All things SEO in one go!
SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) was and still remains one of the most effective ways of boosting the search engine ranking of your website, thus getting it better visibility to your target audience.
While getting started with SEO “seems” simple, putting it to work effectively needs one to be conversant with some basic concepts and diligently apply those to ensure great ROI.
Today, we will look at the topmost 20 key concepts and metrics that any SEO practitioner worth their salt should be well-versed with. Let's get on the SEO train then!
1. SEO (Search Engine Optimisation): Why not start with defining the most basic term? SEO itself! SEO is an umbrella term covering not just the process but also all the tactics applied to boost the ranking of a website on the results pages of a search engine.
2. On-page SEO: On-page SEO, as its name indicates, refers to the tactics applied, and changes carried out on the website itself. This includes, but is not restricted to, rewriting the content, restructuring the website to load faster, providing a better user experience with consistent navigation, images etc.
3. Off-page SEO: A complementary tactic to on-page SEO, off-page SEO consists of promotional tactics and brand-awareness raising activities that are conducted outside the website. For example, organic posts or paid ads placed on social media platforms, email marketing or submitting guest blogs on other websites. The idea is to build credibility and get more relevant traffic to the website.
4. Keywords: These are the foundational blocks, and often the most focused-on elements of SEO. As you can guess, these are words or groups of words most relevant to your target audience for finding your site. You will want your website to be ranked higher in the results when users will search for the keywords. Often, these are connected deeply to the business in which the client operates. For example, for a website talking about water treatment plants, "sewage treatment" or "wastewater treatment" would be relevant keywords.
5. Long-tail keywords: Long-tail keywords are just like keywords, except that they are typically phrases containing keywords. Carrying the above example ahead, examples of long-tail keywords would be "best methods of sewage treatment" or "wastewater treatment plants". These allow for more precise searching by users, for whom shorter keywords would throw up too many irrelevant results.
6. Keyword density: Keyword density is a measure of how many "relevant" or "useful" keywords are present on a particular page. The factors of relevance and usefulness matter because simply "stuffing" a page with too many keywords does not mean that your page will appear higher in the search engine results. In fact, your page may be penalised in such cases. Finding the keyword density is an exercise in finding the right balance between making the content readable and providing useful information to the user.
7. SERP (Search Engine Results Page): As is apparent from the name, this is where the user sees the list of websites after searching for particular keywords or phrases. This is the holy grail - the direct proof of how effective your SEO tactics are proving to be. Here, a special mention must be made on the first page of the results. Most of the users never scroll past the first page of the results. If your website is appearing on the first page, rejoice!
8. Keyword research: This is the process of determining which are the best keywords to be used in your website content. The ideal keywords are those which are most relevant to your business, searched for by a high number of users and (ideally) not focused much on by your competitors. This process needs to be done not just at the beginning, but iteratively improved throughout.
9. Page rank: This is nothing but the position at which your page appears on the SERP. The higher your page appears, the more likely it is to get clicked on by the users. It is a direct measure of how useful your page is for the user's query, according to the search engine. An important point to remember is that the page rank can change based on various factors like the users' geographical location and their previous searches. Hence, it is possible that two users may see the same website page in different positions for the same keyword.
10. Indexing: It is the process by which the search engine traverses through the pages on your website and adds them to its internal repository of pages mapped to keywords/links etc. Automated programs called "bots" go through the content of your pages, the links present on your site and any sites linking to your site to determine the relevance of your content for keywords. You can also opt to not index certain pages so that they do not appear in the search engine results. Typical examples of such pages would be a "thank you for joining" or "we are sorry to see you go" page.
11. Meta description: No, this does not have anything to do with Facebook's parent company. This is a description of about 150 characters which describes what a page is about and what information it provides to the visitor. It is important to write great meta descriptions for your pages, as this is what gets shown to the user on the SERP just below your page link.
12. Internal links: Hyperlinks on your website that let the user navigate between pages belonging to the same website/domain are called internal links.
13. External links: Hyperlinks on your website that send the user to other (external) websites are called external links. These are typically used to refer the user to more information about something your page refers to.
14. Link building: One of the methods of boosting your page rank is to get other reputed websites to link to your website by providing an external link to your website. This process is known as link building. This is typically done by you submitting your website link to other websites and then reviewing and adding it.
15. Landing page: Just like a plane lands at an airport, a landing page is where a user "lands" when they click on the link from other websites or from search engine results. Landing pages are your chance to boost user engagement and usually contain contact/feedback forms for lead generation, enquiries etc.
16. Keyword stuffing: When you overuse keywords in the content of your website in an attempt to rank your website higher on the SERP, it is known as keyword stuffing. Keyword stuffing often results in irrelevant, less useful content and is often penalised by search engines.
17. Responsive design: This is the method of designing your web pages so that they can be viewed optimally on any device the user is using, be it a laptop or a phone or a tablet. This helps the website be more usable across devices and helps boost its page rank as search engines place a great emphasis on website usability.
18. ROI (Return on Investment): This is probably the most important concept/metric you will need to know. When you carry out SEO, it leads to users visiting the website, leads/enquiries coming in for the products/services offered by the business which then leads to sales/revenue. The best way to ensure proper ROI is to monitor the leads generated through your marketing tactics so that ROI can be linked to the tactics.
19. Traffic: This is the total amount of visits to your website and its pages during a specific period. This is of two types - organic (users visiting from the search engine results or via organic posts on social media or other portals) or paid traffic (typically through Search Engine Marketing campaigns or Ads on social media).Some of the KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) here are unique users, page views etc.
20. Broken link: This refers to a hyperlink which leads the user to a 404 error page when clicked on. This happens when the target webpage has been removed without providing a redirect to another page.
Now that you know the basic concepts of SEO, why not contact Idecution and see how we can make SEO work for your business? Contact us today! Click To Tweet