Before going deep into how SEO works, first you need to understand what is SEO. Then I will teach you the cores of SEO and how they work. This article is a detailed guide for those who are new in the field of digital marketing.

Those who want to learn SEO to rank their personal sites, must read this guide till the end and make all the important notes. Once you take care of all the SEO steps, you’ll shortly see improvements in your rankings.

Without wasting time let’s start the journey:

It stands for Search Engine Optimization. This is a process of multiple steps that directly affect the ranking of your website or blog post. There are more than 200 factors that google counts when giving ranking to different websites.

In SEO, you optimize your webpage according to the search engine guidelines.

For example:

Let’s say someone type homemade cheeseburger in the google search bar. Here google gives all the best results to its user. On the first page, Google will display different web pages that contain information regarding cheeseburgers and also the query homemade.

Here the user is searching for the recipe for a cheeseburger. If you have an article on this topic then you need to optimize it to win a place on the first page.

Your page must contain the main keyword which is a homemade cheeseburger. Then the ingredient list, extra toppings, best sauces, how to choose quality bread, the quality of cheese, etc.

All this makes a complete recipe, where people find everything from the first step to the final result.

Once you publish this type of complete post. Then the next step is to do SEO. For that, you need to optimize it in two ways. One is On-page SEO and the second is Off-page SEO.

ON-page and OFF Page SEO:

These two are the cores of SEO. In ON-Page, you work on your site to optimize it, for example, Page speed, Page titles, Meta description, image alt texts, etc.

In OFF-page, you focus more on link buildings. Where people share your content or you do guest posts and link back to your site.

SEO Practises: Black Hat Vs White Hat SEO

People like me prefer long-term business games. But this is not the case with everyone. Some people want to get rich quickly and they follow the black hat SEO. No doubt black hat SEO gives quick results but only for a limited time. After that google give a penalty to the website and their site never ranks.

Buying links, link scraping, keyword stuffing is all bad practices of the SEO field.

On the other hand, white hat SEO means working according to the search engine guidelines. Here you give 100% genuine content and extremely valuable content to google users. People find your content useful; they share it and it goes viral.

SEO Marketing: The right Approach

Now is the time to learn how to do SEO in the right way. Understanding SEO is different than practicing it in the real world. Below is the complete list of white hat SEO strategies.

Content

If you are in the digital marketing field then you probably know the content is king. Because the users read what you write in your post. Your writing skills make them stick to your article and push them to share it.

This is only possible if you write high-quality content. But there are already hundreds of articles on the internet on almost every topic. Now the question is how you can write quality content. 

Elements of Content

There are thousands of factors that google counts when evaluating a piece of content. Below are the topmost important factors.

Content Quality

The quality content is a real win-win situation. Because such content does not contain keyword stuffing. It only contains genuine information that is sufficient to solve the user’s problem. Google like this type of content because google users like it.

This increases your chances of winning the first position in google search rankings.

Freshness

No doubt frequent publishing is the signal of fresh content to google. But this does not mean your old content is no longer useful.

To hold your position on the first page you must update your previously published content. Add some new statics or add some more in-depth information. This tells Google that your content still deserves a position on the first page. 

Quick tips for creating quality content:

First of all, understand the intention of your users then write the content. Know the behavior of the users who are going to read the content.

Break the content into small paragraphs and add some images to make it interactive.

Write actionable pieces of content.

Read the articles of other authors on the topic and then start writing in your words in your style. Do not copy-paste everything. Add some genuine information and go into extra depth. 

HTML elements

Do not get scared with the term HTML you do not need to learn any coding language. There are few HTML elements that you need to learn to work with. They are simple and you will learn in few seconds.

Element list

Title tags

It is the title that displays in the google search results. If you are a WordPress user and also use Yoast SEO. Then you know how to give SEO title. This must be unique from others and relevant to the post. This is the first step towards a better ranking.

Meta Description

This is the content that displays below the title tag or SEO title on Serps. According to Google guidelines, the length of this description must be under 160 characters. You must write a short story of your article or webpage in the meta description.

Subheadings

There are heading tags starting from H1 to H6. H1 is the main title tag of the page, use it only once on the page. Whereas you can use multiple h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 tags according to the article structure. There is no fixed number of patterns of using these heading tags.

They are required to break down the long piece of content into short pieces. This makes it easy for users to ingest the information.

Alt text

This is the text that describes the image in text form. This helps the search engine to better understand the image. It is best not to insert the exact keyword in place of alt text.

Links

Linking building is a technique where you make links for your website and you get a good ranking. If this is the linking then you are completely wrong. Because here involves internal links and external links.

Internal links are those links that you choose for your website. In this process, you link different pages or posts of your website as per the relevancy.

But you get the external link when someone likes your content and share on his/her website or blog post.

Do not try to buy links to manipulate the rankings. Google is watching your website and you will get a hard penalty. In some cases, your site may get blacklisted. All of this is black hat SEO and I do not recommend it.