What is SEO? Search Engine Optimization in simple terms

SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” In simple terms, it means the process of optimizing your site to increase its search engine ranking. SEO helps increase the quantity and quality of traffic to your website.

Main function of search engines are

Crawling is process of scanning the entire website and finding new or updated content. Once the crawler finds a page it will read all the data on the page and then navigates to all the links on the page and goes on and on.

All the data discovered by the crawler will be stored in an index. An Index is a huge database of content that will be used to search based on different criteria.

When someone performs a search, search engines scan their index for highly relevant content and then orders that content in the hopes of solving the query. This ordering of search results by relevance is known as ranking. In general, you can assume that the higher a website is ranked, the more relevant the search engine believes that site is to the query.

Now that we know how search engines work, SEO is nothing but making quality content in such a way that search engine can rank our content better.

Now that we know what is SEO, the next question is where should I start to optimize my site for SEO. Well, before going there one another thing to understand is the types of SEO. In grand scheme, it can be classified into 2 broad categories

On-page SEO

On-page SEO refers to the changes that we will be doing to our content to make it better and search engine friendly. There are multiple small things that we can do as part of on-page SEO that will give your website a huge boost in the ranking. Some of the most important things are

Off Page SEO

Any activity that gets a link from external website to our website can be termed as off page SEO. Link  building is the main step towards off page seo. While social media posting ,content marketing, reviews all amount to the same. Some of the link building methods include

Article Submission: Submitting articles in sites with high DA. If the articles are approved the site will earn a back link from the submitted site.

Classified Submission: Involves submitting of classified ads. Like article submission once they are approved the ads will show in the respective sites.

Image Submission: There are sites where we can submit images and where we can give a link to our website or any particular webpage. Imgur is an excellent image submitting site. All the social media can also be considered as image submission sites.

Forum Submission: Forums include sites like Quora, where we can post, comment or discuss regarding common topics and share links.

Anchor Text: Anchor text is text given to visible clickable hyperlink in a site. Adding keywords to anchor links increases the rank of the website. The format of anchor text is a href="http://www.websitebuilding.com">Website Building</a>, Website Building is called the anchor text in this example.

SEO to website is like how air is for breathing, important and needed. SEO to a website should be done at a regular pace and speed. It is to be kept in mind that SEO is not an overnight miracle, rather it takes effort, time and regular practice for a fruitful SEO.