What is SEO? , SEO in short means optimizing the website to appear in the search engine results pages (SERP).
To answer the question, what is SEO? It is Search Engine Optimization, abbreviated as SEO.
Every second, users of search engines like Google and Bing conduct millions of searches for products and information.
Therefore, search engines are considered one of the most important and largest sources of visits to websites.
If you intend to have a website or blog to publish your articles or even an online store to sell your digital or physical products, your work must include accurate consultations from an SEO company in order to prepare a plan to improve your site to appear in an advanced ranking in search engine results pages.
In order to exploit the potential of the traffic source (which is search engines), your site must be at the top of the search results for the targeted keywords.
This is because 85% of search engine users prefer to click on the first results between 1 and 4.
In this article, we explain SEO for beginners in detail, how search engines work, and how to optimize your website for search engines.
What is SEO?
SEO means improving the site in search engines so that it starts appearing in the first results with keywords closely related to the content of your site.
In other words, your site gets advanced results in the search results pages (SERP) for the keywords you target for your customers.
SEO is one of the elements of electronic marketing from which many elements fall, and SEO is one of the most important of these elements.
This is due to the quality of visits it provides to any website or online store and the conversion rate (CTR) that comes from search engine visitors.
SEO explanation for beginners
If you are a beginner in the field of SEO or websites, or even have a website and want to hire an expert or rely on a digital marketing company , this article will help you obtain 80% of the basic information that you should start with.
Explaining SEO for beginners from scratch depends on your understanding of the basic elements that will be of interest to you continuously and over time.
So I advise you, my friend, after reading this article, to start learning about each of the elements mentioned in detail below.
What are search engines?
Search engines are a set of algorithms that crawl websites and search within the content in order to identify the type of site and classify it.
From the first appearance of your website on the Internet, algorithms begin to index and recognize your website, as shown in the following image.
The following image shows the anatomy of the Google search engine, which relies on some steps as shown in the image.
I do not want to take too much of your time in this part, but as you can see in the picture, there are some operations that search engines perform, starting with indexing the site and classifying it, then starting to give it a Rank according to some data.
Then the user searches and your site starts to appear according to the order it got from the search engine.
FYI, everything depends on AI at every step.
Therefore, you must pay attention to every move you make within your site, which must be planned in advance according to the optimization plan you are working on.
What are the SEO factors to improve search engine visibility?
Search engines rely on several main factors to improve search engine visibility.
To be honest, these factors have become many and many, but in this section I will show you the most important and most important ones for any SEO expert.
SEO factors are divided into 4 sections as follows:
- On page Optimization
- Offpage Optimization
- Technical SEO
- Local SEO
Each section has many factors that fall under it.
Below is a detailed explanation of each section in order to improve your image further.
First: On-page SEO
Everything you do on-page to improve your web pages ranking on search engine results pages falls under this category such as:
- Writing high-quality content that is comprehensive and useful to your website visitors.
- Add meta tags to help Google bots better understand your website content.
- Use HTML tags to highlight headings and other content elements.
- Ensure there are no broken links or duplicate content/pages.
- Organize the URL structure and adopt a neat naming scheme for pages that fall under the same category.
- Compress media and visuals for easier loading and optimize image ALT text for better visibility by search engine crawlers.
- Internal links between related website pages Internal linking between website pages helps search engine crawlers smoothly explore the site structure, discover new relevant content, and rank pages based on their relevance to the topic.
- Improving how quickly your website loads can make a huge difference in reducing bounce rates.
Second: Off-page SEO
This section includes several factors that are being worked on entirely outside the scope of the site, for example.
- Building links from trusted sites, and encouraging customers to give you positive reviews in online forums, will give search engine algorithms an indication of the quality and relevance of your website’s content, and will boost your website’s ranking and domain authority.
- Sharing your website content on social media Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. The conversations about your website on social media channels bring in a lot of organic traffic, which boosts your website’s SEO.
Third: Technical SEO
Technical SEO greatly helps Google robots crawl, interpret and index all pages of a website successfully for use when needed.
Technical SEO involves auditing the site and improving technical elements to make the website perform better, be responsive, have a crawlable structure, and be compatible with different devices.
- Create a comprehensive XML sitemap making the site mobile friendly.
- Add structured data to help web crawlers sort and categorize your site pages based on content type.
- Use a secure HTTPS connection.
- Improve HTML code, meta tags and alt texts.
Therefore, this section includes improving all technical factors that prevent search spiders from crawling and archiving your website.
And finding a clear plan to adjust the site in front of search engines in the appropriate manner, whether within the site or in matters related to the server, hosting, speed improvement programs, and the like.
Fourth: Local SEO
Local SEO is more location specific than other types of SEO.
Local SEO deals with rankings within a specific city or state, and its main idea is to increase the online reach of a business within a specific state or city.
It is the best and most effective solution for companies, shops, restaurants, hotels and every business that has a real website that customers can reach.
Local is a great way to attract online customers for link building and organic search. This is because a local search like (blueberry sellers near me) uses search results in the local language of the searcher.
Local SEO rankings are linked to improving your business profile on Google.
The most common SEO elements
Below are some of the factors that are most of interest to users and their classification among the above mentioned sections.
Content quality
Content quality and improvement are considered factors in on-page optimization of the site.
The content of the site should be comprehensive, cover the topic in a comprehensive and coordinated manner, and contain explanatory media and visuals.
In addition to providing him with search terms related to the same topic.
Site speed
It is one of the technical factors of the site Technical SEO and has been adopted as a major element of page ranking since the beginning of 2019.
As the user experience depends largely on the speed of loading the website on all digital devices, and the speed of the website depends on many factors, including:
- Website hosting speed and data center website
- Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
- Media and visual compression
- No technical problems and easy loading of site files
Website responsive smartphones:
Another factor that joins the technical factors of the website Technical SEO is the responsiveness of the website and its appearance in the appropriate form on mobile devices of all sizes.
More than 80% of website visits come from mobile phones, so Google pays great attention to how responsive and mobile-friendly a website is.
Site authority and its connection to the topic:
The site should be specialized in a specific niche and have a recognized authority.
It is one of the factors of off-page optimization of the site, and one of the most important points that SEO experts use intelligently.
Backlinks:
These are links from other websites that point or cite a website on a specific topic.
The more of them and the higher their quality (they are from high authority sites), the more powerful your website will be.
Therefore, this factor falls under the external optimization factors for websites.
The importance of SEO for websites:
SEO plays a major role in increasing the website ranking which means more traffic. More traffic means new customers and more brand awareness.
It then enables websites to make money through advertising agencies such as Google AdSense, affiliate marketing, selling products and services, and saving the high advertising cost of marketing the website, whether Google ads or social media ads.
Also, increasing customer confidence in your site after publishing your service well to get a positive impression of your project or business activity, and increasing the rate of appearance gives you more opportunities to spread online, which increases brand awareness.
Types and methods of SEO:
Some beginners get confused about the methods, ways and types of search engine optimization; therefore, we will explain below the three most common methods of search engine optimization.
White Hat SEO
It is the legitimate way to improve search engines, and this method includes making improvements to search engines without getting into trouble with them.
White hat techniques are the Google recommended way to rank any page/website.
Some white hat SEO techniques include:
- Publish high-quality text content that better solves the user’s problem and is easy to read and enjoyable to make it easier for users to understand.
- The website interface should be user-friendly, smoothly navigable, and easily accessible.
- Sharing your website/page link on social media helps in gaining additional traffic to the website.
- Optimize your website’s HTML, and constantly check your website’s HTML codes to find out why it’s lagging.
Black Hat SEO
It is a quick way to get results but it is a major reason for your site to be removed from Google servers.
Black hat SEO techniques are used to improve website rankings faster but only for a short period of time.
This is when Google notices that your site is not serving its intended purpose and is getting more clicks.
Some black hat techniques include:
- Random links
- keyword stuffing
- Overly optimized HTML tags and headings
- Use a lot of images
- Hidden Texts and Links
- Buy backlinks
- Post text copied from other sites
One of the major downsides of black hat SEO is that the user will bounce and leave your website after realizing that you don’t have the information they came for, and this technique consumes just as much money as white hat SEO or even more.
Grey Hat SEO
Grey hat SEO is a combination of the white hat and black hat methods mentioned above.
Your website may never be banned by Google but it will paint a bad image of your business and delay your ranking.
Some gray hat tactics include:
- Posting content written by ineffective bots
- Pay for fake reviews
- Exchange links
- Copy from other sites.
Frequently Asked Questions About SEO
What is SEO?
SEO is some improvements to websites in order to get advanced results on the first pages of search engines SERP through an SEO expert or an electronic marketing company.
What does SEO mean?
The meaning of Search Engine Optimization, abbreviated as SEO, is improving your website’s search engines to reach the first results in search results pages.
What are the SEO requirements?
SEO conditions are numerous, but they are divided into 3 main sections, and each section includes several factors. The most important SEO conditions are:
On-page Optimization
Off-page Optimization
Technical SEO
Conclusion
Search engine optimization is an integral part of digital marketing and content marketing and should get the attention it deserves regardless of your digital marketing methods.
We have explained SEO for beginners with enough information for you to know the importance of search engine optimization for websites, and we also learned about the many benefits that your site benefits from after optimizing it in search engines, so you should actually start optimizing your site from now.
