“SEO” stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is the process of getting your website to rank higher in search engine result. For example, let’s say you own a website that sells ac. When someone searches “best ac” in Google, you want your website to show up in the top. So we need to pay attention to seo after building a website.
To rank higher in search engine, you must understand three core components:
1) What types of content people want or need.
2) How search engines work.
3) How to properly promote and optimize your website.
On-Page and Off-Page SEO
The search engine optimization strategy can be divided into two different categories: on-page SEO and off-page SEO.
With On-page SEO you have full control over the site and can optimise it to improve the search rankings. The important factors that affect your on page SEO is internal linking, Permalinks structure, relevant and quality images and content etc.
But with off-page SEO you don’t have full control to improve ranking of your site. The important factors that affect your off page seo is backlinks, domain authority.
Importance of SEO
1) The majority of search engine users are more likely to click on one of the top 5 suggestions in the search engine results pages. To take advantage of this and gain visitors to your website, your website needs to appear in one of the top positions.
2)To move ahead of the competition
If two websites are selling the same products, the website which appears on the top of search engine results will likely have more customers than the other website.
3) Create a Better Visitor Experience
Good SEO practices improve the user experience. When more visitors visit your site, there is more traffic on your site.
4) SEO doesn’t require you to pay for ad space
One of the biggest advantages of SEO is that it doesn’t involve paying for ad space.
Improve Your Site SEO
1) Enable SEO Friendly Permalinks
A permalink is a link to a specific post, page, or blog on your website. For example, if we have a link where salyani.com is the main url and blog is permalinks. So from the permalinks blog it is clear to the visitors that the page is related to blogs. You should change permalinks structure for better user experience which ultimately helps to improve your SEO. We need to make sure that we are using the most SEO-friendly permalinks structure.
2) Choose Between a www or non-www Domain
Do you know some websites live at www.domain.com (www) whereas others live at domain.com? (non-www). If you are just launching your website, you might have confusion whether you should include www in your domain or not. Some people think that this will affect site’s SEO.
But there is no SEO benefit of choosing one over another. It will not influence your rankings in any way. Google views the www and non-www versions of the same URL as separate references to separate pages. So, What’s important is that you stay consistent with the one that you chose at the time of starting your website. For example, our site is live at non www domain. Our site has been live for many years. Now we should not change it to www domain. We should not change it from time to time otherwise your site SEO gets affected.
3) Optimize Images For Search Engines
Using images throughout your content will create a better quality reading experience. This will help keep your users engaged, which will give positive website performance indicators. But, if you are not careful with image sizes and quality, then they can slow down your website. Some steps for image optimization are as follows:
I) Write descriptive alt text
ALT text refers to the alternative text that is used to describe the appearance of an image in a page. For example, if you have images regarding wordpress security always write alt text as WordPress Security. So if the image does not load the user can know what the image is about from alt text. ALT tags are used by Google to see how relevant your image is to the content around it. They are also used by screen readers for visually impaired users.
II) Use descriptive file names for your images
Before uploading an image to the website, make sure you are using optimized file names — this helps to give further context to a page. Rather than /image123.jpg for an image of a flower, use flower.jpg. It is simple; make sure that the file name of the image reflects what it shows. Also, if you’re using multiple words in your filename, make sure you’re using a hyphen between them, as Google will read these hyphens as a space.
4) Make internal linking a habit
An internal link is a link from one page to another page on the same website. For example, if you have a blog regarding wordpress security and another blog regarding wordpress. Then in the blog wordpress security you can link the word wordpress to the blog regarding wordpress. So this will help to boost your pageviews, increases the time users spend on your site, and ultimately will improve the SEO score of your individual blog posts and pages.
5) Use Tags and Categories
Tags and Categories make it easier to manage all the website content and improves user experience by allowing visitors to quickly find the content they are searching for. Categories are the most general method of grouping content on a site. For example, I have many posts regarding the latest technology then I will keep all the posts in the “Technology” Category. Tags are like keywords that you can use to describe what a specific page or post is about. If we create a post regarding wordpress security , we can use the tags like wordpress, security, etc. With the proper use of tags and categories, you can help both the search engine crawlers and web readers to browse and navigate different pages of your site quickly and easily.
6) Optimise comment
Comments are a strong indication of user engagement on your website. When more users are engaged, then it means more links back to your site, more traffic which ultimately helps to improve SEO. Always make sure that the Comments are real. Spam comments may badly affect your SEO. Spammers may submit comments with bad links which could affect and even ruin your search rankings. They use automated software to post comments to hundreds or thousands of blogs. They do this to build backlinks to their website at scale. So we must be careful about these.