, there is one that deserves special mention - visually rich, image or video content. You should do your homework before deciding to dive in here, including video search keywords and optimizing file names and descriptions, researching images, alt text and video transcripts, and more. And remember, while multiple mentions in a different material is a surefire way. Informing Google that your webpage is about a certain topic/keyword, you should not fill them in your write-up. Not only will this make your content unnatural or fake-seeming, but it will also raise a huge red flag for Google.


Step 3 - Focus on User Intent

Sometimes, the user is not able to clarify his requirement in his search query. This is where a Google user's past search history and preferences, and user location come up with an intelligent and intuitive guess as to what they're looking for. We can divide search intent into four broad categories, including commercial, informational, shipping, and transactional types. For example, if you want to buy shoes online, the object of your search is transactions. If it is zoning information for your child's school project, it is informative. If you're trying to find your favorite celebrity's website online, it's navigational. And if it's reading the best, most affordable DSLR cameras so you can buy them later, it's commercial.

As a website owner, you must ensure that the search intent matches the content of your webpage. For example, if a user has come to your website looking for specific information, you cannot take him/her to a product/service page. This will score very low on the user experience meter and your reputation will suffer. We also recommend measuring user feedback or interactions with your site by continuously analyzing Google Analytics metrics such as bounce rate, conversion rate, etc. to see where your website stands.


Step 4 - Optimize for Mobile

Previously, optimizing a site for mobile could be put on the back burner as well as with other non-priority SEO tasks. Even so, the Google search algorithm has undergone a major change and is now indexing websites mobile-first. What this means for website owners is that even if they have an amazing desktop version of their website, if it's not responsive enough on mobile, Google won't pay much attention to it. Registering your website on Google Search Console is an important step in getting it crawled and indexed, and now, it can also be used to analyze how you're doing on mobile, as well as on any mobile device. It can also be used to indicate usability issues. Other pro tips include making sure your website has no annoying pop-ups and loads quickly on mobile. You can also explore Google's mobile-friendly testing tool to see how easy it is for users to use your mobile website. Read more about Mobile SEO.


Step 5 – Perform On-Page SEO Activities

On-page SEO is a way to optimize your web pages that follow Google guidelines to get better rankings on search engines. On-page SEO activities include writing highly demanding, impactful, relevant, and useful website content which is also SEO friendly. If your website is built on WordPress, we recommend that you install this essential WordPress SEO plugin to get access to a ton of features that will help you optimize your site. Not only that - there are countless other small but extremely useful things you can do to get your webpage to the top of Google's SERPs. Use your target keyword in your title tag as a clear signal to Google about the content of your page. Include keywords in your anchor text and link to pages that have a high priority on your website. Having a well-organized URL structure (preferably with targeted keywords) with efficiently categorized pages is another plus. Also make sure that your meta descriptions, which are intended more for humans rather than search bots, are concise but have to wait for visitors. Using a search keyword in a meta description will cause Google to highlight it in bold in your meta description, thereby attracting the user's attention.

Step 6 – Perform Off-page SEO Activities

Off-page SEO is the set of activities you do outside of your website to create links that point to it. These links that point to your website are known as backlinks (links that go back to your site). The main agenda of off-page SEO is to build quality, relevant and trustworthy backlinks. Off-page SEO, when combined with on-page SEO activities, boosts your organic rankings. However, an excessive amount of off-page activities will lead to a Google penalty, which will later be resolved by the Google Penalty recovery service provider. Off-page SEO involves building backlinks from various influential websites, social bookmarking domains, blog commenting, image submission, and many more. Website owners should only consider creating links from the relevant domains. For example – If you are a fashion e-commerce domain, then you are advised to get backlinks from fashion niche domains.

Step 7 - Improving Page Speed

Site speed is one of the important factors that Google considers before ranking a domain high on the SERPs. Recent studies by SEO experts state that a two-second delay in page load times will result in a two-fold increase in bounce rate. Here's another case study declaring how site speed affects SEO and Google rankings for your businesses. That's why it's important to prioritize your page speed. Google Page Speed Insights is a tool created by Google developers that can help you track your page score. It also provides you with recommendations to further optimize your score.

After all your effort, if you fail or even if you don't have time to implement yourself, no worries Volgum Technologies is the SEO service company in Mumbai, India, you can simply visit www.volgum.com to know more!

Here is another blog that How Do Search Engines Work?

Frequently Asked Question

What is SEO and how does it work?

While entire industries are moving online, some people are still struggling to understand what SEO is and how it can help their businesses flourish. SEO involves the specific changes that businesses make to their content and website design to make their website rank in various search engines. Businesses use various marketing strategies through which they further optimize their websites so that they appear in the top results provided by search engines. This can be done with on-page SEO (strategies that take place within your website), and off-page SEO (strategies external to your website). By collecting data on how your site fares at both ends, search engines create a rank that determines where it will list your site.


What Is SEO Tools?

They are some of the elements that examine the chances of websites or web pages for better placement on the SERPs. SEO tools provide insight into other SEO competitors on the Internet as well as information about these elements. SEO tools include details on keywords, content, backlinks, domains, and more.


How long does SEO take to work?

On average, any SEO strategy takes at least four to six months to show any promising results. One of the major considerations related to SEO basics is the fact that these results generally add up over time and require consistent efforts along with patience.


Does Duplicate Content Hurt Your SEO?

Yes, it does. Duplicate content will confuse the search engines and force them to choose one of the similar pages to rank higher. Original content is more likely not to be selected.


Why does SEO matter?

SEO matters the most in today's world as it is the only marketing strategy that helps businesses reach out to potential customers especially. If businesses know what SEO is, they can use the reach of a website by targeting search queries related to the services and products they offer.


How long does SEO take to work?

SEO is not a fast track to success. It never was and never will be. When it comes to SEO you need a long term plan as it can take six months to a year to rank for most of the keywords.


What is the most important factor in SEO marketing?

There is no one factor that is most important because they are all important. If I were to pick something that you should focus on, it would provide quality information to people. You can have all the SEO pieces, but if your content isn't good, it doesn't matter because people won't be interested in you.


How do I rank faster on Google?

The best way to rank up is to make a consistent effort on a regular basis. If you're in it to win, you'll want to constantly build links to your site, create new content, and update previous content. Doing this daily will give desired results.


Can I rank a website without SEO?

Of course, there are situations where people get lucky, but it's likely because they're providing something that not many people are doing. There are many people competing in the same space where the best SEO can win. Affiliate marketing is a good example of this. There are a million websites that focus on sporting goods for affiliate marketing. Competing in this space requires a solid understanding of SEO marketing.

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