WHAT IS SEO?

Search engine optimization (SEO) refers to techniques that help your website rank higher in organic search results, thus making your website more visible to people who are looking for your product or service via search engines.

ORGANIC TRAFFIC VS PAID TRAFFIC

Organic traffic connects visitors who arrive to your site via search engines – without you directly paying for this pathway. By clicking on organic listings that appear in search engine results pages (SERPs), users are trafficked to your website through their own natural initiatives.

Paid traffic from search engines arrives to websites when a user clicks on an advertisement placed on a SERP for a given search term. This ad is created and paid for by a company with the aid of an ad platform seeking to appear first in search engines.

HOW DOES SEO WORK?

When a user types or speaks a query into the search box, the search engine uses complex algorithms to pull out what it believes to be the most accurate and useful list of results for that query. These organic results can include web pages full of text, news articles, images, videos, local business listings, and other more contents.

One basic tenet of SEO is to try and understand how people search on Google so you can craft strategies on those search patterns. The first thing to understand about how people search is that people search with intent. They are looking for something. The intent people search with can be categorized into the following:

• Navigational Searches
• Informational Searches
• Commercial Instigation
• Looking for a Purchase

Navigational Searches – People who are looking for a specific website but they don’t remember the exact URL.

Informational Searches – Stuff like What is the weather in Bangalore? and Who won the word cup 2011? People will usually tend to form these searches in the form of a question and the goal is finding the information.

Commercial Investigation – People working at businesses will be given tasks by their supervisors. Things like, hey we need a website built or can you find a good telemarketing employee in Bangalore . These are the modern day equivalents of looking in the Yellow Pages. Rather than turning to the yellow pages, they turn to Google to find reputable businesses to contact. These may or may not lead to commerce or leads, but presents an opportunity for both, same as someone seeing your ad in the Yellow Pages.

Looking For a Purchase – People will search the Internet when they are ready to buy. This will typically spike around specific holidays as people look for very specific gifts for ideas for gifts. Things like best gifts for friend’s birthday or Nike shoes.

When someone Googles, who won cricket world cup in 2011, Google goes into it’s index and pulls out every webpage that mentions who won world cup cricket in 2011. It then applies its India, the Google algorithm, and ranks those pages from 1 – infinity and serves them up to the user and it does this very quickly. My search took 0.28 seconds.

The algorithm that Google applies is a very complicated mathematical formula and asks over 200 questions to make sure it’s giving users the right responses. One of the most important questions it asks is “what’s on this page that’s relevant to this query?” and that leads us to keywords.

WHAT IS A KEYWORD?

a keyword is not just a word, it can also be a phrase. This keyword or combination of keywords are what people enter into Google, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn or other sites to find stuff.

The words which are used to search about something on search engines are the keywords.

Keywords can be used in Page Titles, Meta Descriptions, Subheadings, URLs, Content of the Page, Link Anchor Text, within descriptive alt attributes for images, and so on…

The keywords entered by a person on the search engine reflects his intention of the search.

For example, if one enters “Bags”, it doesn’t specify whether he wants to buy a Bag, sell a Bag or simply know what a Bag is.

On the other hand, a person with a specific intention of buying a Bag will rather search for “buy leather Bag” or if more specific “buy best black leather bag under 2000 rupees”.

The first keyword “Bag” is a short tail keyword while the other two are long-tail keywords.

Short tail keywords don’t give a clear idea of the intention of the user as they are brief and usually contain a general, non- specific term. This leads to lots and lots of results that may be irrelevant to satisfy the requirement of the user.

Long-tail keywords are detailed and specific terms which give a clearer picture of the intention of the user. This helps the search engine in displaying more accurate results rather than what it does in case of short-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords should be a part of your keyword strategy.

WHAT IS KEYWORD DENSITY?

Keyword density tells you the number of times a search term appears on a web page. It helps search engines determine if your content is relevant to a specific keyword or phrase. It can improve your web page visibility on #1

Aside from improving your ranking, optimizing your keyword density can help:

• Prevent keyword by adding more uselessly
• Reduce bounce rate
• increase website traffic

WHAT IS META TAGS?

Meta tags are a type of HTML tag that provides search engines with information about a website pages. the meta tags don’t appear on the page itself, but only in the page’s source code. Meta tags are essentially little content descriptors that help tell search engines what a web page is about.

USING H1 H2 H3

Header tags, also known as heading tags, are used to separate headings and subheadings on a webpage. They rank in order of importance, from H1 to H6, with H1s usually being the title. Header tags improve the readability and SEO of a webpage.

1. H1 = Main keywords and subject matter, what the overall post is about.
2. H2 = Sections to break up content, using similar keywords to the H1 tag.
3. H3 = Subcategories to further break up the content, making it easily scannable.

Without these tags, your content would be far less engaging and captivating for your audience. Even if you break up your text with images or graphics, headers still make it easier to read.

SCHEMA

Schema Markup is one of the newer forms of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). It allows you to boost your rankings on search engine results pages (SERPs) by providing snippets of useful and timely information to potential website visitors.