WHAT IS SEO/ SEO FOR BEGINNERS/ INTRODUCTION TO SEO

INTRO

If you have been in business for a while or make use of the internet to sell your product or services in any way, most especially if you have a website that serves as a portfolio for the display of your product or services, then u must have heard a billion and one times than you need SEO to boost or increase the amount of traffic to to your website, product page or landing page.

If thats you, and you are willing to know more about what seo is, its importance and benefits, how you can apply it to boost your web traffic , then, stay with me till the end of this video because I’ll be explaining what seo is, its importance and tips you can implement fast to get ahead of your competitors.

Hi! My name is muheeb sulaiman, i template based web designer, a digital marketer and the founder of correct marketer NG, a digital marketing agency where we proffer and provide digital marketing solutions to businesses in Nigeria

BRIEF HISTORY OF THE INTERNET

Let’s get right to the subject matter. For us to underdstand the foundational idea and guiding mantra of SEO, we need to go way back to the beginning and give a brief purview of how the World Wide Web and and internet publication came into existence.

January 1st 1983 is considered the beginning of the internet. The time when the standard communication protocol of computers came into public use. This protocol is popularly known as the TCP (transfer control protocol) or the IP (internet protocol). The internet was initially created to help and enable US government agencies search and transfer informations safely without a third party interference. I wouldn’t want o go deep into the history and politics behind the history and build ups to the origin of the internet, so ill just make it brief. The key note hear is that, the internet came into existence with the purpose of helping and easing the creation, transfer and distribute information.

Then in, in the early 1990s we had the first search engine  popularly known as Aliweb. Between the years of 1990 to 1998, there were series of search engines that existed. They all tried to fix issues around search generally, relevance and speed. But they all couldn’t until the creation of google in 1998. For the record ill be focusing on google. Not just because its the worlds most used search engine but because over the past couple of years, they have developed into a company that focus more on searchers satisfaction and providing users with the most relevant result that match user’s query and intent.

Speeking of intent…Have you ever wondered about the technicalities of how google provides your with information after typing some strings of keywords and hitting the search button? Let me give a brief explanation.

HOW SEARCH ENGINES WORK

For us to have a better appreciation of how search engines work, we need to understand the three but important stages of how they keep the record of web pages that they are permitted to show in result pages as result for search queries.

1 crawling

2 indexing

3 ranking

1- Google makes use of an internet tool which is know as a spider, crawler or a bot. The function of this bot is to follow links on the web or internet to search for website content to store in the index. These bots don’t stop as their sole responsibility is to search for the fresh and lastest contents on the web on a web page.

2- Indexing is the second part of the process. An index is a gigantic but organized list of results, contents and web pages found by the bot. The search engines uses the index as a source for the information it displays on the result pages. But not everything the bot finds while crawling makes it onto a search engines index. An index can be well likened to a bookshelf in the library that stores the book you would want to read.

3- With that been said the last but not the list is ranking. Ranking is a way of measuring the importance of webpages in relevance to the search phrase. This has to do more with what factors they consider while matching a search query with the results they display. Even though the process that goes into what search engines do specifically to determine what result to show and in what order is top top secret, google continually update web content publishers and developers with its best practices and principles that enables web pages to get more impression in searches.

There are over 200 factors considered by google when raking the search results and this will bring us to the main subject matter what is SEO.

WHAT IS SEO

SEO simply stands for search engine optimization and in the most simplest form, its a practice of making a website or web page get found and ranked in search engines result pages for a particular key word or key phrases. The process of implementing the practice is divided into two. We have on page or onsite seo and we have off page seo.

ONPAGE SEO

On page seo involves the alignment of a page specific elements like title tags, headings, contents, length of content, relevance of the content on the page, the amount of times users spend on a page, site speed, freshness of the content and internal links with relevant keywords

OFFPAGE

while off page seo refers to all measures that can be taken outside the actual website in order to improve its position in search rankings. These measures may include but not limited the amount of quality backlinks or incoming links from other authoritative websites, social shares and domain rating etc.

IMPORTANCE OF SEO

Okay why then is search engine optimization important. Research shows that when a searcher searches the internet for a product, service or general information, users are more likely to choose one of the top five suggestions that appears in the result page. SEO helps you rank higher in search result and gives more online visibility, giving you the opportunity of winning the web traffic (visitor) and converting these visitors in to customers depending on what is important.

Secondly SEO create authority and trust in the minds of your searchers because your website is ranking for relevant key words. This shows that your url, website or web page has the best content that answers the searchers query.

Also SEO is free traffic. What do I mean? In the definition of seo, we said its a practice of making a web page or a website rank for some certain keywords right? Great! Because you have determined the keywords your searchers or customers are using to find your business online, you are able to position your website in a way that it shows and ranks whenever a searcher or customer is searching for your product business or service. This is why visitors or traffic form seo is often referred to as organic traffic because you don’t have to pay. Though the process of implementing SEO isn’t always free.

Conversion., a well optimized website gives you the opportunity to increase the conversion  rate of your website visitors while minimizing the need, relevance and cost of paid traffic or paid media generally.

SEO is quantifiable and measurable. It’s easy to detect what’s working and what’s not. It’s easy to make adjustment based on what works well or better for your audience or customers and business at large.

SOME SEO TIPS

The question now is… what are those things you need to implement on a website or web page to enable it rank for specific or relevant keywords or key phrases on search engine result pages. Well, i won’t be able to go through all the factors google consider to determine its ranking but ill go through some of the most significant and important factors.

1. Security- google latest algorithm update focused more on the security of a website. This is because a secure website indicates and suggests that the website is abiding by the internet user guided principles, data protection and privacy.
2. Crawlability – for search engines like google to index a web page, it must first be crawled. There are several ways to get a website seen and crawled by search engine bot. One of the way to do that is to have an external website link to your domain URL. Remember the analogy of the spider and the web i gave in the beginning, having a website link to your website gives the bot the opportunity to know that ur website or url and the content on the pages of your website exists. Secondly you can submit a something called a site map to google. A site map is basically the skeletal structure of the url of your website. This help google to properly crawl your website. Note that crawling doesn’t guarantee indexing as there are factors that goes into weather or not a webpage can be indexed.
3. Mobile friendliness – research shows that More than half of the people worldwide access the internet using mobile devices, while only 49% do so via desktops. The percentage is up by 2% compared to 2020. Africa had the highest mobile usage with 70%, Asia came second with 63% and Europe third with 51%. With this, it has become not just necessary to optimize web pages for mobile friendliness but imperative to increase conversion.
4. Page speed – page load speed is a significant ranking factor tha contributes to the general user experience on a web page. A resent servey by correct marketer NG shows that, a we page with a low or poor page load speed tend to have about 80% bounce rate (the total percentage of the amount of time searchers leave a web page or website without taking further action). A high bounce rate send a negative signal to google indicating dissatisfaction of the searcher on the web page and the lack of ability to meet the searchers needs. This may reduce a web page ranking drastically. It is important to pay attention to the speed of your website on all devices.
5. User experience – this isn’t really a ranking factor but dwell time is…or the amount of time spent on page. A website or webpage with great user experience or engagement has the opportunity of having its visitors spend more time on the page and that send a signal to google that the information on the page is helpful to the visitor. That can make google push your page up the SERPs.

1. High quality content
2. Optimized content
3. Right target keywords
4. Quality backlinks
5. Domain age and authority

CONCLUSION

With this, we have come to the end of this video, i wish i can continue but ill post more relevant content on seo and general marketing tips to help grow your business online. If you find this information help pls like and share and if you are on YouTube, do not forget to smash the subscription button and hit the notification bell so you get notified when even i post videos like this . Peace