What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization is the process of manipulating the visibility of a website or web page in search engines. Search engine crawlers look through websites to determine how well it relates to certain keywords and which websites are more important than others based on user-driven traffic patterns. There are many ways to increase your website's visibility, but there isn't an exact formula for doing so; every site has different needs. However, there are best practices that most major search engines recommend for attaining high rankings. SEO optimizes your website for both users and crawlers by improving your content's relevance to both groups of people. This increases traffic to your site via organic search results (which businesses usually pay money for).
What are the basic SEO techniques?
You can do many different things to optimize your website according to best practices, but they typically involve both on-site and off-site work. On-Site techniques typically include tweaking HTML title tags, URL structures, meta descriptions, headers, alt text for images or videos. Off-Site optimization includes creating content that other websites link to (backlinks) as well as optimizing social media profiles. The most important thing about any of these techniques is that Google has to be able to crawl them! Any mobile site should be accessible by Googlebot mobile, which is a software program designed by Google's web crawlers. It's crucial for your site's SEO rankings that it works for Google bots.
How does Google rank websites?
The algorithm that determines your website's ranking is known as "PageRank." Google's crawler (Googlebot) indexes millions of websites and stores the information. Based on a site's metrics, a search engine ranks it based on an array of factors, including Domain Authority, backlinks, word count in the content, number of other indexed pages linking to it, social media popularity, etc. The more authority a site has, the better chance it has at getting ranked higher. A page with high authority usually means that its creator invested time and resources to make their page popular. Sources with higher PageRank get more traffic from search results due to their above lower-ranked sources. Over time, the page's authority increases as links on other sites point to it. This means that even if a new site gets a lot of links on day one, Googlebot will take some time to add the page's authority before finally ranking it on search results higher than lower-ranked pages with fewer backlinks. A site's domain is also an important factor in determining its rankings. Generic terms like "Movie" or "Video Game" usually have more websites trying to rank for them because they're more popular and therefore competitive keywords. Sites that specialize in a certain topic tend to rank higher on search engines for their specific niche since they have less competition from other sites.
This is why it's important to target specific and popular keywords if you want your site to rank higher.
How can you improve your SEO?
The best way to do this is by optimizing the content on your site for search bots (Google bots) as well as users. To make sure Google can easily crawl your page, you should avoid using Flash, JavaScript, cookies, etc., since crawlers cannot index these things the same way a user with a browser would. Also, keep your page size under 2MB, so mobile users don't have to wait too long for pages to load. Generally speaking, websites with faster loading speeds tend to have higher rankings. People usually focus more on improving their own website's SEO rather than their competitors'. However, you don't want to ignore your competition. You should monitor what works for them and try to implement it on your own site. For example, if a competitor's video gets 100 views per day but yours only gets 10, figure out why that is so you can apply it to your videos as well!
SEO isn't just about how much authority Google assigns to your site—it's also about making sure users find it in the search results. Users are more likely to click on sites with relevant keywords in the title or URL because they're more specific. When optimizing your content for user experience, give fine details about what the user will get from clicking on each page of your website. This includes using targeted keywords in your titles and URLs and focusing on quality over quantity.
SEO isn't a one-time thing—it's an ever-changing process that all website creators should adapt to. Websites are always competing with each other for rankings, which is why it's important to keep track of what works and implement those changes onto your own site whenever necessary. If nothing else, focus on keeping your content unique and targeting specific and popular keywords so you can achieve higher rankings in search results.
