Internet has billions of users all over the world. Thus, it is a goldmine for businesses in terms of customers. The key, however, is to effectively reach a large audience and turn them into paying clients. There is a plethora of strategies to achieve this and one of them is SEO. Are you a beginner and want to know What is SEO? If the answer is yes, then you first of all need to know that SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Search Engine Optimization is a method of improving the search result rankings of a website on various search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. It is based on the simple fact that higher position of the website on the search result pages fetches more visits due to enhanced visibility.

SEO has become an important marketing strategy for businesses irrespective of the products and services they are selling. The main aim of SEO is to influence the search algorithms of various search engines to pick up the website based on various factors.

On-page and technical SEO

On-page SEO means optimizing the content and HTML source code of a web page to rank higher on the search results. Technical SEO deals with all the search engine requirements to improve crawling through the webpages.

On-page SEO- The various strategies of on-page SEO have been listed here.

  • Content is a major part of on-site SEO. The content should be relevant to the needs of the users and must also be interesting. The content should be clear about the product or service the company is offering. Keywords hold the key for making the content a success or failure. The targeted keywords need to be included in the headline and throughout the body of the content. Thorough keyword research is required to determine the relevant keywords which not only appeal to the search engines but also appear relevant to the users. However, keywords and good writing skills are not the only requirements. Your Content is SEO optimized only when 4 parts of HTML of the content are optimized. First is the meta description containing relevant keywords, second are the subheadings to enable search engines to pick up the important points in the content, third are the title tags which enable the search engine to determine what the page is all about and fourth are the search engine friendly URLs for better crawling.
  • Multimedia such as videos, images, infographics and charts make the webpage more interesting and leads to higher engagements. Multimedia influences users to share and like the content of the webpage.
  • Outbound links indicate the relevancy of the topic to Google or other search engines. Internal links leads the users to other articles and sections of the website, thereby enhancing engagements.

Technical SEO- The main features of technical SEO are as follows.

  • Mobile optimization is a major aspect of technical SEO. The oft repeated question is Why mobile SEO is important? The simple answer is that people are increasingly using mobile phones to access internet. Thus, it is necessary for the website to be mobile friendly. Google offers mobile-friendly test tool to check whether the website is working well on mobile phones or not and the level of optimization required.
  • Website speed is an important SEO factor because slow websites cause the people to leave immediately. The loading speed of the webpages can be increased by using simple templates, optimizing images, limiting the number of redirects and using a reputed provider for web hosting.
  • Designing an SEO friendly site architecture which makes it easy for the search engines to crawl the website is an important task of technical SEO. This includes using right HTTPS, making clear, concise and user-friendly URL structure and including sitemap where all the sections of the website are listed.

Thus, it can be said that both On page & Technical SEO is your friend in the bid to get high rankings in search result pages of search engines.

Off-page SEO

Off-page SEO refers to steps taken outside the domain of the website in order to provide more exposure to the website by improving its search result page ranking and Google Page Rank. Link building is an effective off-page SEO method. Link building means making external links directed to the website. Google and other search engines determine the value of a webpage based on the authority of external sources. Thus, link profile of a website is an important SEO factor. Linking the website with social media sites and social bookmarking are other strategies of off-page SEO.