Website SEO: The Ultimate Guide (2021)

What is a Website SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and as the names suggest, it is the process of optimizing your website for search engines in order to rank/be visible for relevant search queries.

The entire process consists of various steps that must be completed both on and off the webpage in order for search engine bots to crawl through the pages and its algorithms to show your web pages for queries.

We all know that SEO is the most important aspect of any website. SEO began with the launch of the first website, but it really took off with the creation of Google, the world’s largest and most well-known search engine.

With the passage of time, Google began to update its algorithm, and SEO evolved along with it and eventually became a necessity for every website.

SEO is the only way to make your website visible to visitors who are searching for any query related to your website’s core topic. So let’s understand SEO from its fundamentals.

The world of search engine optimization is tricky and constantly changing, but the fundamentals are easy to understand, and even a little SEO knowledge can make a big difference. 

Reading best business and technology blogs related to SEO can be very beneficial for individuals as well as organizations. Let’s look at how SEO can help businesses.

Why is Website SEO important for businesses?

With technological advancements, businesses are increasingly focusing on digital mediums to meet their customers’ needs and gain more online customers by developing websites. However, simply creating a website is insufficient. 

The goal is to generate more revenue through that website, which will only be possible if that website is visible to more visitors who are searching for the related query.

This is possible through SEO to make your website rank for related queries, and your website will be visible to more online customers, leading them to your webpage and converting them into paying customers.

Let’s take a look at the SEO steps that we can use to optimize our website.

1. Keyword Research
2. On-Site Optimization
3. Off-Site Optimization
4. Technical SEO

Keyword Research

Keywords are at the heart of SEO because they are the queries that visitors are looking for and for which you want your page to appear.

The secret of keywords lies in understanding your target audience’s search patterns, interests, trends. 

It is worthwhile to spend time on keyword research because it can greatly assist you in improving your page’s ranking.

There are many keyword research tools available but the most recommended are the Google keyword planner tool and ubersuggest tool. These two tools will also provide you related suggestions of your keywords with search volume and SEO competition.

On-Site Optimization

On-site or on-page optimizations are the optimization steps or processes that we have to perform within our webpage.

All steps that can be taken directly within the website to improve its position in the search rankings are referred to as on-page optimization. Measures to optimize the content or improve the meta description and title tags are examples of this.

On-page SEO helps the search engines to analyze your webpage content in order to determine whether a searcher’s query is relevant to your site or not. 

You can easily optimize your site by following these simple steps:

1) Permalinks

Permalink is nothing but the full URL you see or use of your page, it is a permanent link that’s why it is called the permalink.

Permalinks are suggested to be SEO-friendly. There are a few things you can do to improve your links, such as using keywords in your permalinks, using fewer slashes, and making your links readable. So pick your permalinks wisely.

2) Meta title

The meta title is the title of the HTML document that is displayed in the search result snippets.

These are the results that your audience will see when they search for your keywords, and if you have a catchy title, the audience will visit your pages.

It’s simple to optimize the meta title by including relevant keywords and keeping it between 60 and 70 characters long.

3) Meta Description

Like meta titles, meta descriptions are the HTML tag that shows the description of your webpage in the snippet to both user and search engines.

The meta descriptions act as a summary of the page, so make sure you write a good one, include relevant keywords, keep it between 160 and 170 characters long, and most importantly, write different descriptions for different pages.

4) Image Alternative tags

Image alt tags are the text that appears in place of images when images fail to load, these tags are also helpful for search engines to describe the images.

Optimizing the alt tag is beneficial not only for SEO but also for a better user experience.

Optimizing the alt tag is very easy. You just have to focus on some points while writing alt tags like specifically describing your image within 125 characters and place your keyword organically in alt text do not stuff your keyword forcefully.

5) Keyword density

The concept of keyword density is fundamental to search engine optimization. It’s very crucial to understand how keyword density works because it has a direct impact on the visibility of your site content in search engine results pages (SERPs) 

To calculate the keyword density of a page, divide the number of times a given keyword appears on the page by the total number of words – the resultant value is the keyword density of that page.

Off-Site Optimization

off-Site SEO refers to all SEO activities that occur outside of your own website.

It is generally believed that link building is the only off-page SEO, but branding, citation building, content marketing, social media, and other SEO tactics all play an important role in SEO strategy.

In short, offsite SEO refers to any strategies that don’t include making modifications to your own website.

There are different techniques for Off-site SEO also let’s have look at each of them briefly:

1) Link Building

Link building is the foundation of any off-page SEO plan. However, it’s critical to understand how you should approach link development as an off-page practice.

One of the main objectives of off-page SEO is to increase your company’s authority. Links from authoritative websites help to establish your own site as a leader – they are a vote of confidence from one site to another.

The primary goal of link building should be to acquire high-quality links from authoritative websites. Quality should always be preferred over quantity. It’s critical to comprehend the link gap between your site and that of your competitors.

However, link building as an off-page strategy includes more than simply targeting authority sites.

2) Brand Building

Brand-Building activities should be an important aspect, of not only your overall SEO and marketing plan but also of your off-page SEO strategy. 

It contributes a lot to increase your online authority, which is beneficial to both users and search engines. 

Branding activities help Google in determining your authenticity, which is why it has become such an important off-page SEO approach. 

When you create a brand, you’ll notice that you’ll organically get links and mentions all over the internet, even if you don’t go out of your way to do so.

3) Content Marketing

It’s all too easy to assume content marketing as just an on-page SEO strategy just as the creation and distribution of content that lives on your own website.

But when viewed as a whole, content marketing involves both on-page and off-page strategies. 

Publishing excellent content on your own website is only one aspect of content marketing; any content you create and distribute anywhere on the internet is content marketing.

These are the three main points to keep in mind when performing off-site SEO. There are a few more things to think about, which are as follows:

• Press Release Submission
• Local SEO on Google My Business
• Social Media optimization
• Guest Posting
• Podcasts

Off-page SEO should not be ignored in any way, but it is crucial to understand that it is much more than just link building.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO is the process of upgrading a website’s technical elements in order to improve the ranking of its pages in search engines. 

The fundamentals of technical optimization are making a website faster, easier to crawl, and intelligible to search engines. 

Technical SEO is a subset of on-page SEO, which focuses on upgrading parts of your website in order to achieve higher ranks. It helps to increase a website’s exposure through other channels. 

Free SEO Tools

Tools are the most important element of SEO, and if you are a beginner, it is always recommended that you use free tools, so here is a list of the top free tools you will need while doing SEO:

1. Google analytics
2. Google Search console 
3. Ubersuggest Tool
4. Google Keyword planner tool
5. Mozbar
6. SEOWorkers Analysis Tool
7. WooRank Website Review

These are the 7 tools you should try while doing SEO.