How to Make a Website Optimized for SEO

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SEO , or search engine optimization, is the most cost-effective and effective way to drive traffic to your website. But what exactly is SEO and how does it work? How can you make SEO work for you? That’s what you’ll learn in this article.

Index:

What does SEO mean?
What is SEO?
Benefits of SEO
Types of SEO
How does SEO work?
SEO Ranking Factors
On-page optimization
Off-page optimization
Technical SEO
SEO Tools
SEO Strategies and Best Practices
Additional learning
For most of us today, when we need something – be it an Hong Kong telegram data answer, an idea, a product, a strategy or a service – we start by asking search engines.

Google alone receives 3.5 billion searches per day. Just as search engines have become an important part of our lives, they have also become an integral part of many business marketing strategies.

In fact, organic search is considered the channel with the highest ROI by 49% of marketers.

Organic search is just a fancy name for regular search engine results without ads, and the way marketers use organic search as a marketing channel is through search engine optimization, or SEO .

So how can you use the power of search engines to grow your business? In this article, you’ll learn everything you need to know to rank higher on Google, get more traffic to your website, and improve your brand reputation.

What does SEO mean?
SEO stands for search engine optimization. Let’s break this down in the context of your website.

Search: What people do when they want to find an answer to a question or a product or service that meets their needs.
Search engine: A website (such as Google or Bing) where a person can perform this search.
Search Engine Optimization: What you do to get that search engine to link that search to your website.
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What is SEO?
That's all well and good, but you can tell me that RPA stands for robotic process automation and that doesn't mean I know what RPA is.

So what is search engine optimization?

A formal definition of SEO:
Search engine optimization is a set of technical and content practices that aim to align a website page with a search engine's ranking algorithm so that it can be easily found, crawled, indexed, and displayed in the SERP for relevant queries.

A simpler definition of SEO:
SEO involves making improvements to the structure and content of your website so that your pages can be discovered by people searching for what you have to offer, through search engines.

The simplest definition of SEO:
SEO is what you do to rank higher on Google and get more traffic to your website.

Yes, Google is just one search engine among many. There’s Bing. Directory search engines. Even Instagram is a search engine. But with 92% of the market share, the terms “Google” and “search engine” are synonymous for the intents and purposes of this post.

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Benefits and importance of SEO

People are searching for anything, both vague and directly related to your business. These are all opportunities to connect with them, answer their questions, solve their problems, and become a trusted resource for them.

More website traffic: When your website is optimized for search engines, it gets more traffic , which equates to increased brand awareness as well as…
More Customers: To optimize your website, it needs to target keywords – the terms your ideal customers/visitors are searching for – which means you’ll get more relevant traffic.
Better reputation: A higher Google ranking creates instant credibility for your business. If Google trusts you, people trust you.
Higher ROI: You invest money in your website and the marketing campaigns that drive visitors back to your website pages. A high-performing website improves the returns on those campaigns, making your investment worthwhile.
So, whether you want more brand awareness, online visibility , leads, sales or loyal customers, SEO is your answer.

Types of SEO
Google and other search engines take several factors into consideration when ranking content, and as such, SEO has many facets. The three main types of SEO are on-page, off-page, and technical SEO:

On-page SEO: Optimizing the quality and structure of a page's content. Content quality, keywords, and HTML tags are the main players in on-page SEO.
Off-page SEO: Getting other websites and other pages on your site to link to the page you’re trying to optimize. Backlinks, internal links, and reputation are your off-page MVPs.
Technical SEO: Improving your website’s overall performance in search engines. Website security (SSL certificates), UX, and structure are key here.
The above three types of SEO are used for websites and blogs, but they also apply to three subtypes of SEO:

Local SEO: Getting your business to rank as high as possible on Google Maps and local SERP results. Reviews, listings, and Google Business Profile optimization are the most important here.
Image SEO: A combination of technical and on-page strategies to make images on your website pages rank in Google image search
Video SEO: A combination of on-page, technical, and off-page strategies to rank your videos in YouTube or Google video results.
While all three subtypes require all three main types of SEO, they vary in how heavily they rely on each main type.

How does website SEO work?
So how does Google determine which pages will appear on the search engine results page (SERP) for any given query? How does this translate into traffic to your website? Let’s take a look at how SEO works.

Google's search crawlers constantly scan the web, gathering, categorizing, and storing billions of web pages in its index. When you search for something and Google returns results, it's pulling from its index, not the web itself.
Google uses a complex formula (called an algorithm) to order results based on a number of criteria (ranking factors – which we’ll cover below), including the quality of the content, its relevance to the search query, the website (domain) it belongs to, and more.
The way people interact with the results further indicates to Google the needs that each page satisfies (or not), which is also taken into account in the algorithm.
In other words, SEO works like a complex feedback system – to surface the most accurate, reliable and relevant results for any given search using information from you, Google and searchers. Its job is to produce content that meets Google’s requirements for expertise, knowledge, authority and trust (EEAT), which then meets the requirements of your users.



Google SEO Ranking Factors
So what are these requirements? What actually constitutes quality, targeted, EAT-friendly, SEO-optimized content?

Well, there are hundreds of Google ranking factors, and Google is also constantly evolving and refining its algorithm to continue providing the best possible experience, but there are 12 that should be prioritized.

According to FirstPageSage , these are Google's top ranking factors and how they are weighted:

Consistently publishing high-quality content (26%)
Keywords in meta title (17%)
Backlinks (15%)
Niche experience (13%)
User engagement (11%)
Internal links (5%)
Mobile-friendly/mobile-first (5%)
Page speed (2%)
Website Security/SSL Certificate (2%)
Schema markup/structured data (1%)
Keywords in URL (1%)
Keywords in H1 (1%)
But don’t be fooled by the factors at the bottom of this list. As you can see in the chart below, “Other” factors such as unlinked mentions, social signals, domain history, external links, and site structure are all weighted at 1%.

But given that there are at least 200 ranking factors on Google; there are at least 189 “other” factors that collectively make up that 1%. In other words, those seemingly small factors, like keywords in URLs, which by themselves make up 1%, aren’t so small.

How to do SEO: on-page optimization
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Now it’s time to talk about how to actually do SEO – how to optimize your website for these factors so you can rank higher in Google and get more traffic.