SEO is a process in which we optimize website to get free organic traffic from search engines such as Google and Bing. Other objectives include improving website keywords ranking, user experience, search engine visibility, and conversion rates.
To achieve our website SEO goals and objectives, we create an SEO plan and strategies, then implement those either on our own or by hiring an SEO agency or freelancer.
Each website requires different strategies to gain free organic traffic from search engines. There is no one formula that work on all types of websites.
However, there are common basics things that are crucial to implement across almost all websites, whether they are trying to get organic traffic or using PPC ads to drive visitors from search engines such as:
- Finding relevant keywords your audience searches for. Read More: How to do Keyword Research Correctly for SEO Campaign
- Increasing Website loading speed Read More: Top 3 tools to get website page speed insights
- Optimize meta tags, headers, and content with relevent keywords.
- Create valuable and engaging content. Read More: What is Digital Content? How to Create Digital Content on your own
- Fixing technical issues. Read More: What is a technical SEO Audit? Technical SEO best practices
- User Experience. Read More: The Critical Role of UX in Website’s Success
In simple words, auditing website seo helps us to create and examine the report about what is working and what is not in our SEO efforts and strategies. For example, we can check if our chosen keywords are driving traffic to our website or if technical issues are hindering our visibility on search engines. To check keywords ranking we can use Google Search Console and Google Analytics.
Before we start doing SEO for any website or if someone asks you how to increase their website traffic, the first answer and essential step should be to “audit the website’s SEO.” This will give you an understanding of what has already been done, where the website currently stands, and what strategies you need to implement to improve its ranking, search engine visibility, and traffic.
We can create SEO reports manually or through automated tools. Manual examination of large websites takes time and requires good SEO knowledge and experience. However, SEO audit tools help us automate this process with speed and efficiency.
Top 4 Essential Types of SEO
1. Local SEO
The goal of local SEO is to target local, nearby, geographical and location based search terms such as best web development course in … [name of the location] …, homestay nearby me …., best places to visit … flat for sale in…, etc. these are examples of local search terms. And our goals should be to focus on getting our website/pages on search results for these search terms/keywords/phrases.
In local SEO google my business profile and google map is also important. We must optimize our business with these two free google services to increase visibility on search engine for local search terms, getting more reviews/feedback from existing customers and by adding our business details and marking business on google map. Doing this will help search engine users, to find best and right solution near by suitable for them.
Local SEO is very important for businesses that provide and sell products or services locally or target local communities, especially those where customers need to visit a physical store, shop, or business, such as restaurants, hair salons, real estate agencies, travel agencies, hotels, taxi service provider, coaching institute, web design agencies, resturent, food corners and auto repair shops etc.
2. On Page SEO
On Page SEO is the process of optimizing each page of a website and its content according to relevant keywords, search terms, and user needs. In On Page SEO, the following elements are essential:
- Finding relevant keywords using various keyword research tools.
- Adding keywords to each page according to the content and search intent.
- Creating internal links to related content within the website.
- Optimizing meta titles and descriptions.
- Adding relevant tags to pages and posts.
- Optimizing images, size and adding alt text to images.
- Increasing content readability and accessibility.
- Categorizing content effectively.
- Making content easy to read and highly visible to visitors.
- Adding references and external links if needed.
- Including important elements on a page that enhance user experience and make the content rich.
So, by implementing On Page SEO strategies increases engagement, time spent on your site, social sharing, and conversions while lowering bounce rates, helping search engines recognize your site’s quality, resulting in higher rankings, more visibility, and increased traffic.
3. Off Page SEO
Off Page SEO is another important part of SEO. Off Page SEO includes activities that you do outside your website. Mainly, it’s about getting backlinks to your website from other websites. You can also consider this as referral traffic. Whenever a high domain authority website adds your website or post link within their post, it increases your website and post authority. Search engines consider authoritative websites more likely to rank higher.
This happens when someone adds your website, post, or page links to their website. This helps in getting traffic to your website. To get SEO benefits and achieve a higher rank for your targeted keywords on search engines, but it’s important to consider the following points:
If other websites link to your website pages/posts from their website, it should be a do-follow link; otherwise, a no-follow link does not provide much SEO benefit.
The text used to link to your website is called anchor text. This anchor text should be a keyword or related keywords relevant to your post/page topics.
Backlinks from high domain authority websites must have a DA of at least above 30. Still, if you are getting backlink or traffic from low DA websites that also ok. But if you are approaching a particular website for backlink their DA should be above 30.
What not to do to get backlinks:
- It’s important that you don’t advertise or pay or get paid just for backlinks.
- Backlinks can also happen automatically. If your content is useful, other people will automatically add your website link, even with do-follow.
- Write and publish unique and high-quality content on your website and blog.
- Publish case studies.
- Include an About Us page and author bios on your website so that when people are considering linking to your website, they can at least see this.
- Focus on guest blogging. Approach high domain authority websites to publish your content on their site and get a link back to your website.
- How to Get Backlinks Automatically Without Actively Seeking Them
- Ways To Get Quality Backlinks with Guest Posts
4. Technical SEO
Technical SEO includes the optimization of technical aspects to improve a website’s ranking, traffic, user experience, and average engagement rate. If a website is not technically fit or has errors and bugs, then even if you have done on-page SEO, off-page SEO, local SEO, or are advertising through PPC or social media, you will not be able to increase ranking, traffic, and other metrics.
For example, if you are not physically fit for a certain job, no matter how well you market yourself, when it is time to deliver on promises, you will not be able to do it because you’re physically not fit.
So, technical SEO is like the physical fitness of your website.
The following are the aspects included in Technical SEO:
- Website Loading Speed and Performance
Ensuring the website loads quickly on all devices and content quickly accessible to all website visitors. You can use Google Page Speed Insights, Pingdom tools and GT matrix for testing speed and error in loading your website faster.
- Responsive and Mobile Friendly:
It’s very important that a website is easily accessible on all devices, whether it’s a small screen (mobile) or large screens like TV. A responsive and mobile-friendly website is very important these days. You can test your website’s mobile friendliness through these tools such as Website Mobile Friendliness Testing tools by Google (You will see this tool within Google Search Console), Google Page Speed Insights , browserstack, responsivetesttool etc.
- Website Crawlability– Crawlability is the automatic process that search engine bots use to frequently scan and understand your website’s content, pages, posts, etc. You can also call this indexing process. This process starts once you submit your website for indexing on a search engine. You can use tools like Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools for this purpose. Through the robots.txt file, you can control what is allowed to be crawled on your website and what is not. This means you can allow or disallow specific pages from being crawled or indexed by search engines like Google and Bing.
This indexing process help search engine to index and filter various information before sharing it on search results. Whenever you update and publish new content search engine bots automatically find out that and showcase to search engine users as per the query and your content relevance.
So, in technical SEO, it is important to ensure that all the essential pages of your website are allowed to be crawled. You can manage this through the robots.txt file.
- SSL and HTTPS: These days it is almost mandatory for website to have secure socket layer Implementing a secure HTTPS connection.
- XML Sitemaps: Creating and submitting an XML (eXtensible markup language) sitemap to search engines is most important task. The use of sitemap.xml on a website is to inform search engine which pages to crawl and which ones to exclude. Pages not listed in the sitemap.xml are less likely crawled by search engines. To submit a sitemap to Google, visit Google Search Console, and for Bing, use Bing Webmaster Tools. To create a sitemap manually, you can use XML Sitemaps. If you’re using WordPress, you can generate sitemaps with SEO plugins such as Yoast SEO and All in One SEO.
- Structured Data: Implementing structured data to enhance SERP appearances. You can Yoast SEO plugin or special plugins to implement Structured data practices in your website.
- Canonical Tags: Using canonical tags to prevent duplicate content issues. Use redirection plugin so that whenever you change or update post/page url, then it will automatically redirect the user to new url.
- Error Pages: Ensuring proper handling of 404 errors and other HTTP status codes. You can check these error pages/posts through google search console report, google page speed insights and through audting your website.
- URL Structure: Creating a clear, descriptive, shorter, and SEO-friendly URL structure is important SEO practice. And remember to include keywords in post/page url.
- Internal Linking: Ensuring a robust internal linking strategy to distribute link equity. Add link from current page/post to related post that you have already published on your blog. This not only help the user in gaining more information around the topics but it wil also help in decreasing bounce rate, increase user engagement and overall post rank on search engine.
- JavaScript: Making sure that JavaScript does not hinder the crawlability and indexability of the site. Make sure that popup plugins, related posts plugins, social media plugins are not slowing your website loading speed, also check these through inspect element in browser.
Read More: What is a technical SEO Audit? Technical SEO best practices
So knowing all types of SEO practically will help you to increase your website search engine visibility, rank and traffic. And those are digital marketing students, must know about all these types SEO.
While we also consider some other things that fall within all above such as optimization of content for voice search, image SEO (the use of alt text, size optimization), video seo etc.
