Search Engine Optimization

This lesson discusses what tactics and strategies are used in SEO in order to make your website appear in the
search engine rankings!

WE'LL COVER THE FOLLOWING

• How search engines work?

• Web Crawling
• Web Indexing
• Web Ranking
• What is SEO?
• On-site SEO:
• Off-site SEO:
• Useful Strategies

Once your website starts to appear online, the next thing that you need to take
care of is to help more and more people find your website. According to the
recent researches, most people only skim through the first page of search
results and never bother going on the next pages. Moreover, it has also been
studied that usually people only visit the first three links that appear on the
search engine. This should be enough to show how important it is to make
your website reach there!

💡 Did you know?

There exists around 130,000,000+ websites on the internet!

How search engines work? #

Ever wondered how the search engines find pages relevant to the user’s
search when there are millions of websites available on the internet? A short
and simple answer to this question would be that it runs a complex algorithm
and finds if the keywords entered by user are present in those websites and
the number of times that keyword appears on the website, the more relevant
it becomes.

But it’s not that simple!

Even if we filter the results based on just this approach, the results would still
be in millions. Moreover, people would add extra keywords in their web
pages just to appear on the top. Today’s search engines have been made so
smart that they even capture this repetition and ban your page from
appearing in the results. This is why it has become a necessity to optimize
your website through SEO. To understand SEO, you need to be familiar with a
few terms first. Let’s have a look!

Web Crawling #
Web Crawling is the process when a bot visits your website in order to track
the web pages and fetch useful information like keywords in the pages, links
etc. and feed it to the search engine for indexing.

Web Indexing #
After the crawling process, the search engine calculates the score of each
webpage according to the given keywords entered by the user. This process is
called indexing.

Web Ranking #
Every website has a ranking based on user’s searched keywords, this ranking
is called “Page Rank”.
 quickmeme.com

What is SEO? #
SEO is a set of strategies used to obtain a high-ranking on the search engines
to increase traffic to your site.

Nobody knows what exact algorithm Google is following now or what factors
they consider while ranking a web-page but we do know few of the ranking
factors so we are able to make some optimizations. To do that, we need to take
care of two things.

On-site SEO: #
Make sure the search engines easily understand what your website is about,
and find and create content that matches the searcher’s intent to help search
engine best identify that your website is relevant to user’s search. Given
below are a few tips you need to keep in mind while optimizing your website
content:

1. Optimize titles, tags and meta description: Make them specific and
relevant to user’s keywords. Make sure to add the meat of the content in
the first 150 characters of your meta descriptions.
2. Optimize the actual content on your website: Add Contact Us section, add
testimonials etc.
 3. Optimize main elements: By adding the primary keywords in the main
elements of your site like headings, titles, footer etc.
4. Optimize URLs: Make sure to include primary keywords in the URLs of
your website and keep them as simple and shorter as possible.
5. Avoid keyword stuffing: Don’t add the same keyword too many times, in
the long run it always causes trouble.

Given below is a random search result from Google to show you what meta
description and title tag is.

This is title tag

This is meta
description

Meta Description & Title Tag

Off-site SEO: #
The next part and the most important one is to show search engines that our
website is worthy enough to appear in the top rankings. This is done by
adding backlinks to your website from other sources such as social media,
articles, blogs etc. The more influential the website is that links your website,
the more weightage it is going to add in the search results ranking. Basically
links act as votes. The more citations to a source exist, the more trustable it
becomes in the eyes of the search engine and hence the higher it ranks!
The point that needs to be emphasized here is that in order to get a higher
ranking on search page, you must generate quality backlinks. To generate

quality backlinks, look up for websites that already link your competitors. You
can do that by using any free tool online, Google Adwords and Ahrefs are the
most popular ones. Then you will need to get in touch with them and offer
them a pitch that benefits them or their website in any way… lets say giving
copyrights to your designs? This outreach campaign would help you get a lot
of backlinks and would eventually help you get a higher ranking on search
engines!

So in a nutshell, off-site SEO boils down to two strategies:

1. Use Social Media: To create blogposts, articles and videos that direct to
your website.
2. Get influential Backlinks: By getting in touch with influential websites and
offering them some sort of benefit.

💡 Did you know?

There are free tools available such as Adwords and Ahrefs that let you
enter certain keywords and see how many people actually searched for
it over a month. You can also see your competitors keywords rankings
and find what relevant keywords they used to optimize their website!

Useful Strategies #
Given below are some additional tactics that you can follow in order to gain a
higher ranking in the search results:

Domain Name: Pick a domain name that carries the most common
keywords that the user would intend to search.
XML Sitemap: Generate and submit an XML Sitemap to search engines. A
sitemap basically contains a list of all the web pages on your website. The
main reason this file is generated is to let the search engine know
whenever you make any changes like add a new page, or edit content.
 This file help crawlers find all the web pages of your website. Search
engine use this file to index your website. This way if your website gets

updated, the sitemap will be generated again and hence the search
engine would want to crawl your website again. You can generate the
sitemap using any tool online.
URLS: Always structure SEO friendly URLs that are not too long and
difficult.
Internal Links: Adding internal links to your website is also a great way
of getting indexed.
Robot.txt: Robot.txt file is placed in the root directory of your domain
that instructs the web crawlers which part of the website they can crawl
and index which they can’t! The web crawlers, by default, read this file
first before crawling any web page on your site. If this file is missing, it
automatically assumes that all web pages are accessible for indexing.

Pretty interesting, right? Now let’s move on to the next topic and learn how to
generate revenue out of your website!