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What is SEO? A Step-By-Step Search Engine Optimization Procedure 2024

step by step seo
step by step seo

“Slow and Steady wins the SEO Race”

What is SEO?

“SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a combination of strategies used to increase brand awareness and ranking in search engines for a website.”

Nowadays it is very important to choose an e-commerce platform that is very adequate that works for your business growth.

It is also important to know, How you can generate high traffic and reach your potential customers? How you can make maximum conversions from leads?

SEO is the fast-moving and most effective field. It plays the main key role to improve brand awareness and also organic search rankings by targeting long-phrase keywords, creating content and through link building.

Why Do We Need To Do SEO Of Any Website?

Search Engines are the best source to generate maximum traffic. Every user will always open the Search engine to browse anything like products, type of services, content or for any other information.

While we do SEO, Users’ search queries (keywords) are critically important. Keywords are the words that users type into the search bar for finding anything. We should target exact long phrase keywords with high volume and low competition related to what we are offering on our website.

“SEO is game of keywords”

To any business, the first target is to generate traffic to their website. Anyhow social media platforms like Facebook, Linked In, Google+, Twitter, Instagram can generate a bunch of visitors to your website. But, the primary source to generate web traffic is always a SEARCH ENGINE like Google, Yahoo, Bing are the most highly targeted traffic Search Engines.

Once your website is live, search engines (Spiders or Crawlers) will crawl it to find out what’s it about and analyze individual pages. Later, it will index them according to the terms that show up often and in important sections of the page. For suppose, if any user searches for a particular topic relevant to your website, then the search engines will show in its SERP(Search Engine Result Page).SEO helps the search engines to know more about a website’s relevancy and some other factors, which they can’t do themselves. Nowadays competition is very high and, the one who does SEO to their website will absolutely have a specific advantage of traffic and viewers.

Higher Ranking in Search Engine leads to generate high traffic to your website which naturally leads to increased conversions.

Types of SEO?

Before knowing about SEO strategies, it is important to know about the types of SEO. These optimizing strategies are related to some specific techniques used when trying to improve the search engine ranking of a website.

There are four different types of SEO. They are:

a)   White Hat SEO

b)   Grey Hat SEO

c)   Black Hat SEO

d) Negative SEO

White Hat SEO

This refers to attempts to improve website ranking according to search engine’s guidelines (involves no fraud). The Website will be approved by the search engine.

White hat SEO techniques include link building, google analysis, research, meta tags, and meta description, writing relevant content, useful content for your target audience, promoting your content on social media which earns exposure and links, acquire local business citations, Guest Posts for sites in your niche. By following guidelines results will last for a long time and also white hat techniques take longer to improve search rankings.

Grey Hat SEO

These are the SEO practices that may or may not obey the Search engine Guidelines, these practices are a little bit riskier than White Hat SEO because that may or may not result in your site being banned.

These include Paid Reviews, Link Exchanges, slightly altered Content, content whose main purpose is to encourage visitors to click on a link to a particular page.

Black Hat SEO

An approach to optimize the website against to current search engine’s guidelines (techniques in an illegal manner) to get a high search ranking.

There are many black-hat tactics, some of them are invisible text, keyword stuffing, redirecting to another page, farming links, Alt Tags, Domain names, Anchor texts, using multiple H1 tags on a page, Duplicate Content, displaying different versions of the same page, False and Poorly Formatted Content, excessive internal links, Paid Backlinks, Thin Content(Less than 300 words per page or post), page stuffing. By doing all these practices the website will be eventually get banned from the search engine and will be penalized through lower rankings.  

Practice of implementing Black or Grey Hat SEO on someone else’s Website intentionally that includes posting negative reviews, hacking and modifying the site content.

Negative SEO

We will suggest focusing only on white hat SEO to have a better ranking in SERP.

How to do Search Engine Optimization?

Optimizing a website is to gain higher rankings in organic SERP and to make your website user-friendly. Optimization of a website or web page should be in such a way that, it must be more relevant to the user’s search query. So, when Google serves the page in results, you would get high traffic. And also if the content is very attractive then they will share and link to your content which is a bonus.

Types of optimization

  • On-page optimization
  • Off-page optimization

On-Page Optimization Process

On-page SEO refers to working on-site of the page on your website to gain a better ranking in organic SERP.

On-page SEO techniques include,

1. Meta Tags- Title, Description and Header Tags

2. Use SEO-Friendly URLs

3. Site speed

4. Content Optimization

5. Mobile-friendly website

6. Start Page title with a keyword

7. Add keywords in the first 100 words

8. Outbound link

9. Internal Linking

10. Improve Dwell time

11. Image optimization and Alt Tags

12. Monitor Google Search Console closely     

13. Site map.html    

14. Robot.txt  

Meta Title & Description

Title tags limit should be up to 60-65 characters

The Meta description tag will serve the function of advertising copy. The Description tells the search engine and users what our site is about.

Description tags limit should be up to 160 characters

Header tags are nothing but headings in your post. By using your target keyword in header tags will improve the Search engine visibility for your main keywords. There are basically 6 types of header tags –

  • <h1>Your post title 1</h1>
  • <h2>Main heading 2</h2>
  • <h3>Sub heading 3</h3>
  • <h4>This is heading 4</h4>
  • <h5>This is heading 5</h5>
  • <h6>This is heading 6</h6>

Most commonly used header tags are: H1, H2 and H3.

Use of H1 tags: H1 tag is mainly for the title of your post. As far as SEO is concerned a post should have only one title tag. Using more than one H1 tag is not recommended.

Use of H2 tags: Use of H2 H2 tag in your post can be more than one. However don’t use your keyword for all H2 headings, instead use the keyword in 1-2 H2 tags and try to have LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) keywords other H2 headings.

Use of H3 tags: The usage guidelines are the same as those mentioned above for H2 tags.

Use of H4, H5, and H6 tags: Rarely used. There are no extra benefits by using keywords in these header tags.

Use SEO-Friendly URLs

Keep your URL short because Google gives importance to the first three to four words in the URL. Include your targeted keyword in your URL. It’s better to avoid bad URLs and long URLs.

Site Speed

Recommended Page loading time should be less than 5 seconds. You can increase your site speed by compressing images, minify javascript, CSS and HTML files, avoid landing page redirects, switching to faster hosting, using a CDN(Content Delivery Network).

Content Optimization

Your content decides the importance of your page in a search result. Google’s primary focus is to serve the most relevant information to users. If your page does not offer any information about what the user is looking for, it is hard to rank on first or even on the next few pages.

Ensure that each page has at least 300 words of unique content on it that can’t be found anywhere else on your website or web. We have to add key phrases in the content body by spreading them twice or thrice in the first and last paragraphs.

“Content is the King in SEO”

Mobile-Friendly Website

This is a well-known fact now. If any website is not mobile-friendly, then Google starts pushing down the sites in their search result pages. Make sure you have a good responsive website or a separate website for your mobile phone visitors.

Start Page Title With a Keyword

Keep our keyword closed to the beginning. If possible, start your title with your keyword. Make sure you use your keyword in title sensibly, because the title is one of the most important ranking factors.

Outbound Link

Linking to an external source it is an “Outbound link”. It provides more information about your page. Making an outbound link is easy and make sure you choose your outbound link sensibly.

Internal Linking

A Hyperlink which redirects from one-page to another-page of a website. Use internal linking where ever it is relevant and logical. You can have 2-3 internal links per 300 words. But it can be more or less depending on the content length and the relevancy of the link. Having more internal links will generally lead to better search engine rankings.

Dwell Time

Dwell time is “time spent on your webpage”. It is a metric that calculates user engagement, SERP Click through rate and session duration.

Image Optimization And Alt Tags

Make sure you add your keyword logically in your image file name. Image name tells more about the image to Google, as Google can’t read the images. This image filename is known as Image Alt tag.

Monitor Google Search Console Closely

Google search console does most of the jobs to keep your website healthy and to track any issue that might affect your website ranking in Search Engine.

Here are the few things to check on regularly bases

  • Check if you have any crawl errors and fix them.
  • Check if your sitemap has any error.
  • Find keywords for which your website ranks
  • Check for any security issue
  • Check for AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) issues.

Sitemaps

Submitting an XML map to a site is known as the sitemap. Creating and Submitting a Sitemap helps to make sure that Google knows about all the pages on your site. It gives the allover architecture of the website to search engines.

General Syntax will be: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml   

Robot.txt

A Robot.txt file is used to restrict access to certain pages on your sites by search engine robots. These bots are automated and they check to see if a robot.txt file exists which prevents them from accessing certain pages.

General Syntax will be: http://www.example.com/robots.txt

These on-page SEO techniques will help you to improve the performance of your website in Search Engine.

Off-Page Optimization Process

Off-page SEO is working on off-site to improve your site’s search engine rankings.

You have to write a Unique Title tag for each web page, using one of the key phrases you have assigned to that page which helps the search engine and users to know what the page is about. This is the main factor for search engines to give a better ranking for web pages.

Off-page SEO Techniques include,

1.   Submission to search engines

2.   Google Places for Business-Local Optimization

3.   Creating Shareable Content

4.   Social Media Engagement

5.   Directory Submission

6.   Social Bookmarking Submission

7.   Blogging

8.   Blog comments

9.   Article submission

10.  Classifieds submissions

11.  Forum Posting

12.  Image submission

13.  Infographic submission

14.  Press Releases

15.  Video Promotions

Google Places for Business-Local Optimization

Google Places for Business listing is a crucial starting point for any business website. Google places is an integrated map engine, which is going to upgrade with Google my places.

Creating Shareable Content

Creating amazing and shareable content is a smart way of generating the maximum number of natural backlinks to our website or blog. Research frequently and keep your content in every case crisp and refreshing.

Social Media Engagement

A major Off-page SEO technique is social media engagement. If you want to make your business, blog or website popular, then you have to engage with people on multiple social media platforms. This kind of engagement will help to grow your business to the next level and also helps you to gain the maximum number of backlinks.

Some of the Social Networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, Linked In.

Directory Submission  

Submit your website, webpage or blog post on topmost quality directories to get more and more visitors and to increase search engine rank. Directories like,

DMOZ, Yahoo Directory, One Mission, Pegasus, etc.

Check out the list of TOP 180+ FREE HIGH DA(30+) DIRECTORY SUBMISSION SITES 2021

Social Bookmarking Submission

Social bookmarking sites are one of the best platforms to promote your website. If you do bookmark your blog post or webpage on the most popular social bookmarking websites, you will get high traffic to your blog post or webpage.

Some of the Social Bookmarking sites like Digg.com, Delicious.com, StumbleUpon.com, Diigo.com, Slashdot.org, etc.

Check out the HIGH DA SOCIAL BOOKMARKING SITES DO FOLLOW LIST 2021

Blogging

Write a blog for your website and include lots of unique content. You can also write in other service-related blogs that permit visitor blogging(Guest blogging) and enable links to your service page or website.

This is the most conventional and effective procedure to build links for websites, we can do this with the help of web 2.0 websites.

Here is the list of 60+ HIGH DA WEB 2.0 SITES LIST

Blog Comments

We can also promote our blog or website by posting comments in other service-related blogs that allow links in the comment section.

  • Identify your service-related blogs.
  • Post comments in the comment section.
  • Leave links to your website or service page.
  • No spam, use diversify methods.

Article submission

Write articles related to your service or product and submit them to popular article sites like magportal.com, hubpages.com, ezinearticles.com, thefreelibrary.com, etc.

Content should be unique and of high quality. The search engine may reject if your website contains low-quality content and content with more keyword stuffing. Pick the right category and give a decent title to your content.

This will assist you with attaining some quality links for your site and some referral traffic. But I prefer not to go with this mostly spend time on my own website content promotion.

Classifieds Submission

Do some Classified or Local listings to advertise your products for free. These submissions are more suggestible.

Some of the Classified Submissions like OLX.com, Quikr.com, CliclIndia.com, Craigslist.org, Justdial, Grotal, etc.

50+ Free Classified Submission Websites in 2021

Forum Posting

Create a Forum or Online discussion board of your own and start a discussion or share topics with your friend. You can also post or reply and give your suggestions and advice to a thread that allows links in your signature which can be crawled by the search. Make use of “Do-follow” forums.

A list of high PR forums is addthis.com, chronicle.com, bbpress.org, flickr.com, careerbuilder.com, etc.

Image Submission

Share your photos on popular image submission websites. Before submitting your images please optimize them with the correct URL, title tag and check their title, description, and tags.

Image sharing sites like Instagram.com, Shutterfly.com, mediafire.com, imgur.com, tumblr.com, fotolog.com, picasa.google.com, etc.

Infographics Submission

Nowadays, infographics are getting popular on the internet. Submit your infographics on infographics submission websites and give reference links to your blog or site page. In these submissions, image sizes differ with different websites.

Infographic submission sites like Visual.ly, reddit.com, submit infographics.com, infographiclove.com, etc.

Press Releases

If you are a Business or service provider then go for PR submission in popular PR websites like 1888pressrelease, Open PR,, etc.

Hiring a professional press release company ensures your website will not default in Google penalties or any blacklisted practices which are banned from Google and can have a negative effect on your ranking performance.

Using Press Releases Provides Many Benefits Which Include

  • Releasing New Information to the Public
  • Helps Boost Up Your Website’s Domain Authority with Google
  • It Provides Exposure to Search Engines
  • It will help you Rank Better for Keywords Related to Your Business
  • It will introduce your site or product to new users.
  • It Will Increase the Number of Backlinks from Other Websites

Video Promotions     

We can publish or share our product videos, expert opinion, and reviews of our product and make them public. Before submission of videos gives a proper title, description, tags and reference links. It is one of the more popular ways to get quality backlinks and also to increase brand awareness of business because all video submission websites have high PR.

Some of the video sharing sites like youtube, vine.co, break.com, metacafe.com, vimeo.com, hulu.com, etc.

You should be to be very careful while implementing these off-page strategies to your website. Don’t make any spam or overdo it. And also beware of Black-Hats while doing link building.

List of Best SEO Tools in 2021

Keywords Everywhere

It’s the best Keyword Tool which gives the relevant keywords and also keywords people search for. It has the best options which show the metrics like search volume, CPC and competition for those keywords and option to export those keywords CSV file.

SEO Meta in 1 Click

This gives the info about particular page Metadata, how many header tags are defined and what are those, the total number of Images without Alt Tags and Titles, Total number of links which are unique, internal unique and without Title and also has some tools suggestion. SERP Preview Tool is a Plug-in which is a similar tool that displays the URL Title, Description and how it appears in the SERP.

Grammarly

To check Grammar and Spelling Online and Offline which helps eliminates the Poorly formatted Content while writing and also show definitions and synonyms via double clicks on all sites.

Online Character Count Tool

This tool helps while writing Content which counts the number of characters, words, sentences, paragraphs, and whitespaces used. The best thing is it shows the Keyword Density for each and every keyword and its count in the written content.

Alexa Traffic Rank

Gives the Website ranking all over the world and also the Country wise ranking. It also shows the number of sites linking in, similar sites and the Average Load Time.

SEO Site Check-up

One of the Best SEO Website Tool which gives you the detailed SEO Website Analysis summary with SEO Score on a scale of 100. It provides the information about parameters like Meta Tags, not user-friendly URLs list, missing Image Alt Tags or Attributes, Speed, Server & Security, Mobile Usability. In brief, it fetches the data about all the SEO pros and cons for a website like what are the bugs to be fixed and how to do it and what needs to be improved.

SEOQuake

It’s a Cost-free Chrome Extension or Plug-in for Page Audit by SEMrush with different metrics. For example, if we search for any query, it gives us the position of every website with Domain Score and Trust Score on SERP (Search Engine Result Page). Then other metrics like Traffic Analysis, Alexa & SEMrush Rank, Google & Bing Index, Total no. of Backlinks for Subdomains and Root domain, No. of Facebook likes, Keyword Density for short and long-tail Keywords Count with its individual density and no. of times that keyword repeated.

Similar Sites

This is a Plug-in for Similar Sites with Global Rank, Country-wise Rank & Monthly Visits.

Similar Pages

It’s a Plug-in for Similar Website Pages which can redirect to those similar when clicked on it.

Web of Trust

The name itself tell us the use of the Tool that whether to Trust the Website or not i.e., safe or not with Colour Indication like Green, Grey, Yellow, and Red depending upon the Safe & Security also, the Reputation which shows the rating of a Website. The interesting part is that we can share our Feedback like writing reviews & rating it.

SERP Trends

SERP Trends Plug-in gives us the dynamics, Organic and Adwords dropdown whether position moved up, down, not changed or new site for that particular keyword searched in Search Engine for each and every website that appears on the SERP (Search Engine Result Page).

Backlink Checker Tool

We have different Backlink Checker Tools by different websites. The best & Quick responses given by SEMrush (https://www.semrush.com/features/backlinks/) and Ahrefs (https://ahrefs.com/backlink-checker) with new and lost backlinks, backlink types, no. of follow and no follow links, Page Score(PS), Internal & External links for each and every link.

Duplichecker

It’s a Plagiarism and also Grammar Checker which helps to find out the unique content also the types and number of spelling & grammar errors. It gives us the percentage of Plagiarism, unique and related meaning.

Gtmetrix

It is a URL analyzer, which gives the accurate Site Speed & helps how to optimize.

Keyword Position Checker

This tool gives us the keyword position and the ranked URL for Keyword searched for both Desktop and mobile versions. We can also view the Top 10 URLs for that particular keyword along with those results.

Conclusion

The proper step-by-step and continuous optimization of On-page and Off-page SEO gives the best position to your website in SERP. SEO is an ongoing process, and you must keep this up to date, based on new changes done by search engines.


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Check Out: WEBSITE SEO CHECKER LISTS TO DO A PERFECT SEO ANALYSIS QUICKLY [UPDATED LISTS]

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