Updated in 2021: A Complete SEO Guide
This is my pledge to you: if you pay close attention to the end of this post, this will be the only Beginner’s Guide you’ll need to read in order to master SEO.
Let me preface this by saying that I wrote this entire blog under the supervision of Zeeshan Sir, who is the CEO and Lead Trainer of Kolkata’s Top Digital Marketing Institute, ADM (Academy of Digital Marketing). As a result, you get to learn from an expert for free.
To begin, you must first ask yourself, “What is a Search Engine?”
The search engine is a software system that runs web searches and returns the most relevant results based on our keyword input.
Google, Yahoo, Bing, and other popular search engines are examples.
Do you have any idea how many websites there are in the world?
According to the most recent data, there are over 1,875,885,785 websites, and the number continues to grow. Is it possible for you to spell out that number all at once?
SEO is a desired procedure for ranking our website in order to increase the quality and quantity of visitors to our site. It’s like the lifeblood of our online existence, and it’s also completely free.
What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a method of increasing the rank of a website on a search engine results page (SERP) in order to gain organic or free traffic. The higher our website or page ranks in the Search Engine Result Page, the more public notice we will receive. It will undoubtedly aid in the public perception of that company as well as its expansion.
Why do websites require search engine optimization (SEO)?
To help you comprehend these concepts, I’ll define some SEO words.
Quality Traffic:
We can attract all of the world’s visitors by targeting a specific term. Google (or any other search engine) returns the most relevant results for your query. It makes no sense if Google tells a visitor that you are an Apple I-Pad source when you are actually a farmer selling apples. That isn’t the kind of targeted traffic you want for your site.
Amount of Traffic:
You can draw more traffic to your website after your SERP rank is greater. Consider the case when you have an ecommerce website where you sell things!
An increase in traffic will immediately correlate with an increase in income and profit for your company!
Organic Result:
Ads have a prominent presence in many SERPs. You do not have to pay anything for organic traffic, however. You may rank on the first page of Google without paying a single dollar on SEO.
The question now is, how does the Search Engine function?
The three primary functions of a search engine are:
Crawling:
Crawling is a discovery process in which a search engine sends a team of robots (known as crawlers or spiders) all across the internet to collect all the updated content they can locate.
Indexing:
Properly store and organise the data collected by the crawler during the crawling process.
Ranking:
Search engines rank pages according to the searcher’s query, sorting the results from most relevant to least relevant.
I hope you now understand the fundamentals of SEO!
Moving on to the next section of this blog, which is about determining which audience to target. (Keyword)
Now you know what a “keyword” is and how important it is.
The most important factor in reaching out to your target audience is the keyword.
For example, let’s say someone types up “Handmade Craft Items” into Google.
Now, if you’re selling Handmade Craft Items, this is one of the keywords you’ll want to rank for!
Your website’s content should be both user and search engine friendly! You must build your website content in such a way that it appeals to the public while still being relevant and of high quality to the search engines! Let’s figure out which crucial keyword you should include in your website’s content.
You win the game when you know what people are willing to look for.
What are they looking for?
For that query, there is a lot of search volume.
- Key to finding things that are related.
- Click-through-rate (CPC).
- SEO is a demanding task.
Paid difficulties, for example.
Before you begin keyword research for your company, you must first understand the consumer and the company’s product/service.
You can become an expert in this topic if you know the answers.
Assume you’re in the business of marketing things for the care of children.
For keyword research, we use tools like Ubersuggest, Google Keyword Planner, Aherfs, and others!
You can also get keyword suggestions from YouTube, social media platforms, search engine search bars, Quora, and other places.
Here, you must concentrate on identifying keywords with a large search volume yet low complexity!
This means two things:
More people will be looking for you, which means more visitors to your website.
Low difficulty indicates that fewer websites are using the target keyword, or that ranking better for this phrase will be easier and faster for you!
I hope you now have a better understanding of keyword research.
The next stage is to develop and optimise your website’s content!
The process of creating web pages to respond to a searcher’s query. This is the most crucial section!
This is dependent on a number of things. Let me go over each point one by one.
Factors at the content level
Tag in the meta title:
This is the equivalent of newspaper headlines on the internet. A higher CTR is generated when the search keyword and page title coincide. It should be roughly 50-60 characters long! The keyword must also be included, preferably at the start of the title!
Meta Description:
This is a synopsis of the blog’s content! It should be between 150 and 160 characters long! The keyword must also be included, preferably at the start of the description!
Distinctive and Fresh Query-Based Material:
Your content should be unique and add value to the user’s thinking. Always keep in mind that your content is everything. The king is the content. When a user lands on your website, the material on the landing page must be relevant to the user’s inquiry.
Content length:
It is suggested that the content be at least 1000 words long. This isn’t required right now, but it must answer the user’s question. That is critical.
Make use of LSI:
Latent Sematic Indexing Keyword is what it’s called. In your content structure, you can include words that are related to your target keyword, essentially synonyms in the proper spot. It is not required to rank.
Google may rank your title keyword, as well as other keywords from that term.
Headline Tags:
To assist the bot, the content must utilise headline tags!
The most significant tags are the H1 tags. You can use the H2 tag 2-3 times after that. You can utilise it numerous times from H3. A range of 1% to 2% is reasonable. Don’t cram too many keywords into your material.
Image optimization:
Alt tags must be used when any type of image is used in a post.
Internal and External Page Linking: You should include internal and external links that are relevant to your content. It is recommended that the authority of your external linking page be high.
Factors at the site level
This part is primarily concerned with SEO technical audit.
Mobile friendliness:
The mobile friendliness of your site should be good. Your website must be responsive and offer a positive user experience!
Site and Page Speed:
Your website should load in less than 5 seconds. There are many of websites to choose from, so individuals will not spend their time. It’s possible that the bounce rate is high. To examine these criteria, you must use Google Search Console and Google Analytics!
GTmetrix can be used to check this.
Broken URLs:
Your website must not have any broken URLs. This is likely to irritate your viewers. Let’s say you have amazing query-based content on your website with a catchy title, but when a user clicks on it, it says “The page is not found.”
Website file size:
Compressing your website’s content will help the page load faster. As a result, you must make every effort to limit the size of your file. It’s suggested that it’s under 5 MB.
Robot.txt:
The extension “.txt” may lead you to believe it is a text document. Yes, then! You are correct. We can control which bots are allowed and which are not on your site by generating this.
UX: This is a crucial issue to consider. The term “user experience” refers to how a person feels while using a product. There are a few other terms included as well. Allow me to introduce you.
Dwell time is the amount of time that a user spends on your website. If your visitors spend longer time on your page, Google will believe that you have high-quality material, which will assist your SEO.
The number of users who leave your site after landing on it is known as the bounce rate.
Factors at the Domain Level
Google determines the age of your domain and sends a signal to that effect. Although there isn’t much of a difference between a year-old domain and a six-month-old domain.
The presence of a term in your domain name will not improve your SEO, but it will display the relevancy signal.
Domain registration duration:
Important domains are frequently paid for in advance for several years, but illegal domains are rarely utilised for more than a year. As a result, the date on which a domain will expire in the future can be used to anticipate domain legitimacy.
Domain history:
A site with changing ownership sends a signal to Google to reset the domain’s history, although a penalised domain may carry a penalty to the new owner in some instances.
TLD extension with a country code:
Having a nation code in your top level domain may provide you an advantage in ranking your website in a specific country.
I hope you understand how important it is to your SERP ranking. Regularly optimising on-site elements will help you boost your traffic, ranking, and conversion ratio.
What is Off-Page Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
I hope you all grasped the importance of on-page variables for a website. You may now believe that if your on-page factors are effectively tuned, you will rank quickly! You’re completely wrong!
In order to achieve a higher SERP ranking in 2021, you will need to work outside of your website, which is where Off-Page SEO comes into play.
What exactly is off-page SEO these days?
Off-page SEO refers to all of the actions that can be conducted outside of your website to influence your website’s rating on a search engine result page (SERP). Backlink building and encouraging your target audience to search for your brand name by sharing your page or article on social media platforms are two very frequent off-page SEO techniques.
In a nutshell, it’s the process of establishing your reputation in the eyes of search engine bots, or in the virtual world.
Before we get started on this, let’s talk about something extremely practical. Let’s say you decide to purchase an electrical device. What’s the best way to go about it?
If I’m not mistaken, you identify your requirement first, then search for the product on Google, YouTube, and other sites.
Aside from the product’s website, you can read what other people have to say about it. You build an opinion about the product based on that product review or remarks from your friends.
After all, your brand is defined by what people say about it when you are not present!
I hope you understand what I’m trying to say.
For the same reason, your website’s off-page factors must be very powerful in order to create your brand and increase your SERP ranking.
Why is it important to have a technical SEO aspect?
Google’s algorithm and ranking parameters are continually evolving, and they use artificial intelligence and machine learning to improve search results based on queries. For a non-technical person, getting such algorithm changes is really difficult.
So, the general consensus among SEOs is that efficient off-page SEO continues to play a significant part in boosting your website’s SERP ranking.
The significance of link building for off-page SEO
Backlink building is one of the most important aspects of off-page SEO, according to seasoned SEO professionals.
Now we need to know what backlinks are.
It is the process of uploading your website information or URL to other websites, including social networking sites, in order to promote business brands, raise awareness among target audiences, and assist search engine bots in learning more about your company.
It’s also known as popularity building, and it’s a great way to boost your rank. Backlinks are used by search engine algorithms to determine the quality of material. As a result, any site with a large number of good-quality backlinks will usually receive a high ranking.
Backlinks should always be of good quality and related to your content, or else Google may punish you by lowering your rank as a result of its penguin adjustments (released on April 24, 2012).
Inbound links are another term for backlinks.
There are three different kinds of linkages.
- Natural Subscribers: Given without the owner of the page taking any action. If you’re a food blogger, for example, it’s natural to include links to your favourite restaurants on your site.
- Links that have been manually built: These links have been manually built through link building operations that have been analysed. Your audience landing on your page or you engaging influencers in that niche to share your piece are examples of these.
- Self-created links: These links are made by putting your link in an online form, a directory, or a comment box with anchor text. These methods frequently lead to black hat SEO, which will harm your SERP ranking. As a result, proceed with caution.
Backlinks come in a variety of shapes and sizes.
Dofollow backlinks: A dofollow tag tells bots to follow a certain link. They transmit link juice to your website and gain a high page rank.
The following are the types of links that should be no-followed.
- Paid hyperlinks
- Content created by users
- Comments
After reading that, you might wonder how you can tell whether a link is Do-follow or No-follow.
So, allow me to respond. You can determine whether a page is Do-follow or No-follow by looking at the source code or using free tools.
You must examine the website codebase to determine the backlink category.
How can you get high-quality backlinks?
Social media marketing:
Because social media is such a prominent platform nowadays, it is the most effective technique to obtain a backlink. Crawlability for those sites is extremely high. As a result, social media backlinks are highly encouraged.
Site for social bookmarking:
Users can add, annotate, edit, and share bookmarks of web documents using social bookmarking, which is an online service. Users may access their social bookmarks from any device and from anywhere. For example, on Pinterest, you may see an overview of your monthly audience engagement, impressions, and other metrics for your generated post.
Question answering site:
Quora is a popular question answering site where you may register and answer questions relating to your area while also building backlinks.
Local listing:
You can also list your brand on your domain’s local listing sites. For instance, suppose you own a company in Kolkata. You must not list your business on a local listing site in the United States.
You can find a list by searching for “local listing sites.”
It is an efficient method for obtaining high-quality backlinks.
Commenting: You can get backlinks by leaving comments on other people’s posts or articles. One thing to keep in mind is that it can often lead to black hat SEO. As a result, be cautious.
Blogging and submitting documents: You can reach out to industry influencers and provide them a link to your website, or you can write an interesting blog for them and ask them to publish it. That blog must also provide a link to your website! This is also a highly efficient method of obtaining backlinks.
How do you determine the quality of your backlinks?
We use tools like Aherfs, Ubersuggest, Semrush, and others to check your website’s backlinks and the quality of those backlinks.
Ahrefs is my go-to tool for this. It’s a paid service. You check for backlinks on the website, and we copy the website link URL and paste it into the Ahrefs tool. We acquire the results of all your backlinks, as well as their type, such as whether they are Do-follow or No-follow, and many other details.
TL;DR: It’s a search engine ranking score that shows how popular the target website’s backlinks are in comparison to all other websites.
PR: This is a score that indicates how well a page will rank on a search engine results page.
This is a critical characteristic for generating good backlinks.
I hope you have a thorough understanding of the Off-page and On-page elements. Let’s move on to the next step in enhancing your ranking in your local service area.
This is where local SEO comes into play.
What exactly is local SEO?
Local SEO is the strategy of increasing your roadside business or organization’s internet exposure in local search result positions on SERPs. It ranks similarly to organic SEO, but with the addition of a geographic component.
Search engines use signals such as social networking pages, local content, links on local listing sites, and other factors to offer the most relevant local results to users.
The goals of local SEO
The goal of local SEO is to help businesses rank higher in SERPs for local queries.
Consider the following scenario: You own a hotel in Kolkata that is very useful to visitors, but it has no value if your hotel ranks high in local searches in the United States.
If you want to grow local traffic organically, it’s critical to optimise your local SEO.
Here are some local SEO tips for you.
Improve your Google My Business channel: Google My Business will assist you in creating an online local image for your company. As a result, you must create and authenticate your Google My Business (GMB) account. Encourage your customers to leave feedback.
Engage on social media and add posts to Google My Business: Google values what you publish on social media. So, when you’ve created your Google My Business account, you’ll need to share it on social media.
Regularly add posts to your account to convey signals to the bot about your online presence, which will help you boost your rating.
Make sure to include your company’s name, contact information, and address: By registering your business online, your potential consumers will have access to your contact information at their fingertips. You must work on your NAP in order to maintain that effectively (Stands for name, address and phone number).
Conduct a local SEO audit:
SEO is a never-ending effort. As a result, you must keep track of your progress by conducting local SEO audits.
Create local content:
As I previously stated, content is key, and you cannot compromise on your content level aspects. As a result, offer informative local content that can address all of your audience’s questions.
Obtain relevant and authoritative incoming links:
Your backlinks have the ability to improve your SERP ranking.
So take it seriously and build a site that is relevant to your industry and has high domain and page authority.
As a result, you must optimise your content every time you create it.
Ensure that your website is mobile-friendly: We primarily utilise our mobile devices to look for local content. It’s likely that you’re reading it on your phone right now. According to statista, smartphone searches account for 61% of all Google searches. As a result, maintaining your website’s mobile friendliness is critical.
Post and monitor customer reviews: According to business writer Michael LeBoeuf, “a satisfied customer is the best business strategy of all.”
Encourage your customers to leave feedback on the items or services you provide, and respond to them in a timely manner.
The following are some important local SEO tools:
- Moz local,
- ahrefs
- Brightlocal
- screamin’ frog, etc.
Conclusion
I hope you all realise how critical it is for your website to receive organic traffic and to improve your company’s online reputation. Your website advertises your business 24 hours a day, 7 days a week! That is something that no other employee performs.
