Planning to establish a website but don’t know how to set up, optimize and rank it? All the people who are new to digital marketing, let us help you understand “SEO” which is the ultimate key to building a strong online presence across the web.
Read this article in detail to find out how search engine optimization works to meet user requirements, build website authority, and generate potential leads.
“SEO is the practice of enhancing the website quality according to the search engine algorithms. It basically intends to improve the website’s visibility and drive more traffic”
All webmasters mainly optimize their websites to deliver a good user experience and get ranked on the search engine result pages. The search engine that we mainly prioritize is Google.
Keep in mind that SEO is an umbrella term that encompasses everything we do to optimize websites for quick indexing and ranking on the search engine.
There are three types of SEO:
On-page SEO
It refers to the optimization of web page elements which include content, source code, images, title tag, meta description, and URL structure.
Off-page SEO
It refers to the actions that we perform in order to drive more traffic and increase ranking strength (e.g backlink building and content marketing)
Technical SEO
It refers to website and server optimization in order to meet all the technical requirements of search engines and ensure quick indexing.
In short, On-page, Off-page, and Technical SEO all together, lays down the optimization rules following which we tackle different website issues and increase ranking on SERPs. Accordingly, the major tasks of a webmaster (SEO Specialist) includes niche selection, keyword research, website cutomization, content optimization, link building, and site auditing.
For sure, without deploying SEO techniques, a webmaster can never fetch organic traffic to grow business across the web.
SEO is important to establish a web resource that meets search engine requirements and delivers a great user experience. For sure, a website with enhanced usability serves the best to users and in turn, search engines rank it higher on the result pages. Keeping this in view, we can affirm that search engine optimization helps us to get more traffic, increase business growth, and maximize revenue.
If you are a webmaster then you must know that search engine optimization helps to find out:
How to establish a website?
How to find the right content topics for a website?
How to create optimized content for a website?
How to optimize a website for crawling?
How to index a website or web pages?
How to rank website content?
How to generate traffic on a website?
How to monetize a website?
How to boost the performance of a website?
If you properly follow the SEO rules then you can set up, optimize, and rank your website to build your brand and earn money in the digital market.
Now, in order to simplify SEO, we would like to provide you with a clear overview of the search engine which you know is the base of everything. Keep reading to gain in-depth insights.
A search engine can be best defined as a software system that carries out web searches. It enables people from all around the globe to search for any kind of information and connect with multiple websites across the internet.
The websites we explore, access, or use to display information are stored in the database of search engines. Whereas the search database itself is stored in the “server” of the search engine. The database of search engines is basically called an “index”. When we establish a website, we basically store it in the index of search engines so that internet users from all over the world can discover, access, and use it.
What do you think: is it easy for users to discover a website on a search engine? No.
Keep in mind that the content of a website enables the users to reach it. The search engine finds, assesses, and then serves your content on its result pages. You have to rank your web content higher on the SEARCH ENGINE RESULT PAGES (SERPs) so that whenever the users enter a query relevant to it, the search engine quickly displays your website on the top of the result pages.
Once a website ranks at the top, it becomes easy for users to discover it.
Here, our concerned search engine is GOOGLE. So, we would like to tell you how it works.
Crawling ⇒ Rendering ⇒ Indexing ⇒ Ranking
That’s how the Google search engine works! Step-by-step.
Confused? Okay, let us explain it.
Let’s suppose that you have set up a new website. Before ranking, you have to make sure that it is indexed.
In simple words, the search engine works in the following way to index and rank your website:
Step 1 - You publish optimized content on your website
Step 2 - Googlebot crawls your URLs
Step 3 - Googlebot renders (assesses and extracts) your web content
Step 4 - Googlebot indexes (stores) your web pages
Step 5 - Google ranks your web content
The fun fact is that the final and first step are correlated. In order to rank your website, you must optimize your web content. Whereas to optimize your content and boost your website’s ranking, you must know about the major ranking factors.
All search engines have a ranking system that is based on complex algorithms to define and determine the ranking factors. Likewise, Google also has a ranking system that checks whether a website or web page is well-optimized according to its algorithms or not.
Google algorithms have predefined the webmaster goals. Through direct or indirect means, the search engine itself has informed us about the ranking factors. It has clearly specified the guidelines that we should follow for content optimization and ranking.
Following the ranking algorithms, SEO makes sure that the quality of a website and web content is good enough to rank higher on the search engine result pages. So, is SEO all about securing a higher position on SERPs? Certainly, not. The optimization of web content in order to captivate consumers and deliver an enhanced user experience is the main goal of search engine optimization. Apparently, SEO refers to “optimization for search engines” but in actuality, SEO is substantially for the users.
Every time you publish and optimize content on your website, make sure that the search engine crawler can easily crawl, understand, and like it. Moreover, your website content must be accessible, useful, and usable for the users because great user experience is the key to entertaining the search engine crawler. Once the crawler finds your content good for the users, it quickly crawls, indexes, and then ultimately, ranks your content higher on the result pages. Believe it or not, user experience is the primary key to higher rankings.
Now, it's time for you to know about some important factors which the search engine considers while ranking a web page:
Keyword Relevance
Content Recency
Content Quality
Ranking Strength
Topical Authority
Page Experience
All of these factors contribute to ensuring a good user experience and that is why search engine crawlers prioritize them. We will get into the details of these ranking factors but for now, let us provide you with the basic guidelines which Google itself has specified to help the webmasters.
Indeed, Google always helps the webmasters when it comes to website optimization. There’s a wide range of rules specified by Google but we have picked up some of the most important and basic guidelines which you must be aware of. Make that you fully understand the intent and purpose of these webmaster guidelines so that you can plan effective SEO strategies accordingly.
Google ranks your content higher on the SERPs, only when you follow these basic webmaster guidelines:
Create and optimize your content for users, not specifically for the search engine
Do not confuse the crawler and users, clearly specify what your content is about
Avoid the use of deceptive tricks, and let your web content achieve organic rankings
Restrain from copying others, and bring something new and innovative on the web
Now, let us tell you how you can elevate your brand, services, and products across the web with the help of SEO.
If you think that website SEO is all about buying a random domain and then publishing articles on it then sadly, you are wrong. Website search engine optimization is way more than this, it is a complex and quite lengthy process. We do not want to make it sound more difficult right now so let us simply highlight the factors which you must consider and be cautious about when establishing a website.
Make sure that you follow a strategic plan to complete the SEO process which requires you to know:
What type of website is most suitable?
What domain name will reflect your brand?
Which is the best domain hosting provider?
How to customize website UI/UX design?
What categories and keywords should you target?
How to build an effective site structure?
How to optimize web assets?
How to create and crawl optimise content?
How often should you publish?
How to your website pages?
How to index your website pages?
How to rank your website pages?
What can you do to promote your brand?
How can you monetize your website?
What kind of website you need depends on the reason why you are setting it up. There are different types of websites, each comes up with a different set of useful features and functions.
The most commonly used types of websites include:
Multi-niche Blogs
(best suitable for publishing useful and informative content about multiple categories such as entertainment, lifestyle, and technology)
Affiliate Blogs
(best suitable for reviewing and promoting products of other companies and brands such as Amazon and eBay)
E-commerce Stores
(best suitable for establishing an online store to sell various kinds of products and goods such as tech gadgets, clothing, and jewelry)
News Blogs
(best suitable for publishing news updates about different industries including politics, entertainment, sports, and IT)
SaaS Platforms
(best suitable for featuring Software-as-Service Tools such as AI writers, SEO tools, downloaders, and file converters)
Company Websites
(best-suitable for establishing an online presence of agencies, institutes, organizations, and type of company)
In short, the features and functions of a website vary with its type and purpose. Before buying a domain, you must decide why you are going to set up a website and how you can earn from it.
Don’t know what should be the name of your website? Well, let us tell you one thing. The name of your website should correspond with the type of your website.
Still confused? Okay, let us make it simple. Your domain name should signify your brand and the type of content you upload on your website.
Follow these guidelines to choose the best suitable name for your website:
Go for the domain name with “ . com “
Use a name which reflects your brand or vision
Keep the domain name simple & short
Choose a unique & captivating name
Don’t use double letters
Moreover, you can either choose a parent term that signifies all of your website categories or you can simply go with a proprietary name. In short, the domain name should indicate what your website is about and must be easy to pronounce as well.
Domain name is the URL of your website and brand image of your online business, so choose wisely.
After deciding what type of website you need, and what should be the name of your website, the next step is to find a domain hosting service provider. To buy a domain and get hosting services, you need to connect with a reliable domain hosting service provider.
The widely-known and most secure domain hosting service providers include:
Domain.com
GoDaddy.com
Namecheap.com
HostGator.com
Bluehost.com
Visit the website of any domain hosting service provider, search the chosen domain name, and buy it. Always choose the one which offers the most advanced and secure web hosting services at an economical price.
When it comes to customizing a website, the page template matters the most. The layout and display features of a website create a user-friendly interface and ensure a good user experience.
Thereby, you must choose a website template that:
corresponds the best to the type of your website
enables the users to easily navigate through your website
enable the users to easily understand & access the functions of your website
To make a website user-friendly, make sure to add all the required input controls, navigation controls, information components, action buttons, and containers. Again, the type of your website determines what components you are required to add in the interface of your website and how.
Tips for customizing a website template:
Choose a soothing color scheme that contains 2-3 color (conforms your logo)
Make the background captivating in terms of its texture, color, and display (e.g dark background for light-shaded content)
Stylize your text to captivate the viewer: make sure to choose the right size, color, and style for the fonts of titles & headings
Add easy-to-use input buttons, navigation controls and information components
You can use ETTVI’s WordPress Theme Detector to check which theme your competitor sites are using and then accordingly customize your website theme.
Follow these technical SEO guidelines to optimize your website for quick crawling and indexing:
Content must be unique and well-written (readable & keyword-enriched)
Page URLs must be well-structured (contain the keyword in slug)
Page titles should be descriptive, consistent, and keyword-driven
Website architecture must be well-structured (e.g. “flat” or “silo” site structure)
XML sitemap of the website must be submitted to Google Search Console
Loading speed of every web page must be high (optimize assets; use CDN; compress images/codes)
Robots.txt file should be configured to prevent the crawling and indexing of unimportant pages
Metadata/Snippet must be keyword-based and well-structured to highlight content intent (title, description, and URL that appears on SERPs)
You can use ETTVI’s Page Speed Checker to find out how well your website loads when users request to visit and access it. It will help you customize and optimize your site better.
The style, structure, and organization of web content vary with respect to the type of website it is created for.
However, there are certain rules that we are required to follow when writing and publishing content on any kind of website. To be precise, regardless of the content intent, there’s a set of general SEO rules & techniques that must be implemented for the creation of optimized web content.
The goal of content creation for a website is to deliver a good user experience and rank it higher on the search engine. Therefore, we don’t only create content but in fact, optimize it in accordance with the SEO algorithms. Relevance, uniqueness, and readability are the most important optimization factors that you must consider while creating content.
Here’s a tip: you must conduct comprehensive niche research in order to find a suitable category or category for your website. Once you find a good niche to target, you can find relevant topics to write about. It is best if you use a keyword research tool such as ETTVI’s Keyword Suggestion Tool to find ideal keywords to include in the content of each topic/sub-topic. The keywords are the main game in SEO. You must choose the keywords wisely. We recommend you read ETTVI’s Keyword Research Guide in order to gain in-depth understanding of keywords.
Now, let’s discuss some on-page SEO strategies for content optimization in terms of readability, keywords, and metadata.
To make the web content readable, make sure to:
Keep your choice of words innovative yet easy to understand
Construct short & simple sentences (in active voice)
Segment your content into short paragraphs
Connect your sentences & paragraphs using cohesive devices
Don’t construct more than two consecutive sentences
Use headings & subheadings (use H1 for the main heading; H2/H3 for subheadings)
Don’t add more than 300 words under one heading
Whereas about the on-page SEO of the content, it involves the:
Use of right & relevant keywords (high-volume)
Inclusion of keywords in headings & subheadings
Appropriate addition of keywords throughout the content (keyword density & placement)
Creation of a captivating & well-structured page title (includes the keyword in the start)
Creation of brief yet informative meta description (highlights content intent & includes keywords)
Addition of ALT Text (keywords) in the description of images
Addition of internal and external links
Lastly, about publishing the content, keep in mind that there are no fixed criteria for it. You must keep tabs on the performance of your competitor's website in order to anticipate how often you should publish content on your website. Anyhow, one thing’s for sure: never stop updating content on your website.
In case you are still confused then let us help you a bit more. If you are running a blog then posting articles 3-4 times a week would be okay whereas for a news domain, publishing at least 5 articles a day is p
referable.
Always keep in mind that in order to rank your content on the SERPs, you must have it crawled and indexed, first. Let us tell you how you can do it with ease.
Google has special software to discover web content. It is called Googlebot or Spider that’s typically known as the Crawler. Google’s crawler crawls through the web to find new websites and web pages. When a crawler reaches a website, it goes from one page to another to assess the website's quality. The crawler renders the website (URLs, text, assets, images, etc) to check what this website is about and make sure that everything is well-optimized to deliver a good user experience.
Keep in mind that most of the time, we need to request indexing and invite the crawler to visit our website. In order to stimulate the crawler, you are required to submit the sitemap of your website to the Google Search Console. The sitemap of your website directs the search engine crawler towards the URLs of your website that you need to crawl and index. You can also submit individual URLs and request indexing.
You can use ETTVI’s XML Sitemap Generator to create your sitemap with ease. Also, you can use ETTVI’s Crawlability Tool to check if your important web pages are crawlable and indexable or not.
The crawled web pages are stored in the Google database called Google Index. When Google indexes the web pages, the users can discover their content by searching. If required then you can use ETTVI’s Google Index Checker to find out how many of your website pages are indexed.
In case you don’t want some of your web pages to be crawled or indexed then you can add a Robots.txt file to indicate which URLs you need the search engine to ignore. The Robots.txt file is like an arsenal for SEO experts — it helps to specify crawl instructions for any crawler just as required. You can use ETTVI’s Robots.txt Generator to create a custom Robots.txt file for your website just the way required.
Now, comes the point where SEO experts strive to rank the web content higher on search engine result pages. The ranking is ultimately based on the fact “how well a website is optimized according to SEO algorithms”. To be more clear, a website should meet all the requirements of on-page, off-page, and technical SEO to rank higher on the search engine.
Google ranks the web content that is highly optimized in terms of readability, uniqueness, and keywords. Moreover, the website pages must have optimized structure and assets for a higher ranking.
Keep in mind that the following elements contribute the most to the ranking of a website includes:
UI/UX
Speed
Backlinks
Content
Keywords
Metadata
You are all set to publish high-quality content on your website and make sure that it delivers a great user experience. Now, as you are doing it, the next thing you need to focus on is “maintaining credibility” which ultimately helps your website to gain authority and ranking.
No matter how valuable and unique content you are publishing, if nobody knows about it then what will be the use of it? Obviously, you can not sit and wait for organic visibility as it takes more time. You need to boost the process and get noticed. Both the search engines and users will start noticing you and trusting in you only when you work on your website’s off-page SEO.
The off-page strategies will help you earn website domain authority which is your ultimate key to becoming credible, driving traffic, and gaining ranking strength. The more authority your website builds, the more trustworthiness and ranking potential it gets.
There are many ways to power up your website’s off-page optimization. Anyhow, the best way is to make use of “link building”. Yes, backlinks are at the center of everything. When other web resources link out to your website, then Google takes it as a vote for your quality. This means that your website becomes credible when an authoritative site vouches for you. It would be better if you read out ETTVI’s Guide to Link Building Strategies, if you want to unlock your website’s off-page SEO success.
Now, it is important to note that backlinks are only one major part of off-page SEO. There’s a lot more you need to do in order to increase website authority. You can say that your link-building efforts pay off only if you pay attention to other aspects such as relevance, uniqueness, and overall user experience.
Long story short version — you need other sites to refer you and promote you in order to become credible and increase your chances of ranking. You can submit your important page URLs to search engines, directories, and forums to acquire backlinks. Moreover, you can publish a guest post (with your website link in it) on relevant sites. You can even leave your website URLs in the comments of relevant websites. The more you get backlinks, the more you gain authority. Just make sure that you get quality backlinks from relevant websites with a higher DA score. No spammy and irrelevant websites should link out to your site.
Check out ETTVI’s Backlink Maker to create high-quality backlinks with a single click and find in-depth insights about link building.
2022-12-06
Search engine optimization is a set of guidelines and strategies which enables webmasters to set up, optimize, and rank any type of website. It helps to meet search engine and user requirenments.
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