You may have been hearing about SEO and you are wondering what it’s all about.

This post will give you and understanding about SEO, its important and how to go about it.

It is amazing the number of post people put up on the internet daily.

WordPress revealed that 24 blog post are published every second, this makes it over 2 million post every day.

This statistics is only for Word Press not to mention other website platforms.

These users are dishing out both good and bad content on the web.

And guess what?

As much as there are bad content on the web, there are still lots of good content.

It is great to have good content, but if people cannot find you when they make searches, you just don’t exist.

It will seem like trying pick a grain of rice in an ocean.

Yea! That’s tough right?

However, there’s a way you go about it that can make your content stand out from the multitude.

It takes proper optimization of your content to get noticed on search engine.

You don’t want to spend so much time writing and nobody gets to read that amazing article you have written.

For this reason, there are turns of searches on the term SEO daily, people are constantly seeking ways to optimize their blogs, website for search engine.

You may have been hearing about the term Search Engine Optimization and wondering what is it all about.

So let’s dig deep into it.

What is SEO?
Why does SEO matter?
Black hat or White Hat?
Technical SEO
On page SEO
Off page SEO
What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
In the guide SEO 101, Search engine optimization is defined as ‘the practice of increasing both the quality and quantity of website traffic, as well as exposure to your brand, through non-paid (also known as ‘organic’) search engine results’.
What does this means?

Simply, optimization your content on your blog or website, so that search engines can show it to users that search for your keywords.

Keywords are terms, phrases or topics people input into the search bar when searching for something on the search engine.

For example, if I wanted to buy snickers, I could search for, ‘ where can I buy snickers?’, So the keywords could be snickers or it could be the phrase ‘where can I but snickers’.

Why does SEO matter?
Studies have shown that about 75% of most searches begin in Google and most people prefer to click on organic search rather than paid search.
Additionally, 67% of people click on the first five results of organic search, while 6 to 10 result accounts for about 3%.

From this studies, it obvious why businesses must strive to get their webpages or blog ranking high on search engine for their specific keywords.

It is crucial that your blog, website, product or service shows up on the first page of search engine.

In order to optimize your website for search engine, you must first understand how search engine works.

Search engines- How do they work?
Firstly here are the three basic task search engine does:

Search for information on the internet based on specific words
Keep an index of the words they find and where the location they found it
Allow users to search for those words they indexed or a combination of words
There are hundreds of millions of webpages that exist on the internet; to search for information, search engine employs a special software robot called spider to build a list of words found on web pages.

The process of search engine build its list is called web crawling.

After they have crawled the web pages, the store information found in their database, so it can easily be found when they need them.

This process is called indexing.

It is similar index you have in a book that enables you to find a keyword or topic.

So when you make a search for a keyword, the search engine searches its index for relevant information.

After the search, it provides a report of the web pages most relevant to your search in the search engine result page.

That’s how search engine works.

Now let’s talk about two strategies or tactics use for SEO

Black hat vs White hat
There two way people perform SEO, however, your choice will depend on your focus.
If you are more concerning about the money, a get rich quick scheme then you will probably employ Black hat SEO.

Black hat SEO is only concerned about optimizing your content for search and no taking into consideration human.

It attempts to improve web pages ranking in a way that is not acceptable by search engines. The aim of black hat SEO is to increase ranking in other to make money fast.

No doubt, using this approach will get you money faster but you may constantly need to be looking over your shoulders for search engine updated.

This is because it can lead to spammy, crappy pages that get penalized fast.

You would want this if you are looking to grow a sustainable business.

White hat SEO is a sure way to build a sustainable business, it focus on optimizing your content for human audience.

You provide content that are user friendly, easily readable and accessible by user. You play around within the search engine guidelines.

It takes a while and effort to achieve but it sure to get you result for long term business growth.

Here are the strategies of Black hat and White Hat SEO as explained by Inbound marketing inc

Black vs White Hat SEO.

Let’s talk about the three broad classes of SEO, which are: technical, On-page and Off-page SEO.

Technical SEO
So what technical SEO about?

You remember all the talk about how search engine works using software robot to crawl your web page, here is where technical SEO comes in.

Technical SEO deals with how well your site can be crawled and index by search engine spiders. There are a couple of factors to look out for in technical SEO.

They are:

Speed of your website
Is your site mobile responsive
Have your site been added to Webmaster or Google Console?
No broken links
Spam free
Does your site have a XML sitemap
Here are some tools and plugins that will help you with your technical SEO


Pluggins
Google XML sitemap: This plugin will help your SEO by helping Google better index your website with sitemap.

Broken Links Checker: Checks for broken links as this can affect your SEO.

Askimet: Helps fights against spam.

Wordfence: Protects site against malware and hackers.

Yoast SEO: It helps you optimize your articles for search engine

Accelerate Mobile Performance: This will help your mobile site load faster, which will help drive more traffic.

Google page speed: To check the speed of your website.

Google Console: To add your website to Google for crawling.

On-Page SEO
The primary focus of on-page SEO is to optimize your content for relevant keywords and giving user easy accessibility to your content.
Why is this important?
When search engine user request a search, they want to be rewarded with results that are relevant to what they are searching for.

As you may have heard ‘Content is King’, this is the most important step in SEO, you need to get the high quality and engaging content for your audience.

What are the things to look out for in on-page SEO?

Are you using relevant keywords?
Keywords are roadmaps that directs Google to your content, if you do not have relevant keywords, Google will not be able to show your content to your audience.

Relevant keywords will result in more visibility and as you get more and more visitors, Google rewards you will higher page ranking.

It is essential you do the necessary keyword research, do not use keywords based on guess work.

Hubspot guide for beginners will help you if you have never done a keyword research.

Is your keywords density too high or low?
Your keywords needs to appear in you text at the beginning, your subheadings and also in the body of your text.

The more keywords you have the more Google sees your web pages as relevant to the user search.

However, too many keywords will result in your website been penalized and lower your ranking. You would want that for your web pages.

Does your images have alt attributes?
Having alt attributed for your image can help your ranking

Does your content have inbound and outbound links?
Inbound links are links that come into your websites and outbound links are links that goes out of your website.

These links help to improve your SEO

Is your content long enough?
Search engine also looks at the length of your content, however, length must also include quality.

Off-Page SEO
According to Moz, Off-Page SEO refers actions that are taking outside your website to impact your ranking within search engine result page.
Off- Page SEO gives search engine an indication of user’s perception of your website. Search engine looks at factors like your website popularity, relevance, trustworthiness and authority.

Study have shown that Off-Page SEO carries more than 50% of the ranking factors for search engine.

This is why Off-Page SEO is very important.

After all the internally work has been done, it is now time to promote your website.

This is where backlinks come to play.

Search engine use backlinks as an indicator of the quality of you content.

When people reference you on their website, it shows search engine that you have useful information.

Backlinks from authority website will usually rank higher. So the value of the website that links to yours matters.

Some other ways to do Off-page SEO are

Social media sharing
Sharing your content on forums, message boards etc.
Guest Blogging
In Conclusion, SEO is very important for the long term growth of your business online. Getting your technical SEO and On page SEO right is the first step in your optimization journey.

However, SEO is not complete without Off page optimization.

Note: SEO can sometimes be complex for the beginner because the world of SEO is constantly changing. But with a steady learning process, you can get your optimization right.

Not sure you want to go through the hassle of learning, Contact us today @ www.bodmekdigitals.com/contact-us/ or Call +2349032231445. We will help you will your search engine optimization.

Hm

Inciteful and informative

After checking my blog for broken links, there were about 700 broken links that typed in about 5 years of work! This despite the fact that the blog posted a total of 8,000 links, 10% of all links lead nowhere. Where did such links come from? I checked my broken links using https://sitechecker.pro/broken-links/ tool. Here is a list like this:

1. Links to commentators sites. Visitors, when commenting on posts, add a link to the blog, and when their blog is deleted, of course, they will not write to me asking them to remove their link, search engines will push and spend energy on crawling sites when crawling the blog.

2. Links to an old mirror. This blog moved from another domain, so the old posts still had links to the old site, which I had already disabled.

3. Sponsored links. The blog posted a huge number of advertising links. Although I don’t post such links now, in the good old days up to 10 advertising posts a day from me and from a copywriter appeared on the blog, as sites tend to disappear, and among the sites that spent GGL budgets there are dead links can be removed, I think this is not a violation.

4. Links to affiliate programs. Even affiliate programs tend to close over time.

5. There are still “broken” pictures and other errors on the little things, but let's move on to the description of the plug-in, which will help to find all such links and part with them. I hope such measures will help in optimizing internal and behavioral factors, from time to time I get a desire to revive the blog and if the traffic grows, then this desire will also wake up.