Deep understanding of SEO basics

This article is about a deep understanding of SEO basics which is almost in continuation to my previous article “Overview of SEO“.

In this article, you can understand the basics of SEO in deep. 

Here are some points where you will get to know further.

1. Why search engine?
2. Search Engines from a user perspective.
3. Working of a search engine.
4. Earn money through search engines.
5. The ecosystem of search engines.
6. On-page and Off-page SEO.
7. Keywords and keywords research tools.

Let’s get to know each point in detail below.

Why search engine?

Organic SEO traffic is free and of high quality. When people visit your website, they know what they want and acquire knowledge.

SEO helps you waive the costs from paid ads and referrals. Some tools are available that helps in producing organic traffic and they are optin tools.

Some people try to do display advertising to get more visitors from the search engines. So the lead cost will average out and will go down when you take SEO seriously.

The ultimate goal is to gain leads from search ads and organic traffic. There are many big websites that rely on display ads and earn revenue.

People running websites like generic ones like news etc., they just monetize their websites through ads and earn money.

Most of the times the content published in those websites are not of high quality and very short posts. They increase the revenue and try to gain traffic but there won’t be any profit for them.

Currently, businesses are not relishing and so they are unable to gain revenue. So many people rely on paid ads for lead generation.

Search presence is important for you to get discovered by people online. The first thing is people google about the topics which we discuss.

If someone searches for search engine optimization or agencies that work on search engine optimization, Google will show the results that are already made an online presence and ranked on it.

Google has become number 1 in search engine and there are many search engines but google gained traction among the public. Google created market dominance.

Search traffic is very important and SEO is also very important. Traffic is inbound and hence the quality and intent is high.

Instead of paying for advertising, you are creating content to gain visitors and those visitors who view our content and if they find it useful they might become our customers and that is nothing but getting organic traffic.

SEO and paid ads are like buying a house and renting a house. Renting a house is like finding a house and interacts with the owner and stay by paying rent every month.

But buying a house is like making the foundation strong and gathering capital and maintaining the house and in the long term, it will be our asset with quality value.

Start creating content and attract customers organically. Writing a piece of content is an art and people search for information that is quality and useful for them and we create that content and make it helpful to people.

Through that content, visitors can become customers. Content creation is very important. Unless you create high-quality content, it is difficult to engage the visitors for a long time.

Creating a piece of content that is normal quality and short and expecting high traffic visitors is difficult. Make the visitors subscribe to our website so that every piece of content can be viewed by them that are valid and relevant they actually become perennial sources of traffic and attention.

Most of the clicks come from paid ads from google and only 1% from organic traffic. Biggest advantages are that we can get organic traffic from Google through quality content and search engine optimization (SEO). Google organic search gives us 100 times more traffic than paid ads.

Keywords are very important in search engine optimization. Short tail keywords are difficult to get ranked in google and long-tail keywords are trending now to get ranked in google.

You can boost your organic search traffic from your existing audience base through content promotion. People share content on social media as well and it will give you traction.

You have to approach search engine optimization (SEO) with a mind-set of integrated digital marketing. Search traffic is very important.

Integrated digital marketing is most important to get an online presence and gain traffic to our website.

Running Facebook ads as well as google ads can reach more people and they are more likely to click on the ad.

People check the brand name while clicking and so online presence is a must to make the brand reach people.

These ads will help in improving search traffic.

People used to run ads in channels in previous days and they treat each channel separately like TV as a different channel, Facebook as a different channel but the reality is in any channel same people used to view our content.

Search engines from user perspective:

There are 3 methods involved in the entire process.

We have the platform which is the search engine, we have the use who is our website visitor or our customer and we have the business, the webmasters who create the content, who do search engine optimization (SEO).

When we look at black hat SEO, where they are manipulating the search results and try to rank, that is nor ethically right to rank like that.

Search engines are basically an evolution of classified listing, which are yellow pages.

In old days yellow pages used to provide a directory where every contact is available in it.

People search for something that they know it exists. People won’t be able to search for something that they don’t know it exists.

We need to observe what people are looking for and provide the content to gain trust and traffic.

For example, amazon and google are search engines and people who search in amazon, they are buyers. People search in Practo search engine, people search in Zomato search engine etc.

In this way, there are many search engines that provide service to people. A new product or service which doesn’t have any awareness cannot be advertised via a search engine.

Search engines fulfil demand and display ad generates a demand. People search what they know and cannot search what they don’t know that even exists.

You can understand SEO only if you see it from users perspective.

Working of a search engine:

The primary purpose of a search engine is to deliver relevant and quality results. There are multiple purposes for relevancy. For example when you search for an Italian restaurant and when you get a Japanese restaurant as a result, that’s not a relevant result.

Relevancy is important in search queries and second is quality.

The list has to be made useful where you want to buy or go to a particular place. When we try to search for restaurants near us and we get results that are in different places, it is not a quality result.

For this to occur in relevancy, on-page SEO and off-page SEO are important. On-page SEO is usually the responsibility of the webmaster as the website owner has control of what content is on his website.

Webmaster communicates with search engine what the website is about and google search engine let us know what people are searching for and relevant to users. Off-page SEO is under indirect control.

Back-linking plays an important role in Off-Page SEO. You will get a lot of backlinks when you publish content regularly and quality content.

Google checks those backlinks how users are finding that content relevant and then ranks the website based on the backlinks.

How search engines earn money?

Basically search results are free as we post the content and index in google. Businesses pay to google for their visibility rather than organic visibility.

Businesses do not have control on organic listing. They try to get some control over it. Google ads are the biggest asset to google. Google is earning 84% revenue from google ads only.

We can advertise a service agency but we cannot advertise persons who are providing service. The second largest search engine is the YouTube. They all earn revenue through ads with quality content.

Ecosystem of search engines:

There are 3 main parties involved in search ecosystem. We have the platform, we have businesses that want the customers and we have customers that want the products and services.

The platform connects the businesses and customers and charges fee for it. Usually, the platform makes it 100% free for one side and charges the other side.

For example, yellow pages used to provide directory for free at the beginning. When it got popular, they started charging for directory books.  

People are ready to pay price for that as yellow pages has become more popular and gained trust with premium listings. Premium listings get us more visibility to customers.

Getting customers is the biggest business now a days.  Most of the search engines try to get the customers for the businesses, who advertise on their search engines, and if businesses don’t get the customers, search engine cannot survive.

Google and Facebook are making so much revenue through ads.

Most of the search engines rely mainly on the revenue generated through ads created by the businesses on their platform and businesses rely on the search engines as they provide efficient search results to gain leads.

If you are capable of getting customers for your client, then you will always make money as search engines are making money.

Content Marketing and SEO:

Importance of content marketing and how it is very much related to SEO.

If we publish content which people want to read, on-page SEO is not much important as we post the content in word-press which is already SEO optimized.

Search engines have become smarter; if we deliver good user experience and quality content to users then we are good on on-page SEO.

On-page SEO is about good user experience.

Off-page SEO is about good distribution as a part of marketing.

We have to try for backlinks in off-page SEO to get good rankings in google. If we have good content, good user experience, good marketing, then no need to worry about SEO.

Search engines basically made the job of webmaster easy. If you are a good website owner it becomes easier.

Long back people just used to modify the content like add some keywords, started ranking on google, such optimization is no more now. Just building backlinks does not rank our website anymore.

Ranking is not possible anymore through backlinks and anchor text.

Previously black hat techniques are used extensively to manipulate the search engine to get rankings through keyword stuffing, now it won’t work anymore. It is ethically incorrect now.

On-page and Off-page SEO:

On-page SEO:

In On-page SEO you have title tag. Enter the title inside your WordPress blog, enter the title and meta description in seo plugin used in WordPress.

You have header tags, mostly use H1 andH2 tags under headings in the content.

Optimize the images for load speed. Good for SEO

Alt tags on images can help search engines understands that the image is about. Search engines cannot read images so alt tags will reveal what is the image about to search engines.

Optimize website for fast load speed. Sites like GTMetrix and Google Page Speed can tell you if your website is fast enough to give a good user experience.

Keywords are important in the content.

 Write keeping users in mind but also make sure that search engine can know what the content is about.

Don’t write just for search engine.

Search engines know what the content is about.

Long tail keywords must be used to gain traffic and rank the article in google.

Off-page SEO:

Backlinks are the number one off-page SEO techniques that are available for website owners.

Google’s algorithm has been built on top of backlinks. The more links you have the better the chances of ranking high for specific keywords.

Search engines also track the social media engagement on a page once it is published.

Higher the engagement, higher the chances of getting better ranking.

Brand mentions on multiple websites are not as effective as backlinks but they can help with SEO. Google loves beneath because brands are long term and they stick around longer.

People, who try to gain the search engines, do not create brands. That’s why google loves brands.

A higher percentage of brand name searches can also help in SEO.

 For example, there are many medical clinics and hospitals in the city and they all rely on brand names.

General medicine, Homeopathy, Ayurveda, these are the names of the treatments and under these there are brand names that are to be visible to people online.

Brand names such as Apollo hospital, Patanjali all these are popular because they rely on brand names mostly and people prefer brands names first.

There are more than 200 factors that google will consider to rank the website.

Google also tracks the author and the personal brand behind the content. A part of the algorithm called “Author Rank” gives weightage to authors who are recognized as experts.

Keyword Research:

Keyword research is most important one in SEO. Without knowing what people are searching for, you cannot create content for it and you will not be able to tap into the search traffic.

Lot of people think that only keywords are only required for SEO. But keywords also determine the words that your customers use.

It is important for niche selection, positioning and content marketing, landing pages, ad copies, paid search, email subject lines, copywriting and sales.

Keywords are not just about SEO. Keywords are about your customers, your audience when they are trying to describe what is there in their mind.

You can use the keywords to create content for attracting organic search traffic.

You don’t need to create content exclusively for search traffic. You can use the same content for email marketing funnel, lead nurturing and to create a brand presence.

If you are having a website, content, traffic from search, you still cannot make money from it unless you have solid business built around it.

This is all about basics of SEO. Will write about aspects of SEO in details in further articles. Stay tuned.

Thank you for reading this article. Please comment your views about this article and suggestions are most welcome.