A Beginner Guide On SEO And Its Implementation

Note: search engine optimisation is very sensitive and it is to be handled by a person who is having real time experience, else search engines will penalise the website. To make the website results feature in google again we have to spend a minimum of 2 lakhs depending on the value/reputation of the website and it will take a minimum of 3 months to restore the website in Google results.

It’s not an exaggeration to say the above statements it’s all about the expert's sayings.

 For further references on penalization and factors visit this Wikipedia of Googles penalization.

Handling websites like:

.gov

.edu

.ac.in

It is suggested to handle by working professionals as the reason is that google will crawl these websites very frequently and it matters a lot to search engines with the above extensions.

An SEO analyst is the responsible person for involving in the testing of the website the following are the major things he is responsible to: 

• Look and feel of the website.
• Call to action on the website.
• Loading speed of the website or particular web page.
• Touch responsiveness of the website.
• User friendliness.

All the above could be the factors for raised in the bounce rate of our websites.The bounce rate is the major factor that affects a website in search engine results. 

What is search engine optimisation and why is it necessary?

SEO stands for search engine optimisation and it plays a major role in leveraging a brand or product or service. Search engine optimisation is the continuous process of keep on changing the position of the website/web-pages to the top of the Google.

The necessity of search optimisation is because of the reason that we are in the era where internet penetration is going peaks and there is a saying that people who don’t know about the internet also knows about google and Facebook.

As per the experts, said that using digital marketing as a tool 63 percent of the money spent on traditional advertisements can be saved if we switch to digital marketing where SEO plays a key role.

By the above statement, we have to sense that SEO comes under the umbrella of Digital Marketing.

Advantages of SEO:

SEO is a substitute of pay per click (PPC).

Pay per click means if we want any query on the top of the google without any effort overnight the results will feature in a google search as advertisements but these results are only for a period of time whereas the results optimised to search engines using SEO techniques last long for many days until a competitor come up:

• SEO is totally free and cost effective.
• SEO is robust and dynamic in nature.
• SEO is easy to implement and it is the time taking process for results. 

The following are the things we have to be aware of in learning the SEO best practices:

• Ranking of the website.
• Competitive analysis.
• Citation flow and trust flow.
• MOZ Domain authority and Page Authority.
• W3c validity.
• Broken link check.
• Image optimisation.
• Image compression.
• Pdf optimisation.
• Pdf compression.
• URL rewriting.
• Minimising the bounce rate.
• Engagement to inner pages.
• Look and feel of the website.
• URL readability.
• Social Media Buttons.
• Proper title and meta description.
• Indexing of pages by search engines.
• 404 error pages.
• URL redirection.
• Monitoring Google Analytics.
• TXT updating.

All the above things are the constraints where we have to work for better results of optimisation and all the above are explained in detail below:

Ranking of the website:

The first and foremost important thing is Alexa traffic ranking. ALEXA is a website owned by AMAZON and it gives both global and national ranks.

Most of the websites over the globe follow ALEXA rank as it is trust-worthy.

A spreadsheet of Alexa tracking is to be maintained on daily basis for frequent monitoring of traffic rates as a whole.

http://www.alexa.com/

For more information go to the above link.

Competitive analysis:

Competitive analysis is very important in optimising a website, need to make a list of competitors to compete and leaders to follow.

Competitive analysis is a must and needs to maintain a spreadsheet.

Competitive analysis includes Alexa traffic rank, keyword positions, traffic to their websites, and comparing look and feel of the website with our websites.

Frequent comparison and competing with the computers will give us a fruitful result.

According to experts, said that compete for the leaders, not the competitors so that u can be a leader (as per digital marketing concern). 

Citation flow and trust flow:

Citation flow is owned by Majestic SEO.

Citation flow and trust flow is the second major thing to be tracked on daily basis of each and every link of the website, it lies between 0-100 where 0 is the lowest and 100 is the highest.

Every individual page will be having unique citation flow and trust flow.

Trust flow is more important than the citation flow and both of them are directly proportional to each other which means if citation flow increases automatically trust flow will get an increase.

Domain authority and Page authority:

As similar as citation flow and flow domain authority and page authority is also a trusted metric to evaluate a website have to maintain a track for all the inner pages and their page authorities.

Every inner page of the website will be having ideal page authority and it is to be tracked on the regular weekly basis and needs to update in the internal database. 

W3c validity:

W3c standards for World Wide Web consortium and it is the third major important thing in optimising a website.

It is very necessary for optimising the website/web pages with w3c validity and each and every page is to be updated with I love validator and w3c valid icon.

For w3c validity, the following is the standard tool and it's mandatory to check with all the links of a website and an icon saying that this page is w3c valid is to be applied in the footer section.

https://validator.w3.org/ 

Broken link check:

The very crucial thing in optimising a website is to make the website free from broken links

In order to make a website free from broken links we have to make use of the below website and need to audit the website on Daily basis

www.brokenlinkcheck.com

Image optimisation and compression:

Optimising the image in terms of memory and naming convention is very important aspect for optimising a website each and every page is to be cross-checked using the website

http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/

And the images are to be compressed and are to be renamed which is meaningful and relevant to the website

For optimising the image make use of jpeg mini which is an open source

http://www.jpegmini.com/

The above link can be used to compress the images.

Pdf optimisation and compression:

All the pdf files which ever present in the website are to be compressed as much as possible and have to check whether they are crisp or not if not have to make them crisp

Both the images and pdf files are to be maintained in a spreadsheet of checklist given by the SEO analyst.

http://www.ilovepdf.com/compress_pdf

The above link can be used for optimising the pdf files

URL rewriting:

It is the duty of the developer to create meaningful links to the inner pages of the website in order to make them readable by humans and mainly search engines

For example generally, the URL looks like:

www.inceridibleindia.com/visit.html

 The above URL is not meaningful, instead, URL can be rewritten as:

www.incredibleindia.com/visit-beautiful-and-peaceful-india.html

When search engines crawl our pages they can understand what all about our page is and how important it is by our URL firstly and they start crawling the inner page. 

Minimising the bounce rate:

Bounce rate is nothing but a visitor comes into our website and within no time he will run away from our website ... Which is a bad sign for search engine optimisation?

It is the duty of search engine optimisation analyst to work hard in the diagnosis of the problem being in the shoes of the potential customer and have to sort out the issue.

Bounce rate is an indication to the search engines of trust flow and citation flow of the website.

In short and simple bounce rate is because of the look and feel of the website and loading speed is also a major factor for bounce rate. 

 As mentioned above in the beginning of the document the reason could be:

• Look and feel of the website.
• Call to action on the website.
• Loading speed of the website or particular web page.
• Touch responsiveness of the website.
• User friendliness.

Engagement to inner pages:

Most of the people who visits our website are through only main domain because of the reason that it is being resulted in the google results page and it won’t be up to the mark in order to acquire the high traffic rates.

In order to engage people with inner and deeper pages renaming of URL and off page submissions are to be done.

The navigation bar to be frozen to the top of the screen so that the visitors are compelled to visit the inner pages.

Look and feel of the website:

The look and feel of the website can be assessed by AB TESTING, which means 2 pages are to be created with different images and different alignments and are to be uploaded into the website with canonical tag including in one page

The page which is which is getting high traffic hits will be retained and the other is to be deleted.

In short, we will upload page-A and page-B whichever the page is having high will be remained to live the one which is having fewer views will be truncated. 

Social media buttons:

We have to embed each and every page of the website with social media buttons and it is to be highlighted as the reason is that social media indicates the brand value to the public and general people

For example, the prime minister in the world who is having the 2^nd most followers in twitter is Narendra Modi guru and it’s a pride to India. As soon as we come across this definitely we feel he is active in online presence.

As per the experts, said that social media is the first biggest channel in acquiring the traffic to a website so social media buttons are to be highlighted.

Proper title and description:

Each and every inner page of the website is to be given the proper title and Meta description as per the web- master guidelines for further details refer the title and description of Jain university’s home page www.jainuniversity.ac.in. 

Custom 404 page:

Custom 404 pages are to be given for every website we handle and for example if anyone by chance misspelled in keying like www.jainuniversity.ac.in/Sainath it will go to the custom 404 page and it’s a good sign to google and as well as the visitor feels alright than displaying an error page showing nothing.

Actually, there is no page with the above link but it will show the custom 404 page if anything goes wrong.

URL redirection:

URL redirection is one of the most important things in optimising a website if we are going to change the name of the URL the old URL is to redirected to the new URL. 

Monitoring Google Analytics:

On regular basis, XML sitemaps are to be generated for URL’s and XML sitemaps are to be generated for images and are submitted to google search console and the submitted links are to be monitored on regular basis for crawling issues

Robot.txt:

Robots/crawlers/spiders all are same and they will crawl our web pages and index them to search engines

In order to make robots/spiders/crawlers to crawl our pages, we have to upload a proper manually written sitemap to search console saying crawlers to crawl the particular pages mentioned in the sitemap.xml

It is very necessary to check what all the robots we have given permission to crawl our pages.

Avoid giving access to unworthy or untrusted robots.

On-page optimisation:

Particularly talking about on page optimisation the following are the things that are to be done with on page optimisation:

• Text to HTML ratio should be good.
• Proper alt tags.
• org implementation for every element where ever necessary.
• Proper distribution of header tags.
• Avoiding flash files.
• Avoid unnecessary spacing in the coding.
• Need to follow coding hierarchy.
• Have to avoid inline CSS.

All the above said things, the developer has to do some research and development and has to work on the above-said things unless it won’t work anymore.

Off- page optimisation strategies:

What is off- page optimisation: In accordance with search engine optimisation, off- page optimisation refers to the techniques that can be used to boost the position of our website or a web page in the search engine results page (SERPs).

why is off page SEO so important: In general from decades search engines are continuously trying to find a solution and the way to give better results to the searcher for his search query.

What are the benefits of off-page optimisation: off- page optimisation is most important than on-page because off- page optimisation has to be done continuously for better results whereas on page optimisation is limited to only some constraints. The following are the benefits of off-page optimisation

Successful off-site search engine optimisation strategy will give fruitful results as follows:

• The increase in rankings.
• Increase in page rank- (google).
• More Exposure.

Off-page SEO strategies to be done are listed as follows:

1. Community Creation in Social Networking Sites:

Community creation is also known as online reputation management, the first and foremost step with which we have to initiate our strategy for off page optimization is the community creation in social networking sites, to start with we have to be a member of almost all the social networking websites like FACEBOOK, LINKEDIN ACADEMY, MYSPACE, TWITTER and many more. In final we have to participate on regular basis.