SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION | DIGITAL MARKETING

Search Engine Optimization is a very important topic when it comes to digital marketing. Before diving into search engine optimization we should know a little about search engine. Search Is about making connections. Search engine is a platform that helps users find information, product, or services online more quickly and accurately. It connects consumers to products or services they are looking for and marketers to customers, they care about. There are many search engines. But we will consider google, as 90% of the global searches occurs on google.

Search Engine Optimization is the technique that understands how the search engine works and helps brand to be on top of search result. Why being on top of search result is important? Typically, 30% to 40% of the websites traffic comes from google search. 90% of the users does not go beyond the first page of the search engine. First page has ten results but top three results gets 60% of the traffic. Result on the top gets ~32% of the users click, second result gets ~17% and ~11% of the users clicks on the third result.

How the search engine works?

Search engine works in three steps. Crawling,  indexing, ranking.

Crawling

Google sends bots also called spiders that crawls the world wide web and get the copy of the website it visits and save the information or data on the googles server. Google gets data of the website through the sitemap data submitted by the webmasters (owners of the websites). Google also crawls all the links in the website.

Indexing

Indexing is basically creating list or index of all the words and their place on the web page. This is similar to index of a book, which tells which words are present on which page of the database.

Ranking

Google gets millions of results for every search query. Google then returns result or show page by the relevance of the search query. This is called SERP (Search Engine Results Page) rank of the page. The SERP is decided by 200+ factors including Page Rank. Page Rank is a measure of importance of the web page determined by the links that points the website. So each link pointing to your website from other website adds to your websites Page Rank.

Page Rank determines the importance of the web page and google uses this rank to showcase the result on the search page. Page Authority (authority of the home page) or Domain authority (average authority of all the pages) is similar to the Page Rank, as it is also the measure of importance of the web page, but here the rank is given out of 100, unlike Page Rank given out of 10. You can Check the page authority of your website.

  

On Page SEO

Some of the 200+ factors which determines the Page Rank

Page title, Page description, content on the page, there should be no coding errors, mobile friendliness, engagement of users on the website, images tagged properly, security and privacy of the website.

Sitemaps

Sitemaps is basically a list of all the pages on the website. This can be generated using sitemaps generator. Uploading this .xml file on the server allows the crawlers to visit every page of the website.

Robots

Robots are nothing but the text file that contains all the instructions for the crawler what not to crawl. These are the pages not meant for the crawler to visit. You can generate this file using the robots.txt generator, and upload the file on the server.

Meta tags

Page title shown on the search result page. This title should be less than 60 characters.

Page description should be less than 160 characters.

Meta keywords are few focused keywords which should be unique on the page.

Alt tag

This is the name given to the images on the web page. Crawler doesn’t understand the image, so it looks for the Alt tag associated with that image and returns the image. It is necessary to put Alt tag for all the images.

Keyword density

This is important topic with respect to content optimization. Keyword is the main focused word in your content. It should be used very carefully, should be repeated 4-5 times if the content is 1500words. You can either use long tail keyword or short tail keyword. Long tail keywords are preferred more with respect to optimization. Focused keyword is 2-3 words long. Keyword density is the weightage of your keyword inside the content. and these keywords should be used as title, paragraph heading, as an Alt tag.

Length of the page

Each page should have 2000+ words. That means it should be rich in content. This content should be refreshed time to time. You should also include blog if the website is corporate.

User friendliness

Privacy and terms

If your website is collecting any information about the user, you should not misuse it. So, privacy and terms should be included at least at the footer of your website.

Cookie policy and GDPR

Cookies are the tags the user puts on the browser of the user. This is the unique key used to remember that particular user when the user visits the website next time. It is necessary to put cookie policy on every website and this should be disclosed to the user how the websites use cookies.

NAP

Name, Address and Phone number of your website should be included on your website. Other business information credentials can also be included.

Off Page SEO

Technicalities of the link

The anchor text used to build the link should be relevant to the business. You should avoid writing click here, or go to, or click on this link, these are not relevant. Use the word that is related to your business. 

Link building strategies

• Build a social media presence of your business, as google looks at the social media graph very seriously. So, you must build profile of your brand, business or yourself on the social media and keep it active. A very active social media page tells google that you are credible business or credible blogger.

• Have a google business page.

• Create a very interesting content and give it to other websites and if they like it they will give you back link. You can also have infographics, newsletters, videos, whitepaper. The content should be to do list that is how to do designing, how to do marketing, how to write articles etc.

• Find write question to answer on quora and leave your link there.