The 2 Essential Elements of SEO

Over 90% of online experience starts with a search engine, meaning that for every business to succeed their presence on the web and mostly on the first page of search engines is very vital and this brings us to the topic of today "The Basic essentials for SEO."

Lots of blogs have written about this topic and have touched very vital areas of it but then again several persons are still not understanding how SEO really affect their businesses.  ‎

So in the simplest form, I will try as much as possible to explain this term SEO and the very basic essentials that you actually need for SEO. In the blog, I have divided these essential keys into two main categories.

A. Website Optimization
B.  Content Optimization

This two categories will give you the simplest understanding of SEO. However, before we jump into them let first understand the term Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and why it is relevant for your business.‎ ‎

What is SEO?‎

In simple terms, SEO according to Neil Patel is ‎" the magic you have to work on your article, in order to make Google [or any other search engine]  very likely to include your article as one of the top results whenever someone searches for that keyword."
In other words, SEO is the science behind which that website you see on the first page of google search engine after searching for a particular something [Keywords] appear on that page.‎

So Why do you need SEO?

Customers now are days don't want to stress themselves walking through the market and at the end of the day not even getting what they want. They want an easy way to get what they want and the only way for your business to get their attention is through SEO‎.

That is optimizing your business website so as to appear on the first page not only first page but first 5 results whenever a potential customer searches for your product. As a business man who wants to boost is sales and services by meeting a wider range of customer, SEO is the answer to your marketing problems.

According to research organic traffic which is the main target of any website is gotten more from SEO than paid adverts and guess what it is free and just need only a little of your attention.
With this in mind let's look at how we can optimize our website and its content for it to appear on SERP (search engine result page).

A. Website Optimisation

To optimize your website or blog for it to appear on SERP starts from our website design, hence we are going to look first at ways we can design how the website that will give search engine the go-ahead in ranking your website on their result page.

• Website User experience: Search engine won't rank a site that has no bearing. They want a site that gives good user experience such as easily navigable website, good content and internal linking. This makes users remain glued to your website and even recommended it.

• Site Speed:  Nobody likes a website that loads very slow and so does search engines. A site that loads very slowly ranks very low on SERPs as they will have increased bounce rate as users will quickly leave that site for an alternate one. So when designing your website make it as simple as possible to reduce the loading time.

• Responsive Design: Google, for example, takes this seriously. If your site is only limited to showing on desktop screen only, then you won't appear on SERP. The majority of internet visitors make use of their mobile devices and tablet to browse, meaning that when designing your website, all types of mobile and internet accessing devices should be put into consideration. Your website must respond to the screen of the device that is accessing it.

• Meta Description and Title Tags: Meta description might not look very necessary but it is an added advantage. A Meta description is a short description of your services that appears under your Url in search engine result page. Title tag, on the other hand, is a way by which you tell visitors and search engines in the most concise way about your article or business by grabbing the Keyword that matches the query from the title of your article. Always separate main titles and subtitles with h1, h2, h3 heading style.

B. Content Optimisation

After the website design comes your content and this part is very important, something people take for granted. Because you have a website don't just mean that people will click on it. There are many things involved and we will look at them one by one.

• Content Relevancy: How relevant is the content you are posting to people? What are the chances that your content is in demand by people? If you were among the web visitors, would you read what you are posting to people? These are the question one must ask while posting a content on the web. Search engine particularly Google doesn't rank a website that does not have answers to people's query. Meaning that those websites that appear on the first page of SERPs actually provide the best answers to searchers query. ‎relevancy of a content can be based on the searcher's region, searchers search history, time of day, 12 months e.t.c

• Lengthy Content: If someone told you that the length of your content doesn't matter to search engine, then you are being deceived. If your content isn't a video, then you must be ready to post quality content that carries more than 500 words, images not included. Search engine feels that website that carries lengthy content actually write for humans and not for the search engines, thus they tend to rank a website that has lengthy content.

• Linking: Building internal links in your content can assist your website to rank better on SERPs and even increase traffic and trust for your website. Internal linking helps to improve the ranking of your keywords, improve Google crawling and indexing of your site and reduces bounce rate of your site.

• Trust: Trust is an off-page SEO optimization. When your site is trusted it means you aren't spamming and your website isn't obscure. To make your site climb the trust rank of the search engine, avoid spammy and duplicate content. You can build on other people's work. Don't just pick what other people have written and say someone must read it. It doesn't work. Your domain age, content uniqueness, traffic to website, site authority are among the considerations that increase your trust rank. You can check your website trust rank here. Also, check your website authority through this link

• Well Tagged image: Search Engines cannot read image, hence you need to tag them properly for them to appear on SERPs. This can be done through the alt text attribute. The alt text or alternate text in full is a concise description of the image you uploaded. This description can be the title of the article you are writing or just a keyword. Alt text helps search engine to crawl images and index them to appear in their search results.

• Fresh Content: Google which is the most used search engine also uses fresh content as a page ranking factor. Your regularity in posting on your website beeps a signal that you know what you are doing. Hubspot last year showed how regularly posting on website increases pages rank on search engines particularly Google. However though it important to post regularly, you should also know to post once a week or a month can still give you the great ranking result as long as your content is thorough, unique and in-depth.

• Keywords: Keyword research is the backbone of SEO. Including your targeted keywords in your title tag, meta description, Url increases your chances to appear on the search engine. However getting the right keywords is something that one needs to research on carefully as misuse of this might lead to disaster. Check out Hubspot guide to Keyword research for beginners. While adding keywords to your content, note that stuffing keywords in a single content can kill your website ranking on search engines.

• Social Media: You have written your content and you want everyone to know about it, this is where the social media comes to play. Social media according to Neil Patel in his concrete post on SEO, noted that social media helps in SEO ranking. He noted that the quality of shares which comes from influencers and the number of shares can influence the Search engine ranking result.

These are some and major keys I feel that is needed for a website or a blog to rank on SERPs. If you feel anything is missing you can check out Neil Patel's guide to SEO or Search Engine Watch 22 essentials for SEO in 2016.

If you enjoyed and learned from this article please endeavour to share it. If I missed anything you can share your thought through the comment section below