Do you know what SEO is ? SEO in brief, as is known in most sites that talk about SEO, is originally an English word of three letters SEO, and this word is an abbreviation of three English words, which are “ Search engine optimization ”.
So the word SEO always means search engine optimization, and if you ask me what SEO is and want a quick and short answer, I will tell you briefly that SEO is the best way to advertise your site through search engines.
What is SEO?
If you ask someone what SEO is, they may quickly answer that it is improving your site to appear in Google search pages, along with how to write and format an article. However, we want to talk and explain what SEO is in a deeper and more intelligent way.
We will ask again what is SEO?
SEO is the process of optimizing your website for search engines, so that search engines recognize your content and find your website address on the Internet.
SEO helps you grow your online business, and also increases the number of visitors to your site significantly if the practices are correct. SEO is a set of practices and strategies that must be followed correctly to obtain the desired results, which is for your site to appear among the first ten results on the search page.
Benefits of SEO for Online Businesses and Brands
If you have a company headquarters and not many people know about it, the first thing you will do is advertise this company, so that the largest number of people know about it, as well as SEO, if you care about SEO and improving your site for search engines, you will get a larger number of visitors who know more about your site, we can say that the benefits of SEO for your site are as follows:
- Critical expansion in the quantity of guests to your site through the web crawler.
- Search engines are interested in quickly archiving your content.
- Your appearance on the first page of the search within the first ten results.
- Improve your sales if you own an online store.
- Customers trust you more because the customer trusts the thing that is famous on the Internet.
- Keeping your brand in the minds of your target audience.
Why should you improve your website’s SEO?
Because if you have a website that represents a brand and not many people know about it, it will certainly not have any value no matter how much you provide high-quality products through it, unlike other websites that provide products or articles of lower quality but are famous, this is the same thing.
You must improve the SEO of your website so that people know you and the number of visitors to your website increases. Without taking care of SEO, you will not have a presence on the Internet.
When you can optimize your site well for search engines, many visitors will find you very easily.
If the result is like this in Google, the visitor will not hesitate to visit this link because the result is distinctive, which makes the visitor trust the site, and then visit it directly, even if the visitor is hesitant, after reading the excerpt, which must be written in correct language, the visitor will like to complete the reading and thus he will be forced to visit the link.
This appearance on search results is through SEO improvement, so when you ask me again what is SEO? I will tell you that SEO is everything for your company or website on the Internet.
How do search engines work?
Before we talk about how search engines work, you must understand that a search engine is a program that has three tasks to perform. Some of these tasks require you to help the search engine so that it can perform this task perfectly, which is finding you and providing good content.
The three functions of a search engine are crawling, indexing and ranking, what do they mean? Let’s take a look at them one by one.
Search engine crawling
This task is done by robots or search spiders (bots) or those small programs that Google and other search engines use to recognize your content. These engines have names, for example, the Google search engine is called Googlebot , the Bing search engine is called Bingbot , and other search engines.
The crawling process starts with the URL. When the search engine finds a new URL, it immediately analyzes its content and reads it as you would read it, recognizing paragraphs, main and subheadings, images, videos, and other types of content.
If the page that the search robot is crawling contains links, it will also crawl and analyze those links, so it is always advisable to link the content together by placing other links from your site on new pages that you write, whether it is a content page or an article.
After the crawler robot completes its task, it sends the crawled pages to the indexing or archiving stage .
Search Engine Index
Crawled pages are sent to Google’s index or other search engine indexes, but we will focus on Google’s index since it is the largest search engine on the Internet.
This index is a huge database. Let us compare this index to a notebook in which you write down everything that happens to you during the day. However, here Google adds any web page it crawls to this index. You can imagine the size of the data, and you can imagine the number of links on all the sites on the Internet.
After indexing the pages, the last stage of the search engine process remains, which is ranking, meaning arranging and classifying the pages.
search engine ranking
After indexing is complete, Google ranks the pages according to several conditions that we will mention in the internal and external SEO section shortly.
Google arranges the indexed pages in order to prepare them to appear in the search results, and the page appears when the user searches for something related to your site, which is called the keyword , which we will discuss in a future paragraph in this article as well, as we do not want to give you a quick explanation of what SEO is.
Watch this video from Google that talks about how search engines work.
What if you want Google or another search engine to not crawl some pages on your site? This is also available in SEO features, you can prevent Google from crawling a specific page or section of your site, or even disallow the complete crawling of your site.
You control everything.
How to help Google find your site?
Naturally, Google will not find you by chance. Google finds you by submitting your sitemap to Google. The sitemap is a file, usually an XML file, that contains all the articles and content of your site.
This way you make it easier for Google to crawl all your pages quickly, and then archive them. The sitemap is not a page with static content. When you create new content, its page is added to the sitemap, and when you change the title of the article, it is also changed in the sitemap page, and thus Google recognizes that this title has been changed and this page has been added.
This way you tell Google that your content is always fresh, which helps it index your content faster.
What is on-page and off-page SEO?
SEO is divided into two parts: internal SEO, which is called on-page SEO, and external SEO, or off-page.
What is internal SEO?
In order to know what internal SEO is , we must focus on some of the pillars on which internal SEO works, which are:
Content includes: quality of content, ease of searching in content, selected words and spelling, links or links within content, exclusivity of content.
HTML includes: title, description, meta tags that define the type of site and link it to social media sites, and other meta tags.
The system includes: crawling and indexing of your pages, page loading speed, and URL structure.
Let us provide some important tips that you should follow to work on the internal SEO of your website.
To answer more about what is internal SEO, we will provide some important tips to improve internal SEO on your pages.
How to choose a content page title?
The most attractive thing for people and search engines together is the title. Many people may stop reading a good article because the title is not good and does not attract attention.
It must appear in full on the search page, which is why we always keep the title to 60 characters.
Now we know that the title should be a maximum of 60 characters, taking into consideration that if your site title appears next to the article title on search pages, you should make your title shorter so that it contains the article title and the site name, or you can hide the site name from the side of the article, and this is one of the great SEO tricks.
Also, the title must include the keyword . It is true that we have not talked about the keyword yet, but you will understand what it is when you reach the paragraph related to it.
Let’s say the keyword is “summer clothes.”
You should write it in the title, example:
Modern and trendy summer clothes for 2024
This is a short title that includes the keyword. Also, always make your titles in the form of a question and inquiry, for example:
How to choose the right summer clothes for you?
The title starts with a question and ends with an interrogation. Visitors love these titles. There are also more ways to write attractive titles. You must choose the title that attracts you personally before it attracts the visitor.
Writing a page description correctly
As with the title, but in the descriptive paragraph, or page description, we write 160 characters. The number of characters in the paragraph should not exceed this.
You should also include the keyword in your article description or page description.
Improve static URL structure
The fixed address of the page or URL such as:
https://sitename/off-page-seo/
This is what is called a fixed title, and do not include the entire title, but we mean that off-page-seothis title should not exceed four words maximum, it should express the content of the page well, for example this article that you are reading now, its title is, ” What is SEO and how can you increase the number of visitors to your website?”, you will find that we changed it in the URL to and wrote seo,
If you ask why we write it in English and not another better language, I will tell you because Google reads English links faster and they appear on most sites when copied with the same name. As for other links in different languages, they appear as symbols.
Work on ease of navigation within the site
You must make your site well organized, in a way that the visitor can navigate to all sections and pages from all pages on the site. For example, pay attention to the main menu of the site, and also pay attention to placing the classification cloud from which the visitor chooses to access a section of the site.
How to use heading tags better
Have you ever read a magazine? Of course you have, and you have seen how the headings are arranged from largest to smallest, and this also applies to web pages.
Your titles should be well optimized, let’s take an example of titles but in HTML form.
<p>Paragraph</p>
<h2>Main title within the article</h2>
<p>Paragraph</p>
<h3>Main title within the article</h3>
<p>Paragraph</p>
<h4>Main title within the article</h4>
<p>Paragraph</p>
<h2>Main title within the article</h2>
<p>Paragraph</p>We started with the main title and then the subtitle, which means it is wrong to use the subtitle first and then the main title.
Use images to improve the quality of your pages
When using images on your pages, make the keyword in only one image, do not repeat it in all images, also you should make your images of good quality and small size, so SEO experts always recommend using the WebP format from Google because it gives great quality and small size at the same time, but this format is not supported in some browsers unfortunately so far, although Google strongly recommends it.
Do not upload the image without giving it a name. For example, if it is a picture of the Egyptian pyramids, name the pictures the Egyptian pyramids. After uploading it to the site, give it an alternative title that will appear in case the picture does not appear for any reason.
These practices help your content images appear in Google’s image search engine or other engines.
Make your site mobile friendly
We are in the era of smartphones, and most users now browse websites through their phones, so Google always emphasizes that your website is compatible with mobile phones, and it has even designed a tool to check whether your website is mobile-friendly or not. You can find out whether your website is compatible with phones or not through Google’s mobile-friendly test tool.
Improve site speed
You ought to focus on the speed of your site. There are many reasons why your site takes a long time to load. Google has created a tool to detect the reasons for the site’s delay in loading the page. You can detect your site from here .
What is off page seo?
After we have comprehensively answered what is internal SEO, we now move on to our second question, what is external SEO?
Off-page SEO is all the practices that benefit your site but are away from your site. You can say that this part of SEO is worked on completely away from your site, and we can limit these practices as follows:
Links (backlinks) mean your links on other sites: the quality of these sites where you put your site link, the words and texts in which you put the link, but completely prohibit and stay away from harmful external links .
Trust in your site : This is represented by a percentage called the authority of your site, its authority, and the trust of other sites in it, as well as Google’s trust in it, showing the date your site was created, and an SSL certificate to make browsing on your site safe.
Personal information of the site : the country in which the website is located, your location in that country, and the social media profile of your site or company on social media sites.
Social Media : How many likes do you get on your content that you share from your website on social media, how many shares, how many links do you put on social media.
All these practices are away from your site, but they are just as important as internal SEO and more, because visitors come to you in large numbers when you improve your site’s external SEO well. We can say that external SEO is the site’s reputation among the people of the Internet.
It is a best practice to link to other sites, so we will talk about linking.
What is a backlink?
Let’s call it a backlink. A backlink is when you put a link to another site on your site, or another site puts a link to your site on it. Thus, the backlink is divided into two parts: internal and external backlink.
Internal backlink
When you create content and link to an old page of yours, this is called an internal backlink, for example the following link from our site:
12 secrets to writing an SEO-friendly article to rank high in search engines . This is called an internal link, and when you put a link to another site on your site, this is called an external link, but to another site within your site.
External backlink
As for this, it is the most important part of the backlink, and you must focus on it, and choose the sites where you place your link carefully. The external backlink is when another site places a link to a page of your site.
It must be a site with a good reputation because if the site has a bad reputation, it will affect your site. If you notice that your site is on one of the bad sites, you can disavow it and request removal through Google via this tool from here . You can read more about this tool on Google support pages from here .
Promote your business
Have you ever searched for something and seen that the first result has an ad written next to it?
You can also promote your website or brand in this way using Google Ads , and you can also promote your website via social media sites such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
These promotions pay off, especially when you advertise with Google, as you bring hundreds of visitors to your site to see what you do and what you offer them.
But make sure you do it with real professionals or after you learn enough, often sponsored ads directly harm SEO, if you want to know how in detail just contact us to know this secret.
Keywords
Keywords are the words that users frequently type on the search engine, for example the word “the bank near me”, if you take this word in your article as a keyword, you must first know how users type it? And how many times it appears in search engines:
Using Google’s keyword planner, which we will explain shortly, now I typed in the bank near me, and the monthly impressions were from 10k – 100k, but the tool suggested another word, the same but with a different letter. And the appearance is higher in search engines, it appears from 100k – 1 million, so I will use this word in my website content.
Types of keywords
Keywords are divided into three sections:
- Short keywords consist of one word, for example “SEO” and the competition for them is very tough.
- A medium keyword consists of two to three words, for example “SEO” and has medium competition.
- The long word consists of a complete sentence, for example “How to improve your site in search engines” and these words are not difficult at all because they contain many words, but the number of visitors that come from them is very weak, unlike the short and medium word, the visits through them are more.
The term competition means that website owners and brands compete for this word to appear in the search engine.
How to Use Google Keyword Planner
Google Keyword Planner is what enables you to create an ad on Google to promote your website or brand, and also use it to write your articles or content. You can access the Keyword Planner , start:
- Here you can type 9 words when you type the first word press enter on the keyboard.
- Here you can extract keywords from a site by putting its link here, you can put a link to a site that competes with you.
- Finally, click on Get Results.
This is a very powerful tool used by advertisers, writers and publishers to identify the right keyword.
Learn about dofollow and nofollow links
Links here mean those links that you place on your site, and they are divided into two sections:
- Dofollow links
- nofollow links
When we put a link on our site, we must know whether this link has a good reputation or not. If it is a link that you do not know anything about, but you must cite it in your content, then you will use the nofollow attribute, which means that you are not associated with this site and that it has no value to you. The link will be as follows:
<a href="https://www.blabla.com" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">
But if it is a trusted site and it must be DoFollow, the link format will simply be as follows:
<a href="https://www.blabla.com" target="_blank">
We just removed the attribute rel=nofollow and now the link is dofollow.
Best SEO Tools
In the article, we will not cover the main question, which was what is SEO, but we will share with you the best SEO tools ever. There are many SEO optimization tools, but we will provide you with the best of them ever.
Ahrefs website
You don’t have to be a pro in SEO and you will never ask what is SEO again, through this giant site you can search to get a higher rank and get more visits, through the Ahrefs site you will find a set of powerful SEO tools that are easy to learn.
The site allows you to view competing sites and see the keywords they are working on, and it also gives you an accurate breakdown of the level of SEO health on your site and more.
Visit the site: Ahrefs
semrush website
Semrush allows you to review your site to correct meta tags, titles and URLs, through which you can get more ideas and keywords that your competitors are using, you can also know who is using your keywords on the Internet and then analyze their site and know how it works and how it tops search results.
To visit the site: semrush
MOZ website
MOZ is a great SEO solution to help you rank higher, drive traffic to your website, and run high-impact SEO campaigns. Whether you have one site or hundreds of sites, Moz distributes your business information across the web for maximum search engine visibility.
Visit the site: MOZ
KWFinder website
KWFinder covers both traditional and competitive keyword research to help you find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty, which will get you to the top of the search pages quickly. Just search for keywords with low SEO difficulty and high search volume. This site has more accurate information about the search volume of the keywords.
To visit the site: kwfinder
Mistakes to avoid
There are many mistakes that many people make, including:
- Focus on the keyword and leave or forget about the quality of the content itself.
- Copying content from other sites with minor modifications on the basis that it is a paraphrase.
- Write a single description for a group of pages that all contain the same description.
- Not paying attention to the quality of images within content pages and not including alt tags for images.
- Repeating the keyword in all images within the content is a big mistake.
- Randomly repeating the keyword in the content causes your site to be considered a spam site.
With this, we have provided you with a good reference about the question of what is SEO. Was this article useful to you? You can tell us about it in a comment below, in the comments section, and you can also tell us about the information that you benefited from and share your success with us.
