What is SEO (Search engines Optimization)?

1) What is SEO? 

SEO stands for search engine optimization. It basically refers to the process of getting traffic to your site through search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. It’s all about promoting your brand, product, or services organically.

Search engine optimization is the term used to describe a set of processes that aim in optimizing a website for search engines. SEO is important not only for getting high-quality visitors but it is also as a way to increase the credibility of a website and expand brand awareness.

Search engines are using complex algorithms to determine which pages to include in their index and the order they show these pages in the search results. SEO is the way to ‘speak’ to search engines in a language they can understand and provide them with more details about a website.

SEO has two major components, On-Page and off-page SEO.

On-Page SEO

On-Page SEO refers to settings you can apply on the website so that it is optimized for search engines. The most important Page SEO Tips are:

• Optimized titles and descriptions
• Proper URL Structures
• User-friendly navigation (breadcrumbs, user sitemaps)
• Optimized internal links
• Text Formatting (use of h1,h2,bold etc)
• Image optimization (image size, proper image names, use of ALT tag)
• User friendly 404 pages
• Fast loading pages
• Google Authorship verification for all pages
• Top-quality fresh content (This is always the most important SEO factor!)
• External links (no broken links or links to ‘bad’ sites)
• You can find out more details about all the above tips in the SEO Tips for beginners article.

Off-Page SEO

• Unlike on-page SEO, off-page SEO refers to activities outside the boundaries of the webpage. The most important are:
• Link Building
• Social Media
• Social bookmarking
• We will look at these in detail below but first, let me explain the importance and benefits of off-page SEO.

Why is Off-Page SEO important?

Search engines have been trying for decades to find a way to return the best results to the searcher. To do that, they take into account the on-site SEO factors (described above), some other quality factors, and off-page SEO.

Off-page SEO gives them a very good indication of how the World (other websites and users) perceive the particular website. A website that is useful is more likely to have references (links) from other websites; it is more likely to have mentions on social media (Facebook likes, tweets, Pins, +1’s, etc.) and it is more likely to be bookmarked and shared among communities of like-minded users.

What are the benefits of ‘off-site SEO’ to website owners?

A successful off-site SEO strategy will generate the following benefits to website owners:

Increase in rankings – The website will rank higher in the SERPs and this also means more traffic.

Increase in Page Rank – Page rank is a number between 0 and 10 which indicates the importance of a website in the eyes of Google. It is the system invented by Larry Page (one of Google’s founders) and one of the reasons that Google was so successful in showing the most relevant results to the searcher.  Page rank today is only one out of the 250 factors that Google is using to rank websites.

More exposure – Higher rankings also mean greater exposure because when a website ranks in the top positions: it gets more links, more visits, and more social media mentions. It’s like a never-ending sequence of events where one thing leads to another and then to another etc read continue