Search Engine Optimization has become a popular topic in today’s world that brings organic traffic to your website. All small or large businesses apply this marketing strategy to grow their businesses online. Even SEO technique is important at a personal level. Before using it, we must know why is SEO important for us.
Table of Contents
In this article, we will discuss what Search Engine Optimization is, how it works, the types and why SEO is important, the difference between white and black hat SEO, the importance of SEO in-house, and how you can do it through an agency.
What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
SEO strategy is a set of practices designed to improve the positioning and appearance of blogs, websites, videos, and other content in organic search results that can help to bring quality traffic to your website. It is related to the modifications you do according to searchers’ intent and search engine algorithms.
Through this strategy, we, generally, look for the trending keywords and place them correctly into content, giving appropriate titles to each page, using optimized images with alts texts, building internal as well as external links, improving user experience and interface, and apply some mandatory technical changes to enhance the quality of online content.
In addition, SEO can be introduced simply as optimizing and improving a piece of online content to increase its visibility in Google, Bing, and other search engines. It only requires a good strategy to improve the quality of content to get traffic.
Related: How to Optimize an Image for SEO?
Why is SEO Important?
There are several benefits of search engine optimization. You can use this to grow the ranking of your online content on various search engines. Let’s know why SEO for business should be a priority.
Benefits of search engine optimization:
- It targets quality traffic and is an inbound marketing strategy.
- Search engine optimization also helps to generate impressive ROI (Return On investments).
- It helps in bringing organic traffic to your website without paying.
- Search Engine Optimization gets more clicks than PPC through PPC ads appearing above organic rankings.
- It also helps improve and increase PR (Public Relationship, also considered as credibility & trust).
- One best thing is that it provides 24*7 promotions which makes this better than offline marketing.
How does Search Engine Optimization Work?
Google, Bing, and other search engines use relatively complex processes (algorithms) to organize and rank online content.
Before using SEO on our digital content, we should know the 3 stages that all search engines follow:
1. Crawling: Google and other search engines use crawlers (also called bots and spiders) to scan websites and gather information about all the content on the internet. Using a web page, these bots follow both internal and external links from one page to another.
2. Indexing: The URLs discovered by the spiders are analyzed by search engines. Then, according to their algorithms the videos, images, blogs, and webpages are processed, stored, and then indexed.
3. Serving: Once search engines have assessed URLs, it shows the results rank-wise according to the user’s demand and the relevancy of the content in their search results.
Search Engine Optimization brings conversions, gets more leads, and encourages sales if understood and applied effectively.
Related: Grow LinkedIn Business Page
Types of Search Engine Optimization
Basically there are 3 types of SEO marketing and they are as follows:
1. Technical SEO
It refers to the tactics involved in website as well as server optimization that help search engines crawl and index your content more effectively. Hence, this leads to an improvement in organic ranking.
Technical SEO includes implementing SSL, mobile-friendliness of web pages, keeping the speed of the site up by using CDNs, optimizing CSS/Js and Images, creating an XML sitemap, registering a site with Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, fixing duplicate content issues, enabling AMP, adding structured data markup to your website and so on.
Some useful tools for technical SEO:
| Website Grader by HubSpot | Google Webmaster Tools |
| Screaming Frog | Google’s PageSpeed Insights |
| GTMetrix | Google’s Mobile-Friendly Testing Tool |
| Siteliner |
2. On-Page SEO
This includes the changes you make directly on the web pages. So, it means utilizing high-quality keyword selection, putting keywords into the correct places (Keyword placement), giving appropriate titles for every page, using proper heading tags, internal links, image alt, URL optimization, user experience, HTML code structure, etc.
In this technique, we use internal as well as external linking. The most important part of on-page SEO is making sure your content is relevant and awesome.
Some useful tools for on-page SEO:
- SEOCrawler
- Ahrefs’ Keyword Explorer
- Copyscape
- Screaming Frog SEO Spider
- Google Developers PageSpeed Insight
3. Off-Page SEO
This includes the changes you don’t directly make on any online content. It is also considered “behind-the-scenes Search Engine Optimization”.
Off-page search engine optimization includes link building, brand building, content marketing, influencer marketing, social media optimization, and marketing, increasing link popularity, directory listing, link exchange, podcasts, reviews, PR (Public Relations), guest posting, and so on.
| Direct Linking is used in this kind of technique. | Check my links |
| It helps build a website’s recognition and domain authority | Web Archive |
| Some useful tools for Off-Page SEO: | Talkwalker Alerts |
| Backlink explorers: Ahrefs, Majestic & Moz’s Link Explorer | Linkclump |
It wouldn’t be much to say “SEO not only optimizes your content but also your website’s future too”.
Related: Tips for Meta Tags Optimization and Their Importance in SEO
White Hat Versus Black Hat SEO – Which is Better?
White hat SEO refers to the relevant, correct, and ethical way to optimize a piece of online content.
Unlike white hat, black hat SEO refers to the invalid, irrelevant, and unethical way to optimize online content to make the content viral asap.
However, to give you a more concrete idea of the differences between the two tactics, let me share a different ring.
| White Hat SEO | Black Hat SEO |
| This type of SEO follows the correct, relevant, and ethical way to optimize a site. | It violates almost all guidelines formed by the search engines. |
| The main purpose of white hat SEO is to focus on a human audience. It uses well-labeled images, relevant links, and references, complete sentences with good spelling and grammar,standards-compliant HTML, unique and relevant page titles, etc. | Whereas, the purpose of the black hat SEO is to reach the audience swiftly by using manipulative tactics. It uses invisible text, stuffed keywords, cloaking the user to another site, links from sites with irrelevant content, etc. |
| White Hat SEO is a “Long-Term” approach. | Black Hat SEO relies on “Quick Wins”. |
| It has a bright future for your digital content (websites, blogs, videos, podcasts, etc.). | Just like its name, it will blacken (ruin) your content in the future for sure. |
Should Search Engine Optimization Be Done in-House or Through an SEO Agency?
It has its importance in both ways, you just need to use the best relevant ways accordingly. The matter is to understand the different strategies used in them.
How to do SEO in-house?
Making this simple, let’s see the most important step-by-step tasks that need to be followed while not getting help from any agency:
- Publish relevant and authoritative content and optimize the content with trending keywords from free and best SEO Tools related to your title as well as content.
- Set up a schedule to update your content regularly.
- Use metadata (title, descriptive, and keyword) according to your digital content.
- Have a link-worthy site by linking your website with other online content that is content-rich, authoritative, unbiased, and assists visitors related to their interests.
- Additionally, describe the text, image, video, and any other content using alt tags (alternative text) and improve your reach.
How to Do SEO Through an Agency?
A Search Engine Optimization agency focuses on certain factors including on-page, off-page, and technical SEO, keyword research, link building, content creation, competitor research, and prevention from black hat SEO.
Well, knowing about the importance of SEO through an Agency is not enough, you need to take care of certain important factors about the company before you jump to join that. The factors can list as:
- Review the history of the agency.
- Their SEO processes through their previous works.
- Know the transparency of their success stories.
- Ask about some sample reporting they send out to their clients.
- Their time commitment.
- Link-building they do.
- Last but not least, ask if you can directly contact an SEO expert who will work on your content.
How Much Does SEO Service Cost With SEO Agency?
If we talk about reputed agencies in India, they typically charge between $250 and $300 a month for a small-scale business (Local Business) and around $3000 a month for brands depending on niche audience nationwide. Moreover, going with an hourly range can be between $50 and $150 according to the expertise level.
Initially, you can set the budget for 6 months with the agencies, it works, and you will continue. Before setting up the budget with any agency, do proper research about them as we discussed in the previous section.
In addition, if we talk about reputed agencies in India, they typically charge between a month for a small-scale business (Local Business) and around a month for brands depending on niche audience nationwide. Going with an hourly range can be between $75 and $ 225 according to the expertise level.
Related: How to make money online at home
Conclusion
No brand or even a person can think of climbing up the digital marketing ladder by skipping the step of SEO. To get fame and an audience for your online content for both personal and professional profiles, learning the SEO fundamentals is mandatory. Hence, even if you are going to do that yourself or through any reputed agency, the skills never betray you.
Moreover, this will help to make an online presence and enhance your audience at a basic and personal level. So, you can start by using online free courses and tools to improve your SEO knowledge, online presence, and audience reach.
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