SEO tutorial for Beginners in 2019

The world is revolving around digital platforms and soon will be occupied by it. From kids to grannies and every Tom, Dick, and Harry is using digital platforms. Its usage varies from person to person like some may use it just for the sharing photos or videos on social media while some may use it for making the business out of it. Yes, making business on digital platforms is a current trend that is followed by almost all kinds of business owners. While you do social media marketing or email marketing, still the most important parameter of digital marketing remains SEO. SEO is the heart of your online business. In this article we will see what does SEO actually mean and how does it work?

So, if you are ready to start your SEO journey, then first read this article to do it properly. This is because this article will specially focus on the working of SEO in 2019.

What is SEO?

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a process of increasing the online visibility of any website or web page on the search engine result pages using unpaid strategies.

[Search engine result pages (SERP) – Search engine result pages are the pages that appear when you insert any query in search engines. The answers or results to the keywords entered by you are called as SERP]

OR

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results.
Source – Moz

So, basically, SEO is done to rank higher in organic (non-paid) search results in search engines.

Why the Race to Rank Higher?

This is because the higher will be your website the more it will be visible to your audience. The race is on, to stay on the first page of search engine result pages. According to a study, it is found that page 1 of any search engine gets around 34% of traffic share and page 2 gets 18% and the rest follows. From this you can see, placing on the 1st page is more important and thus, one needs to do SEO.

Different Types of SEO :

Due to the increased competition of ranking at highest position many people are seen violating the search engine guidelines .

There are Mainly 4 Types of SEO known as –

1) White Hat SEO:

The practice of strictly adhering to the guidelines of search engines is called white hat SEO. This practice will never impact negatively on your results as you are following the algorithm rules. The results may take a longer time as you are avoiding cheating tricks and don’t take any shortcuts, but the results obtained stay longer.
E.g.: Write relevant content, promote content on social media, etc.

Black & White Hat SEO
2) Black Hat SEO:

There are some people who use black hat SEO that means they don’t follow the search engine guidelines. This helps them to rank higher within a short duration, but it is full of risks. Any changes in algorithms will destroy all your results, and even your website will get banned.
E.g.: keyword stuffing, using plagiarized content, using paid backlinks, etc.

3) Grey Hat SEO:

The combination of white and black hat SEO is called as grey hat SEO. These practices follow a few guidelines but are still considered as risky.
E.g.: Spun content (Content is slightly been changed), link exchanging, etc.

4) Negative SEO:

The negative SEO is done just to harm others website. It means, implementing black and grey hat SEO on others website with the wrong intention.E.g.: Building unnatural and undesirable backlinks on a competitor’s website, hacking someone’s site and modifying its content, etc.

Parameters of SEO :

(1) Quality of traffic –

You can have a website that catches the attention of a wide range of visitors because the search engine makes them visible. But suppose, if you are Apple products dealer and you get visitors looking for apple seeds, then this type of traffic is irrelevant for you. That means you are not attracting an audience that genuinely is interested in your products.

(2) Quantity of traffic –

When you will get the right audience clicks on your web-pages then it will automatically lead to an increase in the quantity of traffic.

(3) Organic traffic –

Organic traffic is a type of traffic that you receive without paying for it.
All these parameters will help increase your website rank in the SERP.

Related : How Web Hosting Affects SEO Ranking? Check These 5 Factors

How SEO Works?

You might be thinking how you get the results, whenever you type any query on search engines, isn’t it?
The reason behind this is – Every search engine has a crawler that goes out and gathers all the information and the content from the internet, related to the query inserted by you. This information comes to the search engine in the form of 0s and 1s to build an Index page. The index is then supplied to the algorithm that tries to match all the gathered data with your query.This is all about the search engine (SE) work.

That Means the Search Engine Works on 3 Parameters :

(1) Crawling –

Crawling is also called as spidering, that scans the website’s section, content, keywords, headings, links, images, etc. Every piece of data that is found on a website gets crawled.

(2) Indexing –

Once the crawling is done, then the indexing of pages takes place. The data that is indexed only gets visible on the search engines.

(3) Picking the results –

So, when the user inserts a search query, then search engine dives deep and pull out the matching results.

The Optimization (O) part comes into action when the search engines start understanding the content written by people on their sites. This can be identified by search engines by referring to the number of visitors a webpage gets for the particular keyword and duration the visitor spends on it. If visitors stay for longer that means they are seeing what they have requested for, and your site is a relevant search for their keyword.
Now, as you have understood the SEO’s working, you may think of knowing it more.

So, Let’s See the Basic Vocabulary Used in SEO :

1) On – Page SEO :

Performing On-page SEO means to optimize your website to make it match with the search engine results. Parameters to be considered while setting On-Page for your web pages are:
• Meta tags – meta titles and meta descriptions
• Headings
• URL Structure
• Image Optimization
• Content
• Size and Speed of Website
• Keywords
• Broken Links
• And many more.

Related : Complete Guide On Link Building & its Benefits in SEO

2) Off – Page SEO :

The rank of your website will increase when the domain authority of your website increases. And, to do so, you need to carry out some activities to get backlinks from other websites to your website. Following are the ways to do so:
• Exchanging of Backlinks
• Guest Blogging
• Social Media posting
• Backlinks from Influencers
• Writing Valuable Content on your Website
• And many more.

Thus, now I think, you might have understood why SEO still holds the importance in the year 2019.

Outline of the Article :

SEO helps to gain your long term results, if you follow all the white hat techniques to build the goodwill of your website. It tells you how relevantly your website serves your visitors and thus, helps in increasing the website ranking on Search Engine Result Pages.