Basics of SEO

The design and layout of a website may be appealing but if it is not SEO-friendly, it cannot achieve higher rankings in search engine result pages. The search engines cannot interpret the content just like us and the visitors; a web page may not look the same to a search engine as it looks to you. So, keep the following guidelines in mind before you start thinking about the design and layout of a website. 1) Keyword Placement You should use the targeted keywords and phrases at the right places throughout the site, i.e. body text, headlines, headers, meta description, links, etc. Proper keyword placement is important for every page but it is more important on the home page as it is a gateway and introduction to the rest of the pages of your site. Also, use proper words for links; instead of using "see more", "read more" or "click here" use the words that describe the link itself. 2) Navigation The navigation must be user-friendly so that users c...

Content optimization is a process of making your webpages more appealing to search engines and users. It is not only restricted to using best keywords in your pages but also focuses on various other parts of your website like the quality of content, broken links, title tags, meta tags, etc. Once your content is optimized the search engine can easily find and index your website and show up it in the initial pages of search results. Focus on the following areas for better content optimization Title Tag:  It refers to the title of your page or post which is incorporated in the head of the HTML code of a page. It appears at the top of the page on the result pages or when you promote your page on social media. The title tags which are concise, accurate and relevant are considered best for content optimization. According to SEO experts, an ideal title tag should be between 50?60 characters long, correctly describe the content on the page and must have targeted keyword at the b...

Content Guidelines The success of a website mainly depends on the quality of content it offers to its visitors. In SEO, quality content refers to a content which not only appeals to readers but also to the search engines. Some important guidelines to create quality content 1) Choose the best keywords Your pages must have the keywords related to your product, services or concept as from the keywords the search engine gets to know about the nature and type of your website. Accordingly, the search engine ranks your website in the result pages for the related queries. So, conduct a thorough keyword research before you start writing content. You can take the help of various keyword research tools like  Google Keyword Planner, Google Trends, SEMRUSH, etc. 2) Original/unique content Incorporating relevant keyword is not enough; your content must be original and unique. It should not be copied from any other site other...

The work of the search engine is divided into three stages, i.e. crawling, indexing and retrieval. 1) Crawling The search engines have the web crawler or spiders to perform crawling. The task of crawler is to visit a web page, read it and follow the links to other web pages of the site. Each time the crawler visits a webpage it makes a copy of the page and adds its URL to the index. After adding the URL it regularly visits the sites like every month or two to look for updates or changes. 2) Indexing In this stage, the crawler creates the index of the search engine. The index is like a huge book which contains a copy of each web page found by the crawler. If any web page changes the crawler updates the book with new content. So, the index comprises URL of different web pages visited by the crawler and contains the information collected by the crawler. 3) Retrieval This is the final stage in which the search engine provides the most useful and relevant an...

A list of top 6 black hat SEO techniques are given below: 1) Keyword Stuffing Search engine analyzes the keywords and key phrases on the webpages to index the websites. To exploit this feature of search engine, some SEO practitioners increase keyword density to get higher ranking which is considered a black hat SEO technique.  2) Cloaking It refers to coding webpages in such a way that search engines see one set of content and visitors see the another set of content, i.e. a user searching for "gold price" clicks on a search result "current gold price" and is greeted with a travel and tourism site. This practice is not in accordance with search engines' guidelines which say to create content for users not for the search engines. 3) Hidden Text The text which search engines can view but readers can't is known as hidden text. This technique is used to incorporate irrelevant keywords and hide tex...

White Hat SEO Techniques A list of 5 popular white hat SEO techniques are given below: 1) Good content A unique well-written content makes your website appear more trustworthy and valuable to search engines and human visitors. It optimizes your website for search engines which helps you get higher ranking on the search engine listings as search engines offer the most appropriate website to the end users for their search. 2) Proper use of title, keywords and metatags The information contained in the HTML code is known as Metadata. It provides crawler the information about the site for classification and indexing purposes. So, proper title, keyword and metatag should be incorporated in the metadata. 3) Ease of navigation Search engines also consider the ease of navigation while assessing the usefulness of a site, so avoid the irrelevant links and use universally recognizable links. It is not only important for the users but also for the crawlers who index the sites. 4)...

White Hat SEO It refers to the  SEO  techniques which are in accordance with the  SEO guidelines  set by the search engines. It means it uses approved search engine optimization techniques to improve the ranking of a site on  search engine results pages (SERP). Unlike Black Hat SEO, it mainly focuses on the human audience opposed to a search engine. People who are looking for a long-term investment on their websites rely on white hat SEO techniques. Black Hat SEO It refers to the SEO techniques which are not in accordance with the  SEO guidelines  set by the search engines. These techniques exploit the weaknesses in search engines to get higher rankings for websites on the  search engine results pages (SERP). It mainly focuses on search engines and not on the human audience. People who are looking for a quick financial return on their website rather than a long term investment use black hat SEO techniques. White Hat v...

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is a process designed to optimize a website for search engines. It helps websites achieve higher ranking in search engine results when people search keywords related to their products and services. Thus, it increases the quantity and quality of traffic to a website through organic search engine results. See the following image to understand the basic activities involved in the SEO

Search Engine The Search engine is a program which is designed to enable the users to browse information or content on World Wide Web. It helps retrieve the desired information in minimum time. It allows you to input specific keywords or phrases and retrieves a list of items matching those keywords and phrases. Thus, it does not provide information straight away; it just retrieves pages which are related to keywords or other search terms. Some of the popular search engines are Google, Bing, and Yahoo! Search. Portal Portal is a private location on the internet which acts as a point of access to the information available on the World Wide Web. A portal is accessed through a unique URL, unique username and password, i.e. apart from URL, personal login is required to see the content on a portal. Some of the popular portals are facebook.com, gmail.com and twitter.com.

Now, we have understood that WWW is a collection of websites connected to the internet so that people can search and share information. Now, let us understand how it works! The Web works as per the internet's basic client-server format as shown in the following image. The servers store and transfer web pages or information to user's computers on the network when requested by the users. A web server is a software program which serves the web pages requested by web users using a browser. The computer of a user who requests documents from a server is known as a client. Browser, which is installed on the user' computer, allows users to view the retrieved documents. All the websites are stored in web servers. Just as someone lives on rent in a house, a website occupies a space in a server and remains stored in it. The server hosts the website whenever a user requests its WebPages, and the website owner h...

The Web Grows Next computer platform was accessible by a few users. Later, the development of 'line-mode' browser, which could run on any system, started. In 1991, Berners-Lee introduced his WWW software with 'line-mode' browser, Web server software and a library for developers. In March 1991, it was available to colleagues who were using CERN computers. After a few months, in August 1991, he introduced the WWW software on internet newsgroups, and it generated interest in the project across the world. Graphic interface for the internet, first introduced to the public on 6 August 1991 by Tim Berners-Lee. On 23 August 1991, it was available to everyone. Becoming Global The first Web server came online in December 1991 in the United States. At this time, there were only two types of browsers; the original development version which was available only on NeXT machines and the 'line-mode' browser which was easy to install and run on any platform but was l...

The World Wide Web was invented by a British scientist, Tim Berners-Lee in 1989. He was working at CERN at that time. Originally, it was developed by him to fulfill the need of automated information sharing between scientists across the world, so that they could easily share the data and results of their experiments and studies with each other. CERN, where Tim Berners worked, is a community of more than 1700 scientists from more than 100 countries. These scientists spend some time on CERN site, and rest of the time they work at their universities and national laboratories in their home countries, so there was a need for reliable communication tools so that they can exchange information. Internet and Hypertext were available at this time, but  no one thought how to use the internet to link or share one document to another. Tim focused on three main technologies that could make computers understand each other, HTML, URL, and HTTP. So, the objective behind the invention of WWW ...