Learn What Is SEO in Simple Words for Easy Mastery

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The process of writing the content in such a way that search engines can discover, skim (crawl), and index the page as easy as possible to show that content to the relevant users. Once the users start landing on the webpages, you have to provide the best possible user experience to them so that they can remember your website for long time. This process of making sure the website is visible to the search engines and providing the best user experience is called Search Engine Optimization.

SEO, or search engine optimization, is the key to making your content rank and catch the most eyes. Not only that, SEO can serve as the main tool for bringing inbound leads. Hence, businesses have been paying a lot of attention to SEO recently. 

Let’s get down to what SEO means, and how it is utilized in different ways to promote search engine rankings. 

What Is SEO In Web?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is the practice of optimizing different factors of your webpage to make discoverable by Search Engines to rank better in the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). SEO is a comprehensive activity aimed at improving organic visibility and organic traffic to your website. 

Now, the factors that SEO focuses on are domains of their own. The main factors are keyword optimization, speed optimization, backlinks, meta titles and meta descriptions, image optimization, content quality, and user experience. Each of these factors has to be independently taken care of in a comprehensive SEO strategy. 

Read: What Is SEO in Digital Marketing?

Thus, any activity you undertake that is aimed at increasing the quality of your website can be called SEO. There are many types of SEO (covered below) that focus on different areas and components of your website. In 2024, it is impossible to drive organic traffic to your website without good SEO efforts. 

Why is SEO Benefits?

SEO is important due to a plethora of reasons. The main expectation from SEO is increased visibility and traffic, which means that without proper search engine optimization, achieving sustainable levels of traffic and visibility is not possible. 

The main reasons why SEO is crucial are: 

• Visibility and Branding: As mentioned in the introduction, 92% of all traffic is on the first page of the Google results. This means that if you’re ranked outside of the top 10 for any keyword you’re targeting, nobody is looking at your website. SEO increases visibility and ranks, ensuring that more and more people see your offerings and content, leading to higher visibility. With prolonged high visibility, your brand gets remembered and creates a name for itself in the market. 

• Organic Traffic: SEO is one of the most effective ways to drive organic traffic to a website. What’s more important is that it’s completely free to do (comparatively) as opposed to paid advertising, which brings traffic to your website as long you keep funding the ads. Moreover, paid ads are expensive and require a huge budget. 
  
  On the other hand, SEO is long-term and relatively cheaper (no cost required to do it, the website owner can start by themselves). SEO efforts bring in sustainable and long-term revenue. 

• Cost-Effectiveness: Not only is SEO cheaper, but SEO is generally more cost-effective than paid search advertising as well. Studies show that SEO can be 5.66 times more effective than PPC (Pay-Per-Click) advertising in generating traffic. For businesses that need good traffic to generate inbound leads, SEO is the best option if they cannot afford to squander a lot of money to generate that traffic. 

• User Experience: Good SEO practices improve user experience by making sites easier to navigate and more informative, which can lead to higher engagement and conversion rates. User experience is also crucial to make your consumers spread a positive word about you, similarly, a good user experience makes Google trust you more, ensuring that your rankings keep going up.
  
  Poor user experience can lead to strikes and penalties by search engines, which negatively affect search traffic, and it is very hard to recover from the effects of penalties. 

• Marketing Efforts: A well-optimized site serves to greatly enhance marketing efforts, especially content marketing efforts. By improving visibility and search engines’ trust, you can attract more people to buy, interact with, or support your products, content, or message respectively. 
  
  It is fairly simple. The more eyes you have on you, the more you can attract! 
• Trust and Credibility: SEO, when properly done, ensures that your site remains healthy and keeps bringing in traffic for many many years. This is because once the search engines have trusted you and your content, it becomes easier for you to rank highly. Examples of this can be found on a lot of websites. SEMRush’s and Backlinko’s content around SEO, for example, always outranks other people writing about similar topics. 

SEO Algorithms and How They Work

Search engine algorithms refer to a set of rules and directions that search engines follow in order to discover, evaluate, index, and rank content uploaded to websites. These algorithms analyze various factors on a webpage and across the web to decide which pages are the most relevant and valuable for a particular search query. 

The algorithms decide how the SERPs will look like, hence, all SEO is aimed at acing the algorithmic tests. The main algorithms and activities that are carried out in the ranking process by search engines are: 

Discovery

Discovery is the process of finding the website. Whenever a website/webpage go live, Google sends its crawlers to find that website/webpage. This process is called Discovery of the Website.

Crawling

Crawling refers to the process of crawlers or spiders (search engine bots) scanning your web pages to discover new or updated content. Crawlers mainly follow internal and external links to reach new or updated pages. 

This is why it is recommended to build a comprehensive internal linking structure, and also keep updating old content, as newer crawling cycles will give it a chance to rank once again. 

Indexing 

Once the crawlers have gathered information about any web page, it is stored in the search engine’s index, which is a massive database of all the web pages the search engine knows about. During indexing, the search engine processes the content, taking into account the text, keywords, media, and how fresh or updated the page is.

Indexing makes your web page eligible for being ranked- at all. If there are technical errors on your website and it cannot be indexed properly, it will never appear in search engine result pages. 

Ranking

This is the most important search engine algorithm, comprised of many smaller process-specific algorithms. This is where the ranking of your webpage in the SERPs is determined by search engines like Google. 

There are more than 200 known ranking factors used by Google to rank pages. The main factors are:

• Keywords: How relevant the page’s content is to the user’s search query.
• Backlinks: The quantity and quality of other websites linking to your content. High-quality backlinks act as votes of confidence in your site.
• Content Quality: Engaging, informative, and well-written content is valued highly by search engines.
• User Experience: Factors like site speed, mobile-friendliness, and easy navigation all influence rankings.
• Domain Authority: Websites with established credibility, trust, and expertise rank higher.

4. Updates : Search engine algorithms are not static. They go through periodic updates that result in changes in the importance of ranking factors, and/or the addition or deletion of ranking factors completely. This is why SEO is a dynamic activity that lasts forever since the algorithms and their ranking methodologies keep on changing. 

The main updates that Google’s search engine algorithms have gone through in the recent past are:

• Panda Update: Focused on reducing rankings for low-quality content.
• Penguin Update: Targeted manipulative link-building practices.
• Hummingbird Update: Improved understanding of query context and semantics

With more updates, search engines are getting smarter and smarter regarding the quality of content and its credibility, hence, engaging in shady SEO practices is getting more and more risky. 

What Is SEO Types and Types of SEO?

There are various types of SEO in practice. Each ranking factor used in search engine algorithms (200+ factors) can be a type of SEO altogether. However, the main domains of SEO are still defined by functional areas. 

Thus, based on functional areas, there are three main types of SEO:

1. On-page SEO: On-page SEO refers to the optimization of individual web pages to rank better in the SERPs and provide a good user experience. There are various elements involved in on-page SEO optimization, and you can find the most SEO ranking factors in this type of SEO since individual pages are the ones that end up in the SERPs, not website home pages. 

Various On-page optimizations include:

• Keyword Optimization: Using relevant keywords naturally in your content, titles, and headers. Keyword stuffing should be avoided and long-tail keywords should be used to provide more context. 

• Meta Tags and Meta Description: Crafting effective title tags and meta descriptions that describe your content to search engines and users. Use primary and secondary keywords in the meta descriptions, and make it engaging and actionable. 

• Content Quality: Creating informative, engaging, and high-quality content that addresses users’ needs. Try to include more relevant information than your competition. 

• Internal Linking: Linking to other pages on your website to help both users and search engines navigate your site. Crawlers use these links to discover and index your web pages. 

• URL Structure: Creating clean, descriptive, and keyword-rich URLs. Use short URLs and separate them using dashes. 

• Image Optimization: Using proper file names, alt text, and compression to ensure images help with SEO. Webp format is lightweight and fast-loading. Use keywords in the alt-text to increase SEO quality. 

2. Off-page SEO: Off-page SEO involves the actions you take outside of your website to improve the rankings of its pages. These external signals help boost Google’s trust in your website, and over time build your website’s authority. A higher authority means your blogs rank easier, and your traffic is sustainable. 

Off-page SEO includes:

• Backlinks: Getting links from other reputable websites is known as link building. The more high-quality backlinks a site has, the more credible it appears to search engines, as the links transfer authority and credibility to your site.

• Social Signals: Engagement on social media platforms can indirectly influence SEO by driving traffic and increasing visibility. Social mentions serve similar purposes as backlinks. 

• Brand Mentions: Unlinked brand mentions in news articles, forums, or blogs can also help build authority. The more times search engines come across your name and content, the more chances that you appear credible and trustworthy. 

3. Technical SEO: Technical SEO refers to optimizations made in your website’s architecture, speed, and user experience, the last of which is also an organic ranking factor.

Technical SEO includes: 

• Website Speed: Ensuring your site loads quickly, as slow sites can hurt rankings. They can also drive away users looking for information to faster sites.

• Mobile-Friendliness: Optimizing your site for mobile devices since search engines prioritize mobile-first indexing. The majority of all traffic is from mobile screens, hence, a mobile-first ideology is necessary in today’s era.

• Crawlability: Make sure search engines can easily crawl your site by creating an XML sitemap and submitting it to Google Search Console and ensure there are no broken links or dead ends.

• Secure Website (HTTPS): Ensuring your website uses HTTPS encryption for security, which search engines like Google prioritize.

4. Local SEO: Local SEO is the process of optimizing a business’ listings and local presence in order to attract customers who are near the place of business. It is an extremely important wing of SEO for geographical businesses. 

Local SEO includes: 

• Google My Business (GMB) Optimization: Google My Business is a tool that optimizes your business listing on Google Maps and other search aggregators. It should have your complete profile as a business, including photos as well as customer reviews. 

• Local Keyword Optimization: These keywords include “XYZ near me” or “best XYZ in Austin”, etc. Optimizing for local keywords increases footfall in your stores as people searching for the product you sell land at your shop. 

• Localized Content: Local SEO involves creating a lot of content that is specific to your location, in order to encourage more footfall at stores and to help search engines mark you as a credible supplier of any product in that area. 

5. International SEO: International SEO is the process of optimizing a website to rank well in multiple countries and languages. This is essential for businesses aiming to reach global audiences and expand their online presence internationally.

International SEO includes: 

• Hreflang Tags: Use hreflang tags to indicate the language and regional targeting of your pages. This helps search engines show the right version of your site to users based on their language and location.

• Customization: The user experience, backlinks, and content have to be customized according to the preferences and tastes of the region in which the page will be delivered. Using subdomains with different content rules and country codes can help search engines rank you better. 

6. SaaS SEO: SaaS SEO is the process of optimizing a SaaS (Software as a Service) website to improve its search engine rankings and attract potential customers. This is crucial for SaaS companies to enhance visibility and drive more traffic to their platforms. 
   
   SaaS SEO works the same as normal SEO, just the emphasis on content marketing is much higher. Also, SaaS SEO uses traffic and visibility to attract and convert customers, hence, a lot more copywriting is required. 

7. E-Commerce SEO: eCommerce SEO is the process of optimizing an online store to improve its visibility in search engine results and drive more organic traffic. Effective SEO strategies are crucial for eCommerce sites to attract potential buyers and increase sales.

E-commerce SEO includes:

• Product Page Optimization: Optimize product pages with relevant keywords, detailed descriptions, and high-quality images. Ensure each product page has unique, compelling content that highlights key features and benefits. 

• UGC (User Generated Content): E-commerce SEO includes making use of customer reviews and testimonials as a marketing resource. This can boost credibility more than any other method. 

What Is SEO Analysis and Competitor Analysis?

SEO analysis refers to analyzing various SEO factors of a website in order to make improvements. It includes a thorough review of various factors that affect a website’s performance in search engines. 

Similarly, when an SEO analysis is done on a competitor’s website, it is known as a competitor analysis. The aim is to figure out areas or opportunities where the competitor can be one-upped, and the factors that are working in their favor, in order to try and replicate those. 

SEO Analysis, whether done for your own website or for a competitor’s, is an ongoing strategic activity that is aimed at making improvements to your SEO efforts and making sure that each page and its ranking factors are given adequate attention. 

Key Components of SEO Analysis:

• Keyword Analysis: Review the keywords your site is ranking for, the search volume, and their relevance to your content. Identifying new keyword opportunities. Use more long-tail keywords and LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) to ensure that search engines understand the context of the page. For competitor analysis, understand how they have used the keywords, and use SEO tools to figure out which keywords are bringing in traffic for them.

• On-Page SEO: Assessing elements like title tags, meta descriptions, headers, URL structure, and internal linking to ensure they’re optimized for search engines. In competitor analysis, keep an eye out for navigation ease, meta description quality, image quality and size, etc. 

• Technical SEO: Checking your site’s speed, mobile-friendliness, crawlability, and security (HTTPS), and fixing any errors or broken links. Competitor analysis for technical SEO is really difficult as most of it is proprietary information. 

• Content Evaluation: Analyzing the quality, relevance, and engagement of your content, ensuring it meets the needs of your target audience. Make sure that you are answering questions based on your search terms. Ensure that your information on a topic is fresher and more concise than your competitors’. 

• Backlink Profile: Evaluating the quality and quantity of backlinks to your site. High-quality backlinks from authoritative sites boost rankings. Determine the source of high-traffic links for your competitors and try to get links from those sources.

• User Experience (UX): Looking at factors like page speed, design, and ease of navigation to improve the user experience, which in turn impacts SEO. If your competitor’s website looks and feels better to use, then you need to implement UX upgrades and optimizations. 

• SEO Metrics: Analyzing key metrics such as organic traffic, bounce rate, conversion rate, and time on page to measure SEO performance. These are indicators of overall SEO and business growth. 

What Is SEO Site Audit, and Tools to Audit the Website?

SEO Audit refers to the periodical activity of revisiting all of your SEO factors ( from all types of SEO) to ensure that there is no fault or issue that can cause any problems. If issues that are hindering performance are found, then they are optimized and improved. 

The goal of an SEO audit is to ensure that your website is following the best practices in terms of SEO and that there are no improvements left to be made. SEO audits are a \periodic activity because any of the many SEO factors may change and start causing a dip in visibility or traffic, hence, it is important to periodically check the overall health of your website and the efficacy of your SEO strategy. 

Many tools are available that help- you in checking the overall health of your website, along with any issue in your website’s SEO. Some of these are: 

1. Google Search Console

This is Google’s tool that every website owner has access to. It monitors your website’s presence in Google’s search results. With this tool, you can check your website’s indexing status, search traffic, mobile usability, security issues, and submit sitemaps. It also shows what keywords bring traffic to your site. It is an overall tool that can help you stay on top of your SEO efforts. 

2. Screaming Frog SEO Spider

Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a website crawler that helps identify SEO issues. It crawls your website, just like a search engine, and lists issues in crawlability that the search engine crawlers might face, leading to a drop in rankings. It analyzes metadata, broken links, duplicate content, redirect chains, response codes, and more. With this tool, crawling and indexing can be properly optimized. 

3. SEMrush

SEMrush is a comprehensive SEO suite that provides auditing, keyword tracking, and backlink analysis. It helps you track the performance of your pages, do keyword research, identify backlink opportunities, reduce spam scores, etc. It also provides an on-page SEO checker. With this tool, you can do a comprehensive SEO audit and can also analyze your competitors’ websites. 

4. Ahrefs

Ahrefs is another SEO suite primarily known for backlink analysis. Ahrefs also provides SEO audit features. Its site audit tool checks for over 100 SEO issues, such as redirects, content quality, metadata, internal linking, and speed. It also helps with keyword research and competitor analysis. Its domain rating (DR) score is extensively used in the market to determine domain authority. 

5. Google PageSpeed Insights

This is another one of Google’s tools. It analyzes the page speed and performance of your website on both desktop and mobile and provides actionable insights on how to improve load times, user experience, and overall performance. It is a great tool for identifying and handling technical SEO issues. 

SEO-Based Content Writing

SEO-based content writing refers to creating highly optimized content pieces that are designed to rank highly in the SERPs as well as provide a good user experience. It balances out content that users want to see and interact with, with the content that search engines want to rank. 

The main components of SEO-based content writing are: 

• Content Structure: The difference between normal content writing (essays, or books) vs SEO-based content writing (blogs, landing pages, etc.) is that the latter places a higher focus on easier structures. SEO-based content writing recommends using shorter sentences. Organizing your content with proper headings (H1, H2, H3) and logical flow improves the reader experience and helps search engines understand the context of your content. Similarly, you should use bullets, images, etc. to improve the overall structure and readability. Use shorter paragraphs. 

• On-page SEO: Ensure usage of keywords in meta titles and meta descriptions. Use images with keyword-rich alt texts. Compress images to shorter sizes to ensure faster loading times. Ensure proper internal and external linking. 

• Content Quality: Focus on readability and freshness of content. Keep information concise and supplement it with graphics, bullet points, etc. The easiest way to provide a piece of information is the easiest way. 

• Keyword Research: Research about the keywords in your niche with the most volume and the least keywords. Try to rank on keywords with lower volumes first, as it will start bringing some traffic first, making your name known. 

SEO Copywriting and Content Marketing

SEO Copywriting is the process of writing keyword-optimized copies for ads, banners, landing pages, product descriptions, etc. The main focus is on creating compelling and persuasive headlines and CTAs (Call-To-Action) to encourage users to click, subsequently driving conversions. SEO copywriting is the process of making your conversion-driven content rank and get more and more eyes, to drive more conversions. 

The elements of SEO copywriting are: 

• A clear and compelling call to action.
• A concise description of the product’s features and differentiating factors. 
• Keyword-optimized headlines and CTAs. 
• Persuasiveness and engagement-centric nature. 

On the other hand, SEO Content marketing is the practice of creating long-form SEO-optimized content meant for educating, informing, and building relationships. It is not optimized to drive immediate conversions as in the case of SEO Copywriting. 

Content marketing has formats such as blog posts, guides and tutorials, case studies and whitepapers, infographics and videos, ebooks and checklists, etc. Content marketing is aimed at building long-term relationships and increasing trust and credibility in both the user’s and the search engine’s eyes.

Despite having different goals and methods, SEO copywriting and content marketing are activities that go hand-in-hand, as you need content marketing to create the trust that drives conversions, and you need copywriting to convert that trust into action. 

What Is SEO Strategy? 

An SEO strategy is a comprehensive plan (with both long-term and short-term goals) designed to improve a website’s search engine ranking and increase organic traffic. It combines on-page, off-page, and technical optimization to enhance website visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs). An SEO strategy basically entails how an entity is going to approach SEO. 

Here’s a breakdown of the essential components of an SEO strategy:

• Keyword Research – Understanding what your target audience is searching for is crucial. Keyword research helps you identify the search terms and phrases relevant to your business. Tools like Google Keyword Planner and Ahrefs can help find keywords with high search volume and low competition.
• Content Creation and Optimization – High-quality content is the foundation of SEO. Create engaging, informative content that satisfies user intent. Content should be keyword-optimized but natural, addressing what users are searching for, whether that’s informational, transactional, or navigational queries. Vary content types, like blogs, videos, and infographics, to rank for multiple search terms.
• Title Tags and Meta Descriptions – These help search engines and users understand the content of your page. They should use keywords and communicate the intent of your page clearly. 
• Technical SEO – This ensures search engines can crawl and index your site effectively. Key factors include site speed, mobile optimization, crawlability, etc. 
• Link Building (Off-Page SEO) – Backlinks from authoritative sites signal trust and quality to search engines. Focus on building high-quality backlinks through guest posts, outreach, and creating shareable content.
• User Experience (UX) Optimization – Improving user experience helps reduce bounce rates and increase engagement. Ensure your site loads quickly, is mobile-friendly, and offers clear, intuitive navigation.
• Monitoring and Analytics – Use tools like Google Analytics and Search Console to track performance. Monitor organic traffic, keyword rankings, and user behavior to adjust your SEO efforts.

Steps to Create an SEO Strategy

• Set SEO Goals: Define clear objectives like increasing organic traffic or improving search rankings.
• Conduct a Website Audit: Identify technical and content issues that could affect rankings.
• Research Audience and Keywords: Understand your audience’s needs and search behavior.
• Create and Optimize Content: Build content that addresses user intent and incorporates target keywords.
• Build Backlinks: Focus on earning links from authoritative websites.
• Monitor and Adjust: Regularly review performance and tweak your strategy accordingly. This is crucial for any strategy to work. 

Why SEO Strategy is Important?

A well-rounded SEO strategy improves visibility, drives organic traffic, and enhances the user experience. It’s a cost-effective, long-term approach to staying competitive online and growing your business. SEO traffic is hard to lose once gained, and so is the trust of search engines. A proper SEO strategy can help generate leads in much less cost than paid channels. 

What is SEO Outreach?

SEO outreach is the process of actively reaching out to third parties through emails or other channels, in order to promote your content, build relationships, build links to your website, offer or request content collaboration opportunities, etc. The goal is to build relationships with authoritative websites that will link to your content or collaborate with you,  which in turn signals to search engines that your site is trustworthy and valuable, helping to improve its ranking in search results.

The key aspects of SEO Outreach are: 

• Backlink Building: SEO outreach is primarily focused on acquiring high-quality backlinks from reputable sites. These backlinks act as “votes of confidence” in the eyes of search engines like Google, boosting your domain authority and helping your site rank higher in search results. However, backlinks from toxic and spammy websites hurt organic performance, hence, be careful while doing outreach for links. 

• Content Promotion: Outreach helps promote valuable content such as blog posts, infographics, or videos to external websites. By sharing this content with influencers or industry-specific platforms, you can generate more traffic and engagement. If it is a statistic or piece of information that no one else has, it means you will be shared a lot, which is good for organic performance.

• Guest Posting: One common form of outreach is guest blogging, where you write content for another website in exchange for a backlink. This is a mutually beneficial arrangement that helps you gain exposure while providing valuable content to the host site. Their readers might also like your piece and come back to your site, increasing your reader base. 

• Relationship Building: A successful outreach campaign involves building long-term relationships with bloggers, journalists, and industry experts. This increases the chances of getting repeated exposure and more backlinks over time.

What is SEO for YouTube?

Just like how SEO is the process of optimizing your website and its pages to rank better and bring in more traffic, SEO for YouTube is designed to optimize video posts to bring in more views organically. YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world, and optimizing your content can significantly increase your channel’s visibility, grow your audience, and drive more views.

The main elements involved in optimizing videos to be ranked higher and reach more eyes are:

• Search Query: Start by identifying what your audience is searching for on YouTube. Use tools like Google Trends, or platforms like TubeBuddy and VidIQ to discover relevant keywords. These keywords should be incorporated into your video title, description, and tags. Make videos on currently trending topics to attract views. 

• Video Title Optimization: Your video title should include relevant keywords while being engaging and clickable. The title should clearly describe the content and encourage viewers to click on it. It should indicate entertainment or educational value, while not being too clickbaity, as that creates a negative user experience. 

• Video Description: A well-written video description helps YouTube’s algorithm understand the content of your video. Include your primary keywords naturally in the first 150 characters and provide a detailed explanation of your video. Adding timestamps, links to relevant content, social profiles, products, etc. can enhance user experience. 

• Thumbnails: Custom thumbnails are crucial for attracting clicks. They are the most important part of YouTube SEO in comnbinatin with titles. They should be visually appealing, clear, and representative of the video content. A well-designed thumbnail can improve your click-through rate (CTR), which in turn influences rankings on YouTube.

• Closed Captions and Transcripts: Including closed captions and video transcripts can make your content more accessible and improve SEO. Transcripts help YouTube understand the content better, increasing your chances of appearing in relevant search results.

• Playlists: Organize your videos into playlists to keep users on your channel longer. Playlists can improve watch time, a key ranking factor on YouTube.

What are SEO Metrics?

SEO metrics are the KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) that indicate how well your SEO strategy is working. These represent how well your website and your brand are performing organically. 

The main metrics to track for keeping track of SEO performance are: 

• Organic Traffic: Organic traffic refers to the number of visitors your site has due to organic search results (SERPs). It is usually kept track of monthly. 

• Click-Through Rate: CTR shows how often users click on your site’s link after seeing it in the SERPs. A higher CTR indicates that your title and meta description are engaging and relevant to users’ search queries.

• Bounce Rate: This metric measures the percentage of visitors who leave your site after viewing just one page. A high bounce rate indicates that your content isn’t relevant or engaging enough to keep users on the site and is presenting the wrong picture. 

• Engagement Time: Tihjs represents the time for which an average user stays on your website, if it is too low, your website either has irrelevant content, or canno0t grab attention properly.

• Backlinks: The number of backlinks a site has is directly related to its traffic and authority. Competitive keywords need a lot of links in order to rank those pages. However, the links should be from high-quality and authoritative sources. 

• Domain Authority: Domain authority in SEO is a score given by search engines to websites on the basis of their trust, credibility, traffic, and other factors. It is a direct method of tracking progress. If your DA is increasing, your SEO strategy is working. 

What is SEO Difficulty? 

SEO difficulty is a term used in conjunction with keywords to describe how tough or easy it is to rank for those keywords. SEO tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs give a KD (Keyword Difficulty) score which describes how tough it is to rank for a keyword on a scale of 1 to 100, and they also estimate how many backlinks, if any, will a page need to start ranking and competing with already ranking pages.

Some aspects of SEO difficulty are: 

• Keyword Competition: Popular keywords with high search volume often have more competition from established websites, making them harder to rank for.

• Domain Authority: Websites with higher DA tend to rank better for competitive keywords. 

• Content Quality: High-quality, relevant content with good user engagement can rank even for more competitive terms.

• Backlink Profile: The number and quality of backlinks pointing to your content can help overcome high keyword difficulty.

What is SEO Process and SEO Checklist?

The SEO process refers to everything you need to do to ensure that a page is optimized for search engines properly. It includes a lot of different steps for each type of SEO. The main aim of these activities and creating a checklist is to ensure that all pages go through a comprehensive SEO check so that they have the best chances of ranking. 

SEO Checklist and Common SEO Techniques for Best Results

1. Keyword Optimization

• Title Tag: Include the primary keyword and keep it under 60 characters.
• Meta Description: Write a compelling meta description with the primary keyword and secondary keywords and keep it under 160 characters.
• URL Structure: Use short, descriptive URLs with the primary keyword. Separate the words using dashes. 

2. Header Tags

• H1 Tag: Use one H1 tag for the main heading, incorporating the primary keyword. Make it compelling.
• H2/H3 Tags: Use H2 and H3 tags for subheadings, including secondary keywords where relevant. Ask a user query as the heading in H2s or H3s and provide its answer. 

3. Content Quality

• Keyword Placement: Naturally include primary and secondary keywords in the content, avoiding keyword stuffing. Use long tail keywords and Latent Semantic Indexing keywords to enrich context. 
• Readability: Ensure the content is easy to read with short paragraphs, bullet points, and clear headings.

4. Image Optimization

• Alt Tags: Add descriptive alt tags to images, incorporating relevant keywords. Alt text is how search engines see images. 
• File Names: Use descriptive, keyword-rich file names for images. Add captions for more context. 

5. Internal Linking

• Link to Relevant Pages: Include internal links to other relevant pages on your site to improve navigation and crawlability. 

6. Technical SEO 

• Responsive Design: Ensure your site is mobile-friendly and provides a good user experience on all devices. Include a lot of engagement-worthy elements such as images, polls, scroll bars, CTAs, etc. 
• Load Time: Optimize images, use caching, and minimize code to ensure fast page loading times (aim for under 3 seconds).
• Clear Navigation: Ensure easy-to-use navigation with a clean layout and accessible menus.

SEO Challenges: SEO Poisoning and Other Threats

SEO poisoning is a form of cyber-attack that is intended to manipulate search engine rankings and promote harmful sites where frauds and scams may happen with people who click on the links. 

Common forms of SEO poisoning

• Keyword Stuffing – Cybercriminals may stuff malicious keywords into website content or meta tags to manipulate search rankings and trick users into visiting their sites which are designed to extract personal information, payment information, etc. 
• Malicious Backlinks – Attackers may build spammy or low-quality backlinks to your site or their own, which can harm your site’s authority and rankings. A large volume of negative and toxic links pointing to you hurts your website’s credibility by a huge magnitude. 
• Phishing Sites – Malicious actors may create fake or phishing sites and then optimize them to rank highly in search results for popular keywords, deceiving users into providing personal information, payment information, etc. A lot of blackmailing scams have been caught behind these phishing websites. 

• Algorithm Updates  – Another major SEO update is algorithm updates. Search engines like Google frequently update their algorithms, which can impact your site’s rankings. Keeping up with these changes and adjusting your SEO strategy accordingly is crucial.
  
  The factors that the search engines prefer to rank keep changing, so your sight might experience a traffic dip without any direct mistakes because of an algorithmic update. 

Conclusion

As you can clearly guess from this guide, SEO is a highly dynamic activity that is its entire domain. There are a lot of techniques in SEO, and by the time you are done mastering one, several others pop up. However, in the digital marketing career, it is very important to have a storing base of SEO proficiency. 

At Mohit’s SEO Training, we provide an exhaustive hands-on SEO course to make you job-ready. Rather than focusing on the theory, we ensure teaching you the practical applications of SEO.  Along with the Advanced SEO Training in Bangalore, we are an Organic SEO Consulting Company as well. If you are looking for a full proof SEO Strategy for your business, do contact us.

FAQs

What is SEO in basic terms?

SEO is the act of making improvements in a website’s content, structure, and technical components, in order to make it rank better in the search engine results, and drive more traffic. 

What is SEO in one word?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is the optimization of webpages and websites in order to gain more search traffic on them.

What is an example of SEO?

Using keywords in the headings and meta descriptions is an example of SEO. If search engines and users can grasp the context of your page, it will rank better naturally. 

What is the main purpose of SEO?

The main purpose of SEO is to increase organic traffic and organic visibility of a website. More traffic leads to more inbound leads, higher trust, more conversions, etc. 

What is the SEO role?

In digital marketing, the SEO role is the person responsible for optimizing website factors to bring in more traffic. They might also be tasked with creating SEO-backed content, or simply to make content created by someone else to rank better. 

How does SEO work?

Search engines have 200+ factors on the basis of which they decide to rank web pages. SEO aims to make your website the best possible option on each of those 200+ factors, leading to an improvement in your organic traffic and credibility. 

How to do simple SEO?

A simple SEO journey can be started by taking SEO courses, watching SEO-related content, and analyzing already ranking webpages and assessing the reasons behind their ranks such as optimized meta descriptions, alt text for images, etc.