It is just a segment to understand SEO in the maze of digital marketing.
You should not need a strong brain to understand SEO even though it possesses algorithms and ever-changing rules.
Instead of battling the mythical beast, you can navigate the maze with the simple tread of understanding.
In this blog post, you will decode SEO to transform it from a complex quest into a super simple journey. You are going to shatter the misconception that only an “SEO Guru” or “Digital Marketing Expert” could understand SEO.
Let’s join hands together and start the journey of simplicity to understand SEO. Here, simplicity is not merely a goodness but a clarity and strategic approach of vital importance.
So, let’s embrace simplicity and understand SEO like never before.
Table of Contents
What is SEO (Search Engine Optimization)?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing your website and its content to improve its visibility and ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs).
This process includes strategically incorporating relevant keywords, improving website structure, and enhancing user experiences.
SEO aims to attract more organic (non-paid) traffic to your site. Thus, it ultimately increases your site’s online presence and helps you to reach a broader audience.
To be an expert, Think like an expert
You have heard that SEO is Vast and the more you know, the more you realize you don’t know.
Such a mindset could overwhelm you. You have to develop an expert mindset – the ability to think strategically and analytically about every aspect of SEO.
Do you know why?
Even though there are hundreds of resources about SEO on the internet, there are very few SEO experts.
Because everyone who learns about SEO does it the wrong way.
You are learning SEO only in terms of tricks and tactics because the resources available online are teaching you in that way.
It is not possible to understand SEO by reading and learning tricks and tactics. Tactics don’t last. Tricks and tactics sometimes work and sometimes don’t.
Just learning how to build backlinks, on-page SEO, Technical SEO, and other tricks and tactics would give you some results in the short term.
To be an expert in SEO, you should think like a search engine and develop a holistic understanding of SEO.
You should know why you are doing SEO. What is the main purpose of it besides tricks and tactics? You have to dive deep into the SEO and think like a search engine. This is the way to become an expert in SEO.
Build your Search Engine in your mind to understand SEO.
If you want to become good at SEO, then you need to think like a Search Engine.
What would you do if you were designing the algorithm for the search engines?
How would you rank the websites?
If you start thinking like that then you will be on your way to becoming an SEO expert.
That’s why you are going to build your search engine in your mind to understand SEO.
Let’s say you want to create a directory of all the websites in your local area or your city. You want to rank them for different keywords for the benefit of the people in your area.
For simplicity, let’s assume, there are 100 websites in your local area.
What would be your first job?
It would be to list all the possible websites available in your area or city that can be accessed in the public domain. (The surface web).
Sometimes, there will be websites you will not know about.
How do Search Engines DISCOVER the websites?
As you build a search engine in your mind to understand SEO, it is your first job to find the websites for listing in your search results page.
This is the reason you should understand how search engines discover websites.
But there would be one big problem in discovering a website for listing in your search results. That would be billions of websites on the internet.
That’s why search engines like Google build automated bots known as crawlers or spiders. Google, a search engine similar you are building in your mind discovers and lists websites with the help of three primary functions.
Crawling: Search engine bots continuously browse the web by following links from one page to another. They start from a list of known web addresses (URLs) and then follow hyperlinks on those pages to discover new pages.
Source: Moz
Indexing: As the bots crawl through web pages, they gather information about each page’s content, structure, and metadata (such as title tags and meta descriptions). This information is then stored in a massive database known as the search engine’s index.
Ranking: It is a process of Search engines that provide the best content or answer to a searcher’s query. The results are ordered from most relevant to least relevant.
This is the answer to how does search engine works.
As you have learned for your search engine, you have to first discover the website through links.
This emphasizes the importance of your site structure and linking (internal, external, and backlink) to understand SEO for your website.
Give RELEVANT information based on the search queries
Is discovering (from link to link) and listing the websites in your area enough for your search engine?
Of course not, right?
You should provide like Google, a search engine – relevant information based on the search queries of your users.
This would be your second task, in building your search engine and understanding SEO.
So, how would you complete this task?
Search engines like Google use many factors and signals (It is said that more than 200 factors, that nobody knows) to give the best possible relevant results to its searchers or users.
You are not going to build that kind of algorithm. As you are going to understand SEO simply, you are going to do this task simply.
To be relevant what matters most?
It’s a keyword or search term. Keywords in the title, keywords in meta (according to Wikipedia – a set of data that describes and gives information about other data) description, and keywords in your content.
You should understand the search intent of your users in your niche.
You have to provide the right and best information as a search engine like Google to your users.
Suppose someone is searching for “restaurant in city X”, then you should show the result list of the restaurant websites of your area on the result page.
You cannot show them the list of schools in your area. This is the simple understanding of relevancy in SEO.
You will do this with the help of the Keyword, Title, and Meta description of the website and its URL.
Therefore, Relevance is On-page SEO.
When you do proper on-page SEO, such as keyword research, title tags, meta description, images, linking (internal and external), etc., your blog will be relevant to your users.
If your blog is about restaurants, it should have keywords related to food.
School websites will have keywords related to education.
And so on.
Based on this keyword matching, you can show relevant results to your search users. In this way, you can solve the RELEVANCY by on-page information: using the right content on the website with the right keywords.
The users of a website will do off-page SEO
As a default rule, off-page SEO is supposed to be done by the users, not webmasters.
Webmasters are only supposed to solve the problem of on-page SEO by giving correct information to the search engines and using the right keywords on the websites.
This is your third biggest challenge to building a search engine and understanding SEO.
Only providing your search users with relevant information is not enough. You have to provide the best recommendation which is truly QUALITY.
Let’s take the above example.
If your search users search for “restaurant in city X”, you list the relevant results based on keywords, meta description, and title along with the URL.
What if you list the worst restaurant at the top and the best restaurant at the bottom?
Your users will stop using your search engine if your recommendations are not of good QUALITY.
Search engine like Google gives you the best recommendations taking care of the quality of websites i.e., sorting it from the best to worst.
How Google solves the problem of Quality in website listing
Google does that with the help of data collected from user experience, authority, trust, and credibility of the website, and 100 other factors.
Therefore, you should also collect the data from the people who visited those restaurants to determine the quality of a restaurant’s website.
However, you cannot directly collect data from restaurant owners who own those websites. As you know how the world works, every restaurant owner would say they are the best.
Every restaurant’s website title would be “the best restaurant in the city X”. Everyone calls themselves the No. 1.
Where more people are mentioning a restaurant’s website on their social media, where there is more linking, and referring of a website, you can assume and rank that website on the top.
If there is a restaurant’s website that has no links or mentions, you can assume that this restaurant is not popular. You can rank it last.
The collected data from users’ mentioning, linking, referring, reviews, brand searches, backlinks, time spent on the website, and 100s of other factors would determine the quality and ranking positioning of a website.
This is called off-page SEO when you solve the problem of QUALITY of your listed websites in your search engine.
You don’t have to build backlinks, you have to earn them with your quality content and brand awareness.
In this way, your blog website is also ranked and listed in search engines like Google based on the user’s behavior and their insights data.
Say hello to Google to better understand SEO.
Now you have understood the SEO in simple language.
You have understood:
- On-page SEO
- Off-page SEO
- How search engines work
- How does a search engine discover the websites?
- What is relevancy?
- Why quality is important for listing?
It’s time to make your blog website discoverable on the search engine like Google.
When search engine starts to discover and index your blog website, you will start to understand SEO better.
As you may already know websites ranked on the first page of Google gain more clicks than subsequent pages.
Source: search engine journal
It is only a matter of time before Google discovers your website as its crawlers automatically and continuously crawl the new content through links.
But you can speed up the process of crawling and indexing by following simple steps. It is like saying hello to Google and saying to Google your website exists.
You just have to register for one of Google’s free services which is the Google search console and submit your website with verification mentioned in the search console.
It would be a better idea to encourage your website visitors to share your website using social media sharing icons in your website.
Social media profiles with your website link also help in discoverability.
They make your website more popular, authoritative, trustworthy, and valuable. This will help your website more visible.
How to check if your website is indexed in Google?
You can check whether your website has been indexed or not in Google by going to Google search and by typing – site: yourwebsite.com.
If you cannot see anything related to your website and your web pages, then you should know that your website is not indexed yet by Google.
This is because your website is very new to Google bots. That is why you have to say hello to Google and inform them that your website exists. You can do that by submitting your website in the Google search console.
Another reason why your website is not indexed on Google can be website is protected by a password. If so you have to disable that setting while you are designing your website.
If you can see a listing like this, it confirms that your blog website is already indexed.
Final Words
You have come to the second last section of this blog post. This blog post also included FAQs related to SEO at the bottom. You can continue reading after the conclusion of the post.
Search engine (Google) crawlers discover websites. You have to make sure your blog website is up so that it can be discovered.
Google bots read your metadata and scan your site data for keywords. That’s why, you have to make sure that your site is about one specific topic or niche. It has the right titles and descriptions.
It should have the right content for your users. This helps Google to rank relevant websites on their results.
Search engine spiders look at social media mentions, backlinks, and user behavior such as time spent, bounce rate, pages/session, and 100s of other factors to determine the quality of your website.
This helps them sort the websites on their results according to Quality.
On-page SEO is for RELEVANCY.
Off-page SEO is for QUALITY.
Webmasters do on-page SEO.
Users do off-page SEO.
This understanding is very important for you to become an SEO expert.
If you fail to understand this fundamental concept in understanding SEO, you cannot become an SEO expert with all the tools, tricks, and tactics.
FAQs Related to SEO to Understand SEO more.
What is Technical SEO?
It refers to the process of optimizing a website’s technical infrastructure and elements to improve its search engine visibility and ranking.
Technical SEO deals with the backend aspects of a website that affect its performance in SERPs.
This includes optimizing website speed, improving site architecture, enhancing mobile friendliness, managing crawl ability and indexability, implementing structured data markup, ensuring site security, and addressing other technical factors that impact search engine rankings.
What is Local SEO?
Local SEO is the process of optimizing a website and its online presence to attract more local customers and improve visibility in local search results.
It focuses on increasing a business’s visibility for location-based searches, such as “restaurant near me” or “Plumbers in (city)”.
Local SEO strategies aim to connect businesses with nearby customers who are actively searching for products or services in their area.
Key components of local SEO are:
- Google My Business optimization
- Local Citations
- Localized Content
- Customer Reviews
- Local Listing and Directories
- Local link Building and more
What is Content SEO?
It is the practice of optimizing individual web pages to rank higher in SERPs and attract more organic traffic.
Technical SEO focuses on the technical aspects of a website, and off-page SEO involves factors outside the website itself (like backlinks).
In the same way, Content SEO specifically deals with optimizing the content and elements on a web page to improve its visibility and relevance to search engines.
In some way, you can say Content SEO is similar to On-page SEO.
Content SEO aims to improve the visibility, relevance, and quality of individual web pages. These results in higher rankings in search engines and increased organic traffic.
What is White Hat SEO?
It refers to the use of ethical and legitimate optimization techniques to improve a website’s search engine rankings.
These techniques strictly adhere to search engine guidelines and focus on providing value to users.
White Hat SEO practices prioritize long-term sustainability and aim to improve a website’s visibility in search results through genuine means rather than exploiting loopholes or manipulating algorithms.
This kind of SEO emphasizes ethical and sustainable optimization techniques that prioritize user experience, relevance, and value creation.
What is Black Hat SEO?
It refers to unethical and manipulative techniques used to improve a website’s search engine rankings in ways that violate search engine guidelines and policies.
These techniques focus on exploiting weaknesses in search engine algorithms rather than providing value to users.
Black Hat SEO tactics may lead to short-term gains in ranking, but they often result in penalties from search engines and long-term damage to a website’s reputation and visibility.
What is Grey Hat SEO?
It refers to optimization techniques that fall somewhere between White Hat SEO (ethical Practices) and Black Hat SEO (unethical Practices).
These techniques may not directly violate search engine guidelines but still raise ethical concerns or involve some level of risk.
Grey Hat SEO practitioners may use tactics that are not explicitly prohibited by search engines but are still manipulative or questionable.
What is Mobile SEO?
Mobile SEO refers to the optimization of websites for improved visibility and performance in mobile search engine results.
With the increasing use of smartphones and tablets for internet browsing, Mobile SEO has become essential for businesses to reach their target audience effectively.
Mobile SEO focuses on ensuring that websites are optimized for mobile devices in terms of design, speed, user experience, and content.
What is International SEO?
It is the process of optimizing a website to ensure that it ranks well in search engine results pages across multiple countries and languages.
The goal of international SEO is to attract organic traffic from various regions and languages by making the website more visible and relevant to users in different countries or language markets.
