Beginners Guide to SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

As you are interested in our beginner’s guide to SEO (Search Engine Optimization), we take pride in sharing the basics of SEO starting with seo definition to how it works and will conclude with some popular SEO tools used by digital marketing experts. Let’s begin with the definition of SEO.

What is SEO (Search Engine Optimization)?

As the word “Search Engine Optimization” itself says optimizing for search engines. To elaborate it further, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a set of activities performed in respect of the website so that your website could appear in search results of the search engines like Google and Bing. And, the ultimate goal of SEO is to improve the website rank on search results. And for this ultimate SEO goal, there are few most popular business goals, an SEO expert works for the business website. These business goals are:

• Improve website rank on Google/Bing
• Increase website traffic organically
• Creating lead funnel to attract more customers
• Ecommerce SEO to increase product sales
• Local SEO to spread awareness in nearby areas
• Increase customer visits and retention time on website
• Strengthen domain authority and page rank
• Improve customer experience, reducing customer service calls
• For brand building and enhance credibility

These goals may vary depending on the website type, business needs, nature of business and the area of business operations e.g. local business, multi-cultural business, online business, offline business, etc.

SEO and Digital Marketing

Search Engine Optimization is a digital marketing activity or you may say a digital marketing strategy that focuses on organic ways of generating website traffic, increasing sales and in technical terms most importantly improving the rank in SERP.

SERP stands for Search Engine Results Pages. It is basically a list of search results that appear on any search engine like Google or Bing as a response to the user's search. The word(s) used here for search are called Keywords.

Keywords & Keyword Research:

Keywords hold a great importance in search engine optimization. It is the basic prerequisite to start SEO practice. An SEO expert performs the keyword research activity before starting with the digital marketing activities and takes the decision considering all the factors that include type of website, nature of business, business goals and area of business operations.

Keyword Research is a process of identifying search terms against which the website should appear in the search results. These keywords usually are of 2 words (considered as a primary keyword) with few short keywords and long-tail keywords.

Long-tail keywords are picked so that users who are searching for different queries land on your website ultimately, which increases the probability of getting more organic traffic and new sales leads.

Do check out the link below for our ultimate guide on how to do keyword research in SEO.

How to do keyword research in SEO?

How does SEO work?

Today, due to vast usage of internet and handful of devices available to people, finding any new information online is just a few clicks away. And, with introduction of voice search, map search, nearby search (local search), image search, video platforms, etc. the need of SEO has become unavoidable for small businesses. So, if you don't know how does SEO works then you might be missing a critical factor in the growth of your business. And, as an SEO professional, you should understand all the technicalities of the SEO and how does it works. You should have clear & in-depth understanding of the all the 3 types of SEO:

• On-Page SEO
• Off-Page SEO
• Technical SEO

To understand the meaning of on-page SEO, off-page SEO and technical SEO, do check out our blog:

Difference between On-Page SEO, Off-Page SEO and Technical SEO

Let us now understand how does SEO works.

How does SEO and Search Engines work?

Search Engine is a bot that crawls through all the URLs available to it. And, which website or particular page of the website should come on which rank that varies depending on various factors. These factors determine the most useful content that a user might love to read as per the bots of search engines. Here, website content and how it has been represented plays an important role but there are a list of digital marketing activities which an SEO expert does to improvise the page rank of the website in SERP.

Most importantly, for any website to appear in search engines, this website should be crawlable and indexable.

What is Crawling in SEO?

Crawling, in simple words is reading of a website by the search engine bots. These bots are called crawlers or spiders. Just like an spider, a search engine bot crawls throughout the website and the links available in it. This way, it prepares a list of URLs and adds them with content as a cache to its database. It helps Google and other search engines find the most relevant content for the end user.

What is Indexing in SEO?

Indexing, on the other hand is a process where these search engines rank or you may say organise these list of URLs to respond on the user search queries. It helps search engines to respond fast on keywords. That's why, keyword research is a most important and foremost step in search engine optimization.

Best SEO Tools for Reporting & SEO Auditing

There are some plenty of useful SEO tools used by SEO experts for keyword research, reporting and auditing the website. Here is a list of few:

• Google Search Console
• Bing Webmaster
• Moz
• SEMRush
• Ahrefs
• Google Trends
• Google Analytics
• KWFinder
• GTMetrics
• Woorank
• ContentKing
• Answer the Public
• Google Ads Keyword Planner
• Yoast SEO
• GrowthBar
• SEO Quake
  and many more..

If you want to know more about these SEO tools, visit our blog on best SEO tools and blog resources.