What is SEO? – Ultimate Guide to Search Engine Optimization

SEO – Sounds like something too technical?

Don’t be scared. You’re not supposed to code!
By the way, an SEO professional is a job role that doesn’t require you to code.

You can consider it as a role that is primarily a digital marketing role but kind-off a little technical in nature.

That’s the reason I have listed SEO as one of the job roles in my blog 11 tech jobs that don’t require coding

But what exactly is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization.

Search Engine Optimization is the process of getting more traffic to the website by making the website rank higher on search engines.

SEO is one of the key activities in Digital Marketing. But before actually trying to understand search engine optimization, you must be aware of how search engines work.

Search engines are the place where one searches for something. Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc are some commonly used search engines.

In this article, we will learn about the concept of search, the factors influencing SEO, types of SEO, and much more.

Understanding the concept of search

Whenever we search for anything on search engines, we get the Search Engine Results Page.

Search Engine Results Page (SERP) gives you the relevant results based on your search query.

Suppose I search for “best place to learn SEO”, then I would get something like:

Here on the basis of keywords, that is the search query the most relevant results are fetched. This is the first page of SERP. As we all know, there are several such pages. But most of us don’t even go to the second page.

In fact, more than 90% of people don’t go to the second page. Out of that 90% of people, the majority of people prefer just the top five links. Yes, even most of us are in that 90%.

So, what does this mean?

This means your website must rank as high as possible in SERP. And how can you rank higher in SERP?
By optimizing your website for search engines, that is by Search Engine Optimization.

But you would wonder how are the websites ranked on search engines?

Search engines crawl through a website and on the basis of the relevance of the website they index (rank) the website. Every search engine has a different search algorithm which helps it to give rankings to various websites/web pages. The ultimate goal of every search engine is to provide the best search results.

Let us understand the concept of crawling and indexing in detail to understand search engine optimization.

Crawling and Indexing

You would have understood by now that ranking at the top of SERP is extremely important for your website.

But if you understand the ranking process, you will understand SEO in a much better way. Search engines crawl and index. You will find these 2 words whenever you try to understand Search Engines or SEO.

Now, let us understand the meaning of crawling and indexing in very simple language.

Suppose that you went out into the market to explore. You noticed a new shop in your vicinity that is selling different varieties of juices, milkshakes, and ice creams.

You also could see the posters depicting the shop’s specialties. You tried ice cream and enjoyed it a lot.

After spending some time in the market, you came back home.

A few days pass and a new family comes to stay next to your house. You start talking with them and they ask you about where can they find good ice creams in your vicinity.

Won’t you remember the new shop you recently visited? Won’t you recommend to them some good places selling ice creams in the vicinity?

The role played by you in the above example is the role played by SEARCH ENGINES.

Just as you like to explore the market, they explore the internet. Just as you discovered new shops, they discover new websites.

You recommended the ice cream shops to your neighbor on the basis of the quality and taste, similarly search engines rank high-quality websites.

The process of discovering content on the internet by search engine bots is known as crawling. These search engine bots are known as crawlers, robots, and spiders.

The bots try to explore every type of content on the internet. It can be images, videos, webpages, PDF documents, etc.

Search engine bots discover content using links (URLs) to the web pages.

After they find/discover the content, they store it in an index. An index helps them retrieve the information whenever needed.

Just as the index of the book helps the reader in finding a particular concept in the book, similarly the index of the search engines helps them in fetching information when a user searches for it.

The results that we see on the SERP are fetched on the basis of relevance and quality from the index.

I hope this gave you an understanding of crawling and indexing.

What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

Now, it will be easier for you to understand SEO. SEO is the process of ranking higher on the SERP in order to drive more traffic to the website.

Search Engine Optimization is the building block of the digital marketing campaign. Because unless your business is discovered on the internet, you cannot do business digitally.

SEO involves various activities and the SEO activities are divided into two segments – On-Page SEO activities and Off Page SEO activities.

On-Page SEO

On-page SEO is a process of optimizing a website in order to rank it higher on Search Engine Results Pages. It can be performed by optimizing the content of the website and the HTML source code of the website.

Page Title, Meta Tags, Heading Tags, Good Content, etc are a few of the On-Page factors which much be optimized.

Off-Page SEO

Off-Page SEO is the process of driving more traffic to a website.

The most commonly used Off-Page activities are Sharing, Commenting, Star Ratings, Link Building, etc.

Types of SEO – Various Hats of Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization is of 3 main types on the basis of the ways in which it is implemented:

1. White Hat
2. Black Hat
3. Grey Hat

White Hat SEO

White Hat SEO constitutes practices that adhere to Google’s guidelines and is legitimate. The white hat techniques focus mainly on the quality of content and Google’s algorithms.

Though these practices take time for generating the desired results, it is advisable to follow white hat practices.

Black Hat SEO

As the name suggests, these are less costly and faster techniques but are not legitimate. Keyword stuffing, Cloaking, Hidden text, links, etc are a few of the most commonly used black hat techniques.

The website following black hat tactics can be banned by Google. Also, it does not help in the long run as Google constantly updates its algorithms. So, it is advisable to avoid using such black hat practices.

Grey Hat SEO

The SEO practices which are not as ethical as white hat techniques and not as unethical as the black hat techniques are Grey Hat techniques.

Grey Hat is riskier than White Hat but less risky as compared to the Black Hat SEO. A few of the commonly used Grey Hat practices are Spun Content, Clickbait, Paying for reviews, Link Exchange, etc.

3 Major factors that influence SEO

There are several factors that impact SEO.

But the 3 major factors are:

1. Website Architecture
2. Content on the website
3. Linking

In a nutshell, Search Engine Optimization is the process of improving the ranking on search engines by optimizing the website’s architecture, having the relevant content in it, and linking the website properly.

Tools for SEO

SEO tools help in achieving some common and necessary activities in a faster and easier way.

A few of the most useful tools for Search Engine Optimization are:

1. Google Analytics
2. Ahrefs toolbar
3. Google Search Console
4. MozBar
5. Google PageSpeed Insights
6. Yoast Plugin
7. Moz Link Explorer
8. SERProbot
9. Google Keyword Planner
10. SEOWorkers Analysis Tool
11. Woorank
12. Neil Patel’s UberSuggest Tool

Happy Learning!