SEO – means Search engine optimization, the process adopted by SEO experts to get the website ranked in search engines especially in Google (dominates the biggest market share) to increase the visibility of the brand in search engines. Getting the website ranked higher in search engines means more and more people will come to the website and in turns increase the user base. If you really want to learn SEO in detail from a beginner’s guide to an advanced level covering all aspects like Technical SEO, News SEO, Mobile SEO, Video SEO, Image Optimization tips etc. in addition to off-page and on-page SEO aspects, you are at the right place. Here we have covered each and every topic in detail chapter-wise with the best examples and infographics (for better understanding) & used case studies. In other words, the process of ranking the website in search engines organically by adopting the best practices published by the search engines from time to time is known as SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Broadly the SEO process is divided into two parts On-Page SEO and Off-Page SEO. Check out our On-Page SEO guide & Keyword Research Guide at Top Blogging coach covering all On-Page SEO factors that are important for the ranking of the website in search engine
Search Engine Optimization: Why SEO is important?
There are multiple digital platforms to generate traffic to the website like social media (Facebook.com), Affiliate marketing & other online platforms like Twitter, Tumblr, and even through other big websites (which we called as referral traffic). But across the globe, the major source of traffic driver / big real estate in the online medium is a search engine. In search engines like Google there are two types of real estate one is PPC where we give some money to google to deliver the traffic to our websites and the other is an Organic (non-paid) medium. Organic real estate gives more visibility to the websites as SEO has 20X more visibility than PPC on both desktop and mobile. In all US searched 2.8% of users click on PPC and the rest on the organic search, the conversion rate for an e-commerce website is more on organic results as compared to PPC. The below infographic clearly shows how your Google SERP looks like and the division of Real Estate between Organic and Paid results. Various features like Knowledge Graph,
Featured snippets can increase the visibility of your website in search engines and proportionally increase the CTR, Impressions and clicks, which can be easily monitored through the Google analytics tool.
Crawling Indexing and Ranking. How Search Engine Works?
The important step is to understand how a search engine works, here we are taking the example of How Google / Search engines works and explaining the process of searching and delivering the right result for the searched query in the search engine. The whole process is divided into three parts Crawling(gathering the information), Indexing (Storing the information), and ranking (serving results).
Discovery / Crawling: How Search engines discover the content
The first and foremost important step is the discovery of the content whether in any format like the article, video, image or PDF. How good your content is, if not discovered by spiders also called web crawlers, your content will not appear in search result pages. The crawlers can find the links on the web page and navigate to another page, then to another page etc. this way the crawlers can discover the content in whichever format like web pages, PDF, images, etc and store the information in the form of URL (Uniform Resource Locator) in their database. Every piece of information has a unique URL to understand. There are other technical ways also to get the content discovered by search engines like XML sitemaps, RSS Feeds etc. Make sure the URL are accessible by the search bots and the website follow all technical guidelines effectively for better discovery of content in search engines.
Indexing: How Search engines store the content
The second step for search engines is to store the information crawled by web crawlers in an organized manner. The process of organizing the information in different web servers across the globe so that the fast and accurate result will be delivered in SERP based on the search query. There are different ways to check the indexing of the content in the search engines, the most commonly used is the site operator. The syntax for the same is site:domainname.com will show you how many pages are indexed in Google / Search engine database. You can also use the inspect URL feature
of the search console/webmaster to check the indexing of the page in the search engine. The search engine can store the highly compressed text-only version of your web page and can be seen through the cache command. The syntax to use the cache command is cache: URL this is the latest version that Web crawlers stores in their database.
Ranking: How Search engines rank the content
The third and last step is to serve the results based on the search queries. When a user searches for something on Google – the search engine will return the best and most relevant informative results covering the answers of all queries that users want to know. Google search results show different results in different locations for the same query based on many factors like Location, Language, Devices, etc. Also, the ranking of the web pages depends upon various factors like Core web vitals, Content Optimization, Page Experience, and ongoing multiple Google updates. All these will be covered in detail separately and Google is not taking any money to get the website ranked.Website Architecture: How to make SEO-friendly Navigation?
Website architecture plays an important role in SEO and User experience especially when it comes to the first Job of User/spider / Web crawlers i.e the discovery of the content. The clean architecture will help the bots to discover the links of other web pages / discover new articles so that Search engine bots will index them properly and if deserved rank for the related search queries. Whether it’s an online website or retail store architecture plays an important role –
Let’s take an example of shoppers stop where every section is clearly visible for visitors to understand the layout. Similarly, the clean and good navigation will help users to navigate as per his requirement and even help the bots to understand the site architecture. URL (uniform resource locator) will help everyone to understand the section and sub-sections of the website.
Best Practices for Website Architecture
- Plan the primary categories and relevant sub-categories in an organized manner.
- The top navigation should be simple and easy to understand.
- Every category and sub-category should be accessible by an SEO-friendly URL.
- Every sub-category should be linked to the parent sub-category.
- Minimize the number of clicks between the pages.
- Use interlinking between the web pages so that users can navigate from one page to another relevant page.
URL (Uniform Resource Locator). What is SEO-friendly URL?
URL means Uniform Resource Locator, used to address the location of any resource (whether it’s an article or Image or PDF) on the internet. URL plays an important role in SEO.
SEO Friendly URL Pattern Best Practices to follow
- Always use a hyphen instead of underscore or space to understand the meaning of the phrase
- Don’t use special characters like (?,= etc) within the URL.
- URL length should be small so that it should be easy to remember.
- URL should contain the important phrase that actually defines the subject line of the topic.
- URL should be case sensitive, the lower case should be preferred as https://topbloggingcoach.com/seo is different fromhttps://topbloggingcoach.com/SEO and creating confusion for users/bots to understand
- Always use keywords or Phrases in the URL
What is Sitemap?
The sitemap is an HTML page where the user can find all navigation links which are important to navigate. Even the web crawlers of the search engine can navigate this file and discover all important links of the category/sub-category pages so that they store the information and index them properly. XML sitemap is the blueprint of any website/blog where the google bots can find all important links. Basically through the sitemap, webmasters can tell google which pages are important by defining the priority value against each URL and when was the page last updated, so that Google bots can index the updated content of the page.Types of Sitemap
There are different types of XML sitemaps, which are used for the same purpose means the discovery of the content, but the technical specifications are different which actually differentiates the type of content, whether it’s an article/news website or Video content, Photogallery Content.
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- Normal XML Sitemap: Simple XML file that tells Google about the page information like URL, Last-Modified, and priority (defines the importance of the page)
- News XML Sitemap: XML sitemap that tells Google about the article/news published on the news portals whether the news portal is in English or Hindi. Help Search engines to discover the content developed on the sites which are approved in Google News. The Page Title/headline is an optional field in the sitemap. The only technical specification that differentiates the news sitemap from a normal XML sitemap is News sitemap contains the last 2 days’ URLs.
- Video Sitemap: Helps google to understand and discover the video content published on your website/blog. The technical specifications to develop the video sitemap is completely different than the normal XML sitemap/news XML sitemap
- Image Sitemap: Helps google to understand and discover the video content published on your website/blog. The technical specifications to develop the video sitemap is completely different than the normal XML sitemap / news XML sitemap
Sitemap Creation and Submission:
There are multiple softwares to create the XML sitemaps. If the website is small means the limited number of pages is around 500, then these softwares are fine for sitemap development. If the websites are big means 1000’s pages are published on daily basis like any news publisher’s website, then development is required for XML sitemap as free tools have limited access. All sitemap files are hosted at the root of the domain like https://topbloggingcoach.com/sitemap_index.xmlFor the WordPress site, there is a paid plugin’s Yoast SEO – for sitemap development. The actual benefit of using the premium version of Yoast SEO is that the sitemaps are updated automatically with the new URLs as and when developed.
Submission in Google Search Console:
Once the sitemap is developed and accessed through the URL, the next step is to submit the sitemap in the search engine console. A search engine console is the communication platform between a webmaster and google. The below screenshot clearly shows the option to submit the sitemap in the search console (platform provided by Google) along with the other parameters like when it was the last read by Google bots, submitted date in search console etc.
What is Image Optimization?
Image optimization is the process of optimizing the image for the users. Google image search is another great funnel of traffic to your website, if your images are properly optimized, the probability of ranking the image in Image search is higher and as a result, the website/blogs start getting some traffic from the Google Image Search.
Best Practices for Image Optimization:
Google Search Engine has published the best practices for Image optimization – you can go through our Image Optimization Guide in detail as well to know the technical and editorially best practices for Image SEO. I have listed down the outline of the image optimization process to follow:
- Image File Name: The image file name should be descriptive and define the actual meaning of the image, don’t save the images in a generic format like image1.jpg, image2.jpg, image3.jpg etc, always use history-of-qutub-minar.jpg {if the image in itself defines the history of the Qutub minar}
- Supported Image Format: The supported file image formats are JPEG, PNG, and BMG as most of the browsers are using these image formats –
- Use Great Alt Tags: The alt tags/text around the images should be descriptive and meaningful.
Avoid using the long alt tags. The alt tags should be small and should actually define the meaning of the image itself. - Image Sitemaps: Always create the image sitemaps to tell the search engines about the image content of your website, this makes the process of crawling and indexing your image content in the search engine is smoother and helps the bloggers to increase the visibility in Google image search for your image content.
Technical SEO Tools:
Technical SEO refers to checking the technical elements of your website so that the search engine bots can crawl and index the content of your website. There are multiple SEO tools to check the website’s performance and to prepare the technical SEO audit report.
- Mobile Friendliness test
- AMP Validator
- Page Speed Insights
- Search Console tool
- Rich Snippet testing Tool
- SEO Friendly site architecture
- How Search Engine Works
- SEO friendly URL Pattern
- Learn How Page Speed Impacts the Google Ranking
If you want to learn SEO more in detail/want SEO services for your online portal/website, Pls email me at [email protected] with your requirement. I will reply in 24 – 48 hrs.
Naveen Sharma says
Hi Tim,
Excellent article. In the last few weeks there has been a lot of buzz about the changes to be expected in SEO techniques. Your article gives a complete picture of it regarding changes in technology and what we need to do to adapt to it.
There is also a lot of jargon involved with SEO techniques but this article clarifies everything. Dwell time, bounce rate, pogo sticking, etc. have been described succintly.
Thanks for sharing the valuable information and the tips with us. Have a great day!
-Naveen