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Introduction to SEO
You are a beginner and you started your website or blog. You search for your content on search engines and you cannot find your page? You are not receiving any visitors to your blog? So what is the problem? A little secret: it is SEO.
Follow up on this article to know all about how to find your page on the first page of google, because does anyone even go to page 2 ?! I don’t even know what lies there, do you?!
So how will people know about your page and start visiting your blog and reading your content?
Running a simple search on google on the number of new blogs that are being published every day gives us a total of over than 4.4 million blogs each date.
Scrolling down a bit further, Google suggests a search of how many total blogs are present in 2020, and trust me the numbers are high, and that is in 2019 only!
So competition is high! How should you stand out and rank your blogs and websites high so that you get more views and visitors? Bare with me.
What is SEO?
Go now and search for any thing, you can see some pages rank on top of other pages. Wondering why? This is SEO.
SEO-which stands for search engine optimization- is the way or strategy you need to do to make people find you blogs online using engine searches and getting free visits, or what we call “organic listing”.
Let me explain a bit further and dig into some details.
When aiming for a good SEO, there are 3 factors to look into: you , the search engine and the searcher. Whenever publishing any new blog article, you want to rank your article on top so people would find it.
How do search engines work?
While most search engines keep their algorithms secret from the public, we do know some of their strategy on how they work.
But before I continue talking about search engines and their algorithms, I will start using google and stop repeating search engines. Let’s face it, 90% of all the world’s searches are done on google. Bing searches are used to find google page when first opening the IE.
Back to our main idea. When introducing a new post online, google starts skimming the page in search of the keywords used in the article. This is how Google will know what your article is about.
Google also checks the bounce rate for the page. The bounce rate is defined by the time the site visitors stick to your page. The higher the time spent, the lower the bounce rate. The lower the bounce rate, the higher Google ranks your page in the searches.
Types of SEO
There are two types of SEOs: On-Page SEO, and Off-Page SEO.
Imagine have a local coffee shop at your hometown. You need to accomplish two things to keep your business running. First your need to attract people by making the design of you place pleasant. Then you need to provide them with good and tasty coffee for them to stay loyal customers. Right?
Now you are thinking, what does a coffee shop has to do with SEO? Patience my friend.
Making your coffee tasty, is the same as making good on-page SEO. It is the design of your content, the value and keywords in your content that make people stay on your page. While designing your coffee shop to attract visitors is the same as the off-page SEO to make google and search engines rank your page higher.
On-Page Optimization
There are three main points for on-page SEO you need to pay attention to.
The first and most important is your content!
Content
Why content? Because content is king. Researchers would be very happy when finding all the results they need in one article.
Go now and search “simple homemade pizza sauce” (I think I’m hungry). Google will put all its effort to deliver to you the best article that talks all about the best recipe with minimal ingredients and less time to prepare. Nice ha.
It doesn’t show you the best pizza places around town, instead it shows you exactly what you asked for.
This is why you need to deliver excellent content to make google and your reader value what you are providing them.
Also, there are two types of content. Evergreen content, which is the content that will live long, such as posting about how to make money online, and short term content that will die in a couple of years, such as posting about the best mobiles in 2020.
Keywords
What are keywords? Keywords are the terms people will use to do their research.
Always make sure to use specific keywords when trying to rank higher. For example, “best homemade pizza sauce” is better and more precise than “pizza sauce”. You got my point.
There are many free tools to help you picking your keywords wisely.
Below is an example of finding good keywords when running a search about pizza sauce using a tool found on h-supertools.
But make sure to not go too far using keywords. Use it in your titles, in the URL link of the page and in some of your body content. Be cautious about keywords in your content, it should stay in the percent range of 0.5-3 percent. Going above this range will not trick search engines and might penalize your ranking as a result.
Design
We are not talking here about the design that attracts the search engine to rank your page, we will get to that later. We are talking about the design of your content.
Making sure the heading of your post, the titles you use and all the structure of your content is understandable to your reader is very crucial.
Moreover, optimizing your images in your content is very important.
Images are the way you tell your content visually.
Make sure your images have captions and descriptions. Use the keywords in your description for the search engine to analyze this image and it will be displayed by the search engine for that specific keyword. This will help the overall article ranking for that specific keyword.
Off-Page Optimization
Now we come to the part where we attract Google to rank our page. Many factors contribute in this and below are some.
Page Speed And Bounce Rate
Let’s face it. When was the last time you waited for a page to load for a minute? Or even 20 seconds? That’s right, you can’t remember. Time is the most valuable thing in life, and Google knows it.
Having a slow page, increases your bounce rate. People will click the link and then leave in under 10 seconds because your page did not open.
This will result with high bounce rate thus lower ranking on Google page.
Security
SEOs now consider the security of your website a major role in its ranking.
Moreover, open a not secure website on Google Chrome and you will get a warning that scares people. People will not continue to your website after reading the warning. And now that Chrome is the most used browser in the world, this is a big problem.
Always make sure your website starts with HTTPS. What does that mean? It means that the data that is transferred between your website and your visitor is always encrypted. You can achieve that by installing an SSL certificate to your website.
Backlinks
A page that has many links pointing to it is considered a very important page by any search engine. This is what backlinks are all about.
But let’s face it, if you are not a very important website that everyone is talking about, no one will backlink to you. Sad I know, but this is the truth. To get backlinks, you should take the initiative.
Try to contact other blog owners to exchange backlinks with them. But make sure to go for quality over quantity. Having a very reputable company known by many people to backlink to your blog, is more important than having many pages not read pages backlink to you. SEOs believe that important blogs talk about important blogs. Which is why Google would rank your page higher if you have good quality backlinks.
Tools for Good Ranking
If you are using a word press blog, then the most popular plugin to add to your blog is “Yoast SEO”. It advises you on what to change in your page to get better ranking. It analyzes your post to tell you what is good and what is bad. Below is an example.
Another tools that will help you with your ranking is SEMRUSH.
SEMRUSH is the ultimate SEO tool that helps you get deeper insights into your competition, identifies your top organic keywords as well as paid keywords, allows you to do backlink analysis, and much more.
Make sure you check it out.
Conclusion
While it doesn’t take too much time and effort to follow a good SEO technique, it might kill your posts if your don’t.
It might take you a 5-6 hours to write a blog post, but it is up to you to decide if your post will live for years, or it will not be visited by anyone. Just commit to 10 to 15 minutes after you are done with your post to make the necessary adjustments. These changes will get you a better SEO rank, thus reaching to many people. Maybe after following a great optimization technique, your article will stand out!
Thank you for reading and I will be waiting for your comments below.
Amazing content love your blog...
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