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SEO Webinar

SEO – A Beginner’s Guide

The SEO webinar helps you find out latest SEO and online marketing techniques to expand and strengthen your online visibility, get much traffic and acquire more credible prospective clients to your website.

Once your website goes live, you will immediately start thinking about your ranking and visibility in the search engines. This is where the key pillar of digital marketing comes in … the search engine optimization.

Ranking simply refers to the process a search engine uses to determine where particular content should display on a search engine results page (SERP). On the other hand, visibility refers to how conspicuous a given piece of content appears in search engine results. Content with high visibility usually appears at the top of organic search results while content with low visibility will appear from page two and beyond of the search engine results.

Search engine optimization (SEO) refers to the practice of increasing the quality and the quantity of traffic to a website through organic search engine results.

To have a clearer understanding of SEO, let us have a look at the key terms below:

Quality of Traffic: You can have a lot of traffic but it is not quality traffic. In other words, quantity does not always mean quality. Quality traffic refers to a situation when someone visits your site and finds what they are looking for.

To illustrate; suppose Google tells people you are a resource on Apple computers when in actual sense you are a farmer selling apples. We cannot say this is quality traffic. Your ultimate aim is to attract people who are interested in what you are offering.

Quantity of Traffic: This refers to the actual number of people who visit your site through clicking from the search engine results pages (SERPS). Again, we must not forget that it is only helpful if it is quality traffic.

There is therefore a close relationship between quantity and the quality of traffic to a website. You do not want to attract a lot of website visitors who find your site or products irrelevant.

Organic Results: Sponsored ads constitute a significant percentage of most search engine results pages. Organic traffic refers to any traffic that is not paid for. Specifically, organic traffic is any unpaid traffic that arises from the search engine results pages.

How SEO Works

A search engine can be looked at as a website one visits to type or speak a question or statement into a box which then magically responds with a comprehensive list of links to webpages that are most likely to have information on your query.

While this is true, have you at any time paused to ponder how this happens?

In a nutshell, this is what happens. The search engine you use has crawlers which go out and compile information on all the content available on the internet (depends on the capacity of the crawlers the search engine is using). The crawlers bring the information to the search engine that builds an index. The index is then fed through an algorithm which attempts to match the data with your query.

A lot of factors go to a search engine’s algorithm. Here is how they are ranked in terms of importance:

– Domain- Level Link Authority Features such as the amount of links to a domain, the trust/ quality of the links to the domain, the domain-level pagerank.

– Page-Level Link Features such as PageRank, the TrustRank, the quantity of links to a page, the quality of the link sources and the distribution of the anchor text among other page-level link features.

– Page-Level Keyword and Content Features such as content quantity/relevance, topic modeling scores on the content among others.

– Page-Level Keyword-Agnotic Features such as length of content, uniqueness, the readability, the load speed.

-Domain-Level Brand Features- such as the offline use of the brand or domain name for example mention of the brand/domain in the news, in press releases, among others.

– User, Usage and Traffic, Query Data- such as traffic and usage from browsers, clickstream, tool bars, the quantity and diversity of the CTR queries.

– Social metrics such as the quantity and the quality of Facebook shares, twitted links.

– Domain-Level Keyword Usage such as exactly matching keyword domains, as well a partial keyword matches.

– Domain –Level, Keyword –Agnostic Features such as the length of the domain name, the TLD extension, HTTP response time on domain.

This is all about the Search Engine (SE) part of SEO.

Optimization, the O part of SEO, is where all the work begins. Optimization refers to the activities people undertake so that the content on the sites as well as the sites themselves appear high in the search engines. When properly done, optimization makes a website rank high in the organic search results.

Optimization can occur through various initiatives. It is everything from ensuring the title tags as well as the Meta descriptions are informative and of the correct length to link building tactics.

Let’s wrap up this pointer with a general overview of search engine optimization

Build an SEO friendly website

First and foremost, to begin the SEO walk, you must apply the techniques you are learning to a site. This can be a new site or your old website that needs improvement. Practice makes perfect and SEO is not different.

Content Matters

A site is not a site until you have high quality content. As a matter of fact, SEO for content has unique variables and that is why you need a thorough understanding to deliver the best results. Make sure you are conversant with topics such as keyword research, SEO friendly content writing, among other tips. There is a lot to learn in this section.

Link Building Tactics

Take your time to learn everything about link building. Learn the various strategies of link building. By the way, link building is at the core of search engine optimization. Therefore learn everything you can about the link building process.

Other Optimization

Once you are conversant with the basics of SEO, you will move to more advanced topics. Learn about conversion rate optimization (CRO), as well as whether to go local or international with your SEO efforts.

Bottom Line

It is important to remember that SEO is a rapidly evolving field. If you want to stay on top of the game, keep learning and be updated by attending to an SEO webinar.