Nowadays, the world wide web is the main way of gathering and giving information amongst businesses, and individuals alike. The world wide web can be a competitive tool for sharing your information as many bigger or well-known websites may have better SEO practices, so in this article, I will tell you all about SEO and how you can improve your practices and methods in this.
What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and involves adding elements to your website to rank higher in the search engine’s results when you search for a certain subject. Why? This is because the more complex your website is and the more work you put into it, then the better the website looks to the search engine and its users since a website with just primary headings and paragraphs would look less appealing to the eye than a website with headings, paragraphs, links, images, styles, and much more.
However, this might not mean the content of the website is reliable, SEO only covers how high your website will rank in a search engine, such as the Google search engine or Microsoft Bing, the top search engines by their amount of users.
What is the Difference Between Each Result?
Two different types of results may appear when you search for a certain query in your desired search engine, paid results and organic results.
Paid Results
Paid results appear atop the list of search results with an “Ad” marker next to it. This means that the individual or group has paid the owner of the search engine for this placement; the amount you pay the search engine’s host will determine how often and how high your website will rank in the results. This means the higher the amount of money you pay, the higher your page will be placed.
Organic Results
The other type is an organic result, this means that the creator or owner of the website has worked on their page enough that it will rank higher in the search results without the need for paying the likes of Google or Microsoft to have the website rank near the top.
These are more reliable and relative than the results that have been paid for since they have been worked on more than advertised pages so that they appear higher in the search results. This work can bring reliable information, which is usually gained from the top results of a search engine, helpful links, and images to help the person searching understand what they are reading.
The Statistics Built from Good SEO
Traffic Sources
Some of the sources of traffic you may receive for your website includes searches through the many search engines, direct searches, social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter, websites that refer to another website, emails that include links to a website, and ads that display and send people to websites.
The Top Source
The top source of traffic for websites is by searching for it with a search engine with about 60% of the traffic gained from this. According to Backlinko, the top result from a search query gets 20% of the clicks when people search the world wide web. This statistic is made from the best practice in the world of SEO amongst any other website that can appear in your search results.
The Best Practices and Ways of SEO
Keywords
One of the best ways of increasing your ranking in the search engine with SEO is to use keywords throughout your website. This will help your page appear among the top search results as the search engine searches by the content of your website and the words the visitors use in their search queries.
These include the main keywords most people use to search for their desired subject. For example, if you were searching for the latest parts and news for your gaming computer, you would search with queries such as “Ryzen processor”, “NVIDIA graphics card”, or “AM5 motherboard”. These words that people use when searching the world wide web will display top results which will lead to websites that use all the keywords of common search queries such as those listed above.
Another set of keywords is the secondary keywords, which are keywords that describe the subject. These words are used if the person searching is struggling to find what they are specifically looking for. An example of this practice is searching for the season 7 episode of The Simpsons, “Radioactive Man”, the top result for just searching “Radioactive Man” will come up with the character and the comic from the 33-year-old animated TV series, but searching with a query like “Radioactive Man episode” will return the episode called “Radioactive Man”. This is because the word “episode” is used in the search query to describe what you are looking for more specifically.
Effective Titles and Headings
A second factor that you could take into making your website appear higher in the search results is making sure it has a title and headings that may stand out amongst others or include words that most people use to search for subjects and topics in your chosen area.
For example, if you were searching for help with SEO, you would type in and search “good SEO” and it would give results such as “The Best Practices for SEO” or “The Ultimate Guide to Good SEO”. These results appear at the top since the titles of the webpages stand out to people and the search engine, which is why I used the title “What Makes Good SEO?” for the article I have typed up.
You can give your page a title with the following lines of HTML code:
In this photo, you can see the <h1> and <h2> elements in the body, which are two examples of making headings, and the <title> element which gives your page a title, which is displayed in the tabs section of your chosen browser. This is very much simple to do as you only need a couple of lines to add to make sure you have a title for your website, which will be displayed in the search engines when it is published, giving your website an identifier that looks good when it is found on a search engine, moving it higher up the ranks. Headings also help the visitor navigate through your website which looks good for search engines as these tend to like more user-friendly websites that are easy to look at.
Write Powerful Meta Descriptions
The meta description is the piece of text that is shown alongside the link to a website when it appears on the search engine results page. These are created in the <head> part of your website’s HTML code, much like the title of your website, which appears in blue in the search results.
However, the owner of the search engine can change the meta description of your website so that, whatever the user searches, then the description will fit into that search query to allow the user to find their answer easily. This will not improve your ranking in the search engine’s algorithm but the attractiveness that the description presents to the user will improve the chances of your website being visited, which is because the user will often click on the best website that is relevant to their question.
In this image, you can see that titles are shown in blue and the meta description is shown below the title:
Smaller Image Files
If you want your website to appear much higher up the ladder of search results, you must decrease the file sizes of your website’s images. People with slower devices searching the web can access and see the full website in a smaller amount of time. The reason for this is that the smaller the file is on a website, the less the visitor’s device has to download from the website’s host. Would you wait a long time to access a website? The search engine puts the faster websites first for your benefit!
You can decrease a file’s size by putting it through a compressor, which can even be done with the likes of Adobe Photoshop, or saving an image as a .jpg file, which was designed to reduce an image’s size, for the benefit of devices such as mobile phones, laptops, older, lower end desktop computers, and any device that is not up to the current standards for fast browsing.
Adding to Images
You can also add descriptions to images with <alt> tags, add a suitable name to the file, and resize the image to the required dimensions. You should do this so that it fits on the website without repeating, being too big for the screen, and so that it does not stick out like a sore thumb. A good-looking website with good-looking images makes the website look great to search engine algorithms, which check to see if you have made the experience of visiting the website the best it can be.
The work done on these images also makes the website look better for search engines designed for displaying images, such as Google Images or Bing Images, the top competitors in searching for images.
Include Links
You can also improve your search engine optimization practice by including links to other websites or pages! For example, if you were talking about a footballer, you would make a piece of text or an image a link, which would lead to something like an article about their career or a list of their records, a good example of this is Erling Haaland, who has broken all sorts of records, which would give the reader plenty of information.
It is all about giving your readers plenty of information from different websites; that is something that search engines like to see and want people to see. Could you imagine visiting a website for information on your chosen subject and not being given further information on what you are reading? That would make the search engine look bad if that was one of the top results as its users would not be given the information they so desire in the areas they are researching.
You can add a link with an anchor and a reference. In HTML, this is done with an <a href=”> element along with a closing </a> element. An example of this is displayed below, which is built on from the lines of code from earlier in the article:
Now That You’ve Learnt About Good SEO…
I hope you have learned a fair few new things about how you can improve your skills in SEO, these are some of the best and easiest ways you can improve your SEO for the benefit of you, your website, and your readers. These include fundamental changes such as adding to the text in your website, changing the descriptions and titles inside the <head> tag of your website’s HTML code, and editing images so that they look better to the eye of the reader and are easier to display by the device, which ultimately looks better for the search engine’s algorithm.
I also hope you learned some new things about how search engines work in terms of results, and how traffic differs between websites and sources, as I have researched from some great websites about the best practices of how you can improve your SEO. I sure learned some new things!
