An Easy-To-Understand SEO Basics For Beginners

SEO is one of the important elements that you need to incorporate into your blog/website to be able to reach your audience and garner some online traffic. If you don't apply SEO and make your blog/website indexed on the search engine, no one will know about your existence.
Before we dive into the topic, imagine this -
You have started a blog with an attractive theme, written beautifully-crafted articles, added eye-catching images and graphics.
Everything is great on your website! But, when you go through your blog analytics, you find out that there are no likes, no comments, no clicks, and no traffic from your audience.
How did you feel? Disappointed, right? But, worry not. This is where SEO comes into play.
SEO is one of the important elements that you need to incorporate into your blog/website to be able to reach your audience and garner some online traffic. If you don't apply SEO and make your blog/website indexed on the search engine, no one will know about your existence.
In this article, you will get to know about the basics of SEO  in the easiest way possible.
WHAT DOES SEO STAND FOR:
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is basically a process of optimizing your overall website on the basis of certain factors to make it rank higher on the search engines. By investing time and efforts in SEO, you can make your piece of content rank on the first page of Google that will help your site get more organic traffic.
Now, some of you may counter and wonder why do you need SEO when you are getting enough traffic from your social media. The answer to this question is that by investing in SEO, you will help your website achieve the trust of the search engines and the audience.
People tend to trust the businesses that can rank on the first page of the Search Engine Results Page (SERPs). Yes, you might get a lot of traffic from your social media profiles, but it is only SEO that can help you achieve a place on the first page of the SERPs.
TYPES OF SEO:
SEO practices are seperated into two sub-categories - On-Page SEO and OFF-Page SEO
1. ON-PAGE SEO:
It involves all the SEO practices that you conduct on your website to make it more search-engine friendly. You have full control over on-page SEO and it is up to you how you want to tweak your website to catch the attention of the search engine.
On-page SEO involves:
Content Quality: The first and the most important thing to remember regarding the content that you post on your website is that it should be a hundred percent unique and authentic. Make sure to cover multiple sub-topics in your articles. Internally link each of your article to provide more information to your readers - the more the quality, the more the social share, nor the time spent on reading, and eventually higher organic rankings.
SEO Title: Your title, headings are the first thing that catches the attention of the visitor. Make sure to keep it interesting, specific and crisp. Do not forget to add your SEO keywords in the title. For better search engine visibility, try to keep your headings under 60 characters.
Image Optimization: Only text-no graphics are boring! No one wants to read huge piles of textual content. Try to add relevant images and videos, infographics, graphs, etc. Describe every image in your article using the proper name and ALT text.
Internal and External Links: A good SEO strategy includes proper internal and external links. The links that point to other articles or content on your website are called internal links. You should at minimum 3-4 internal links in each article. The main reason behind internal linking is to make people stay on your website for a longer time. Similarly, links that point to other websites or blogs are known as external links. Depending on the article, you should add a minimum of 3-4 external links in your article.
Website Load Speed and User Experience: These two form the most important elements of a website’s SEO. No matter in what way you optimize your website’s content, if your website’s page takes more than 4 seconds to load, your visitor will leave the website, and this is bad for SEO. Aim at having a website that loads in less than 3 seconds, without any pop-ups, extra-large images or ads.
2. OFF-PAGE SEO:
It refers to those SEO practices that are not conducted on the website. The two important elements of off-page SEO are-
1. Backlinks: A backlink refers to the link your website will earn when another website or web page on the internet links to you. Backlinks from the most important SEO strategy because it works like a voting system, i.e. other website owners are telling Google that your website is good and informative.
Also, if the website giving you a backlink is itself a bigger website, the vote holds more weight as compared to the new websites that hold lesser weight.  Therefore, your goal should receive backlinks from bigger websites in your niche.
2. Social Shares: Social media is important and there is no denying it. When your articles or other piece of content gets a good amount of share and engage with social media, it sends a positive signal to the search engine.
IMPORTANCE OF SEO KEYWORDS:
In simple terms, SEO keywords are the queries that the user searches for on the search engine. By using those exact queries in your articles and blogs, you increase your chances of getting the attention of that user.
For example-
Suppose you run a website in the “bakery” segment, you would want to get higher ranks for queries like-
· Bakery near me
· Affordable Chocolate truffle cakes
· Fresh baked breads near me
The above listed are all SEO keywords that the users are using to search for someone like you.
TYPES OF SEO KEYWORDS:
Before understanding the types of SEO keywords, understanding user's search intent should the first step. Once you complete the first step, the next step is to research relevant keywords.
There are three types of keywords that you should target-
1. SHORT KEYWORDS: These are the words that are just 2-3 words long. They are highly generalized keywords and are not specific, they have large monthly search volumes. These keywords are difficult to compete against as big brands are already ranking high for these words.
For example, Best cakes in Delhi
For a beginner site, it will be rather tough to rank for this keyword as several other bigger brands must be already ranking high for this query.
2. LONG-TAIL KEYWORDS: These are the keywords that are usually more than 2-3 words long. These have lesser search volume and are highly specific. These keywords are relatively easier to rank for. By writing a quality article around your targeted long-tail keyword, you get a better chance to outrank the bigger brands for the query.
For example, Best Chocolate Truffle Cakes Near Me
The search volume comparatively will be less for the above keyword, but the chances of getting ranked for it will be higher than the short keywords.
3. LSI KEYWORDS: LSI stands for Latent Semantic Indexing. These are the terms or phrases that are similar to the main keyword. They play an important role in helping Google understand what the page is all about.
Because it is a bad SEO practice to use too many keywords (keyword stuffing), you can make use of LSI keywords here and there in your content body to make sure that it is for the search engines to recognize the website.
KEY TAKEAWAYS:
Be it a blog or a fully-fledged website, if you want to survive the growing online competition and achieve higher ranks on the Search Engine Result Pages, not using SEO is not an option. SEO forms the most important aspect of every digital marketing campaign and is an essential element for receiving higher online traffic.
By investing good efforts and money in receiving professional SEO services from a good SEO company in Delhi, you stand a better chance at achieving higher rankings in the SERPs.