It is a
process of improving the structure and content of your site and doing
promotional activities to increase the traffic, and thus ranking on search
engine result pages.
SEO
is further divided into two parts: On-Page SEO and Off-Page SEO
It refers
to all the measures or methods used by website owners within their websites to
increase the traffic and ranking of a website on search engine result pages.
Within the website means you deal with such elements of SEO that are in your
control, such as meta tags, technical tags, content quality, etc. So, there
should not be any delay in resolving on page SEO issues to maintain and improve
the ranking.
Some of the important On-Page SEO
factors are as follows:
1) Meta Tags: Meta Tags are HTML tags that
contain meta data and provide information about the content of a webpage. They
tell what the page is about when it was updated, and who has created it. This
information is very important in terms of SEO as it helps search engine
crawlers understand and index the page.
These tags
are placed inside the head section of a HTML page, e.g., <head> meta
tag</head>. The users who visit your site can't see these tags, but the
search engine can see them for indexing and deciding the ranking of your site.
There
are mainly three types of meta tags:
2) Page Length: The search engine prefers long
pages to rank higher than short pages. It knows that users do not get satisfied
with basic information. Instead, they expect a full explanation
3) Outbound Links: You can give links of other
sites on your page that provide similar information. It may act as a trust
factor for Google.
4) Internal Links: Interlinks your popular
pages to new pages so that traffic from one page may be diverted to other
pages.
5) Canonical Tag: This tag is used to prevent
the duplicate issues that arise when you have two URLs with similar content. It
tells Google that two or more pages with similar content are equivalent to one
another and belong to the original page.
6) Image Optimization: Image is required to be
optimized using alt text, description, etc. Additionally, instead of naming
your image as "image1.jpg' use descriptive filenames, for example,
'boy-playing-in-the-park.jpg.'
7) Sitemap: A sitemap is created for a
site. It helps search engines in indexing pages of your site.
8) Content: The content of your pages
should be unique, relevant, and the latest and should be related to highly
searched topics, keywords, etc.
9) URL Optimization: Keep your URL less than 255
characters, and use hyphens '-' to separate different parts of the URL. Additionally,
it should be short, descriptive, and contain your main keywords. For example,
www.javatpoint.com/smo-tutorial -for-beginners. Also, optimize the structure of
URL by making categories that help search engines and users to find the content
with ease. For example, Homepage>Social Media>Facebook>Post
10) Mobile Friendliness: Around 60% searches in
Google are made through mobile phones and other such devices. So, make sure
your website is mobile-friendly.
Although
Off-page optimization has the same objective of increasing traffic, it is
different from On-page optimization. In On-Page SEO, we deal with the factors
that are in our control, i.e., within the website, but in Off-page SEO, the
measures are taken outside the site, which is not in the control of a website
owner such as blog submission, article submission, forum posting, etc.
Some of the important Off-Page SEO
factors are as follows:
Off-Page SEO techniques mainly deal with
increasing the links to a site which is called Link popularity. These links can
be internal or external. The internal links come from your own webpages, and
external links come from other websites or webpages. High link popularity
indicates that you have more connections to your site, which is a plus for SEO.
Some important off page SEO techniques to increase link popularity are as
follows:
1) Influencer Outreach: If your content is unique, relevant,
and the latest, you should share it with influencers in your industry.
2) Guest Posting: There are many authors or
blogs that allow you to submit your post or content as a guest post on their
sites. If you have written quality content, you can post it there to get
backlinks from them.
3) Social Bookmark Submission: There are many social
bookmark submission sites where you can upload your webpage or blog post
containing a link to your site to drive traffic to your site.
4) Forum Submission: In this method, you
participate in forums related to your business, websites. Here, you can reply
to threads, answer questions and queries, and provide feedback and suggestions.
For better results use, "Do-Follow" forums.
5) Directory Submission: Here, you can submit your
pages in directories to build backlinks. You should choose relevant directories
and categories.
6) Article Submission: There are also many article submissions
sites where you can submit articles, again choose relevant categories to submit
articles.
7) Video Submission: You can create videos with
proper title, description, tags, and reference links and submit them to video
submission sites to get backlinks.
8) Image Submission: You can share your images in
various image submission sites. But, don't forget to optimize your images with
the relevant title tag, URL, alt tag, description, etc
9) Infographics submission: Infographic is a visual
representation of information or data such as graphs, charts, etc. You can
submit it to infographic submission sites with links to your website.
10) Web2.0 Submission: This off page SEO technique
allows you to create a subdomain in high domain authority websites, such as
blogger, WordPress, medium, and more.