SEO is a process that is carried out to make a website or landing page discoverable to the right audience on search engines. In spite of how important SEO is, not every business/marketer is doing SEO. If you think that writing excellent content is enough to bring you visitors, you’re mistaken. Well written content is a waste if it is not optimized for your audience.

Want to know the how, what and why of SEO? You’ve landed on the right blog! We’ll guide you through how to do SEO for your website step by step.

But before that, let’s check how well your website is currently optimized. A good way of finding this is to conduct a detailed SEO audit for your website. 

Tip to remember- Google keeps on changing its algorithms and to do SEO in a correct way, you need to be updated with any change in the algorithms. It is important that you optimize your content both for the search engines and the users.

Here are common questions on SEO answered:

What is SEO and how does it work?

As explained earlier, SEO is the process of making your website/content discoverable to the right users, who are looking for content similar to yours.

Do you how Google shows relevant data for a query?

When web crawlers, called Google bots, crawl the content on your website, the keywords used on the website help categorize your content into relevant categories. If your web page makes use of the keywords that the user has put into the search bar, your web page should show up in the results! Keyword research forms an important part of any SEO task. To know how SEO works, you need to know the elements of SEO and how search engines work.

Let’s take a look at the elements:

Title tag- This is what you see at the top of the page in any browser. Search engine spiders look for this title tag when they crawl a website. The title tag must always consist of a keyword with a decent search volume. This keyword must also be highly relevant to the nature of the content on the page. It should give a description of the content within. Know how to optimize Title tags.

The character limit for the same is 70 characters or less.

Meta keywords- Keywords are the building blocks of SEO. While adding keywords, make sure you add those keywords that are aligned with your content or topic. Keywords that will be used in the content must fall into place in as natural a manner as possible. Remember, your content also needs to be optimized for your users and should be easy to read. You can add 5-7 relevant keywords for a single web page.

Meta description- It is a more detailed description of the page, just like a crux of the content. It is important that meta-description includes relevant keywords with a decent search volume. Google, by default, highlights the relevant keywords used in the meta-description. So, you see how important it is to use relevant keywords?

The character limit for the same is from 120 -158 characters.

Techniques of Doing SEO

There are three techniques of doing SEO. All three have the same objective, i.e. rank higher on search engines. However, the main difference lies in carrying out the process of SEO and the nature of the techniques. 

Black-hat SEO

Rightly called as the unethical method because it involves techniques and processes that go against the principles and rules laid out by Google. These techniques cost less than the white-hat techniques and are ineffective in the long run.

No doubt that you get instant results, without waiting for a long time. However, these methods involve a high risk of getting your website penalized and banned from search results. Thus, if your business makes use of black hat techniques, there is a possibility that your users might never find your website again in the SERPs. Some black hat techniques include paid backlinks, keyword stuffing, etc.

White-hat SEO

These SEO techniques adhere to the Google guidelines. SEO, when done in the right way takes a longer time to show results. This is more costly than the black-hat SEO as it is done in an ethical way.

The risks involved in using white hat techniques are almost negligible. All websites that rank well on search engines are likely using white hat techniques. White hat techniques include writing unique and informative content, getting original and quality link backs and promoting this content on relevant marketing channels.

Grey-hat SEO

This is a blend of both black-hat SEO and white-hat SEO techniques. However, it is not labelled as unethical. But using this technique will be risking your website’s online visibility.

An example of this is click bait techniques that you might have heard of. The main purpose of this is to attract a visitor to the website and encourage them to click on a particular link, without delivering any value.

Types of SEO

SEO is carried out in two ways, on page SEO and off page SEO. A blend of both these activities is required for ranking well on search engines.

Off-page SEO

These are the activities that are performed on a page after it goes live on the website. Such as sharing the page on social media channels, creating quality link backs to the website, sharing on social bookmarking websites, etc.

On page SEO

This refers to all the activities that we do on a page, ranging from keyword insertion in the content, internal linking within the content, adding keywords in certain sections like Title tag, meta description, image optimization. In short, all these activities that make your website search engine friendly.

Why SEO is Important

SEO is as important to an online business as having a website. Having no visitors to your website is as good as having no website at all.

According to reports, 80% of website traffic is generated by a query. Also, the top 4 links received for any query have the highest click-through rate. So, if you are doing SEO the correct way, the chances of getting online visitors increases manifold.

We hope you’re a little more familiar with everything about SEO, how to do SEO, techniques of doing SEO and why it’s so important for all online businesses.