What is basic SEO?

What is basic SEO? SEO abbreviation stands for Search Engine Optimization.

Let’s understand the basic idea of a Search Engine. Here is a Basic SEO checklist –> SEO for beginners

Please refer to the post on How Search Works? if not already.

It is a process that will improve the search engine ranking of web pages. It is basically a term generally used to improve the visibility of a website on search engines and get Higher traffic and more customers. More customers lead to more profit for websites in the following terms:

Blogging website: They can monetize their income by enabling Ads on their website, which leads to Income earning.

E-commerce website: They can attract more customers, and sell to a larger number of potential customers, who are willing to buy online.

Small, Medium & Local Business websites, Charitable Org., Educational Org & others: Business websites can provide details about their Products List/Quality Services they offer online. Customers can find such type of Business online and contact directly and procure their services. Customer’s trust in such type of business website increases if a business has a Professional website.

Charitable organizations, Educational organizations, and others that do not come in the Business category can provide information and their Culture in the organization. They can put options of collecting donations online, Announcements of a special event to their potential contributors.

Let’s understand How to optimize your website for search engines and improve your ranking:

^__> Editing Title:

Using relevant Titles for content is best practice. Using a Keyword in the title is also known as best practice. Avoiding repetitive titles etc.
The title is the first thing that will be crawled and viewed by the search engine, therefore Editing titles for rank results should not be ignored.

^__> Editing Rich Snippet:

Adding High quality and relevant Description of the Title is important to rank in the search engines.
It increases the User’s Click Through Rate (CTR) if the user finds an attractive description in Meta Description.
Click-Through Rate means the percentage of people who click on your web page when it appears on search results. If web page Titles or description is eye-catchy and match with user query, they will click on the web page without wasting time in thinking.

^__> Enhancements:

If your website is properly optimized for search engines then, the site will show enhancement for web pages like breadcrumbs, site logo will be automatically shown.

Using the Site Search box is one of the options for Enhancements.
Use a Table of Content for your Blogs and provide links.

Using Favicon on site will be beneficial as it will be shown in Rich snippets.

^__> Link Building:

Inserting external links and internal linking within your website makes Indexing of web pages faster.

^__> Image Optimization:

Properly resized and optimized images are one of the important factors to rank websites in search engines. Because if images are properly optimized then they will be indexed and ranked in Google image search, which will be beneficial to website owners.

Using Webp format for images is the best practice.

^__> Use of Structured Schema Data:

Using the right type of Schema data is a crucial thing. If Schema data is used correctly it will help to understand the Google as to what type of information is on that web page.

There are various types of Schema Data. Find various types of schema on schema.org

^__> Copywriting/Content Writing:

Write for your viewer of the website. Provide users with rich quality information they are searching for. If they do not find out relevant information on your web they will bounce to another website. So, ensure you provide users with Quality information. Do not write plain sentences, write catchy headlines and short but satisfies the intent of the user.

^__> Build and Submit sitemap:

Decide the format of Sitemap you want to use. For example, Text, XML, and RSS.

There are third-party sitemap generators available in the market which will automatically generate sitemaps for your website. Make sure that size of your sitemap is not more than 50MB.

If you are building the website on the CMS platform, then the sitemap is built automatically through a plugin.

Submit your sitemap to Search Engines where you wish your web pages to appear.

^__> Optimize Page Speed:

Optimize your website images and assets for website speed. “Website that loads faster, crawled faster by a search engine, and ranks higher”.

You must have experienced Slow website loading, and ask a question to yourself, How much time you can keep waiting patiently for the website to load?

User bounce rate will increase if the website does not load within a maximum time of 3-4 seconds.
Page speed including the Speed of the website on Mobile devices is one of the important factors.

^__> Mobile Friendliness:

If a website is loading correctly on Mobile Device, then a website is considered optimized for Mobile Device.

Consider the following factors to Test Mobile Friendliness:

• Are all images displaying properly on the mobile device screen?
• Are fonts and text being readable for a human visitor?
• Is Navigation Menu correctly showing all options on Mobile Device? Or it is going off the screen?

Conclusion:

Title, Meta Description, and Images is an important factors in the SEO of web pages. Test your website for Responsiveness on Devices like Mobile, or Tablet. Nowadays most of the traffic comes to websites from Mobile devices. So, it is also important to test the speed of your website on these devices.

Regularly submit your Sitemap to search engines if you have made changes to the website.