▶What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search engine optimization. It is a set of rules for optimizing your website so that it can achieve higher rankings in search engines' organic results.
SEO has two main goals. The first is to help you understand what users are searching for online so that you can create high-quality content to satisfy their intent. The second is to help you create a website that search engines can find, index, and understand its content.
▶Why is SEO important?
In today’s competitive market, SEO marketing is more important than ever.
Search engines serve millions of users per day looking for answers to their questions or solutions to their problems. SEO is not only about search engines but good SEO practices improve the user experience and usability of a website.
SEO is good for the social promotion of your website. People who find your website by searching Google or Bing are more likely to promote it on Facebook, Twitter, or other social media channels.
SEO is important for the smooth running of a big website. Web sites with more than one author can benefit from SEO directly and indirectly. Their direct benefit is an increase in organic traffic and their indirect benefit is having a common framework (checklists) to use before publishing content on the site.
SEO can put you ahead of the competition. If two websites are selling the same thing, the search engine optimized website is more likely to have more customers and make more sales.
▶An introduction to SEO for beginners
In simpler terms, Search Engine Optimization is a way to improve your website so that it will appear closer to the top positions in the search results of Google, Yahoo, Bing, or other
Optimizing your website for search engines will give you an advantage over non-optimized sites and you increase your chances of ranking higher.
The first stage in the SEO process is called technical SEO. As the name implies, technical SEO has nothing to do with the actual content of a website or with website promotion methods.
It has to do with settings you need to configure to make the job of search engine crawlers easier. Usually, once you get your technical SEO correct, you may not have to deal with it again. On the other hand, if you have problems with crawling and indexing, it can negatively impact your rankings.
The second stage is On-Page SEO. On-Page SEO has to do primarily with the content and other elements found on a page.
Unlike technical and off-page SEO, the main focus of on-page SEO is to provide search engine crawlers with enough signals so that they can understand the meaning and context of your content.
Remember that search engines don’t read a page like a human so they are looking for signals to figure out what a page is all about.
It is at this stage that you will deal with website structure, SEO keywords, title optimizations, headings, internal links, image SEO, structured data markup, and other techniques that can send the right signals to search engines.
If followed correctly, on-page SEO will also improve the usability and credibility of a website or blog.
Note that content optimization is part of on-page SEO but sometimes this is referred to as Content SEO.
The third stage is Off-Page SEO.
Besides the changes, you can make to your website (on-site SEO) so that it ranks higher in the SERPs, the other way to improve your website’s ranking position is by using off-site SEO techniques.
Off-site SEO is generally known as link building but I prefer to use the term website promotion since a proper way to promote a website involves many more methods and techniques than building links.
In general, when a user types a search query, search engine algorithms look into their index and try to find the best pages that can satisfy the intent of the user.
Pages that are good candidates appear in the first positions of the search results.
One of the factors to determine the position of a webpage in the results is the number of incoming links (backlinks).
Backlinks are a signal of trust and depending on where the links are coming from, they can greatly affect your ranking position.
If the links are coming from well-known and trusted sites, your ranking will be positively affected.
If they are paid links, links in article directories, link farms, or a result of an exchange, your ranking will be negatively affected.
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