The acronym SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and it describes the logic behind the ranking of websites when you perform a search on a particular search engine.

Although it may seem tedious and painful at the start, SEO can actually be rather fun and easy to implement.

With over 1.3B websites in existence today, how can you ensure that people find you when they search on Google, Yahoo, Baidu or Bing?

Simply put, SEO can be defined as a marketing technique that helps increase the quantity and quality of the traffic to your site.

SEO (or search engine optimization) describes a series of steps that you can take to rank higher on Google and thus get free organic traffic from various search queries.

The best way to understand SEO nowadays is to break down its meaning. In that manner, SEO is:

1. A marketing discipline – understanding SEO is crucial to all your marketing efforts because this way you will be able to drive traffic to your website and generate leads and conversions. You not only need to write content that Google likes but also content that will resonate with your audience.
2. A technical task – knowing the best practices to optimize your content and site is important if you are planning to compete for traffic. People that know the ins and outs of search engine optimization are highly sought after because the ROI they bring is high.
3. An exciting field – I don’t know about you but to me, creating dope content and generating leads for free is quite amazing. Also, I love the ever evolving nature of SEO and the fact that it requires marketers  to constantly read up on new algorithm changes and more.

How  SEO works?

When a user searches for a term on a search engine like Google, the results that he or she is presented with is a series of websites that are relevant to the query and websites that have a solid domain authority (among other factors described below).

For example when you search for ‘web design ideas’, the top results are the ones that are adopting the best SEO practices in Google eyes.

This is mainly because the search engines use advanced crawlers that gather the information on every website, gathering every bit of content it can find on the Internet. That creates an index for every website that is compared to the algorithm that Google has built for the best SEO practice.

factors that affect SEO?

Whether you are trying to learn more about SEO or want actual ranking techniques on how to improve your website’s SEO, there is a set of on-site and off-site factors that Google and other search engines favor when ranking every site.

Even though there are more than 200 factors that affect your site rank, the good news is that anyone can improve their website by simply working on a handful of them.

 

Here are the most important factors that affect a website’s SEO:

1. Domain Authority

Domain Authority (DA) is a metric that shows how much trust your domain has built over time by a matter of backlinks and age.

 

The more sites that talk about yours, the higher your authority.

Similarly, the older your domain, the higher its domain authority.

Another important factor that I’ve found is the relevance of the domain name in respect to the main keywords you are targeting. For instance, seoexpert.com will be more likely to rank better than lucysblog.com for “seo” related queries.

Lastly, a few of my SEO expert friends have reported that shorter domains will generally outperform longer domains.

2. Keywords

 

SEO begins with picking the right keywords (which you can very well find using Google’s Keyword Planner or Ahrefs). My strategy there is to start by picking medium to low competition keywords and then slowly build up my post to target more competitive terms.

If you are looking to rank then you should definitely include LSI keywords (keywords that are synonyms to your target terms).

For instance, a site that talks about “portable chargers” can also include terms such as “power banks”, “portable batteries for phones” and so forth. Make sure to include the keywords that you want to rank for in the title and in the sub-headings for perfect on-page optimization.

3. Relevancy and Context

 

Search engines are smarter than ever before. They do know the difference between a relevant page and a copied one. They can also distinguish whether just site is about oranges or protein bars. I recommend sticking to a niche when building out a site and catering content specific to that particular niche. For me, my niche is online marketing and SEO.

4. Number of Inbound and Outbound links

The more relevant links your website is pointing to, the greater your SEO score.

Same goes for inbound links which are actually more favored, especially if they are coming from prestigious, relevant and popular sources.

You can get backlinks by getting yourself featured on big news sites for example.

5. Site Speed

Google really cares about how quickly your site loads. To speed up your site you can use caching plugins such as W3 Total Cache or use a CDN to deliver your content in a faster way.

6. Clean and responsive design

Nowadays, the best optimized websites are the ones that are clean, functional and responsive to devices of all types and sizes. In fact, Google even favors websites that have mobile-friendly design than ones that don’t have.

If you are using WordPress, you can install the AMP plugin to have your site load blazingly fast. If your site is not using WordPress, you should learn how to make use of the accelerated mobile pages project by Google.

7. URL structure

The easier your url, the better it is for humans and search engines to understand what your post is all about.

Here are two examples:

a) https://www.suntech.org.ng/2018/05/28/what-is-seo-and-how-does-it-work

b) https://suntech.org.ng/blog/archives/05/28/2018/seo/?p=23

Clearly example A is better because it’s descriptive and to the point.

Several studies have confirmed that the shorter the url, the better. Nevertheless, you still want to make sure you are including your top keyword in the slug for an added SEO juice.

 

In conclusion

Getting organic traffic is just the first step in building a successful business, don’t forget that you can also get traffic by getting featured on major sites, driving a lot of traffic from social media, and building a loyal fan base that will continuously buy from you and refer their friends.

See also Benefits of SEO & Why Your Business Needs SEO