What is SEO? Powerful checklist to optimize your website.

 

What is SEO?

In the good old days of the internet, you could have ranked on page 1 with no efforts at all but things have changed a lot in these past few decades. The level of competitiveness for ranking your article on page 1 of Google search has grown exponentially over these past decades.
Here comes in SEO, namely search engine optimization. In simple words, all the small and big things we do to get our article featured on page 1 of Google search results. We have put up a small but powerful checklist to optimize your website and improve SEO ranking.

What are Keywords?

‘Keywords’ is a word or a group of words used by the searcher on Google to find a solution to their query or suggestion.
For example, when you search for Cajun chicken recipe on Google search results, this is what you see:

As you can see that the results are an exact match for what you were looking for. This happens because the websites use keywords to tell Google what type of content/website you own. It helps Google provide suitable results to the masses and in return, the websites get a rank stating how related the article/website is from the keywords used in it.

Post Title, Meta title, and Description:

Post title of an article is as important as a person’s name, Without that, you won’t know who you are referring to or reading about. Imagine having to keep jumping articles just because you didn’t find what you were looking for. That’s the main reason your Post title should always reflect very closely to the topic of the article.

While searching for Cajun chicken recipe as seen in the above image, you can see the title for each search result, this is called Meta title. It is as important as Post title. While Post title tells you what the article is about when you are already on the page, the Meta title is the title seen in search results and determines whether the audience will find your article more relative than other articles listed or not.

The description is equally important as it gives a little preview of the article.

All these 3 things have the power of making or breaking the rankings.

Content:

Have you ever read poorly written posts on a website? Everyone has gone through that horrible experience one day or the other and you never return to that website. Eventually, the article gets thrown into the back alleys of Google and gets lost in the universe of the internet. Content is important because if you have everything listed here up to the mark but you are having a badly written content, as the saying goes “Content is King” is not false by any measure.

Always check your content on the various plagiarism checkers available on Google for free before posting them on your website, especially if you have them written for you by any other author than yourself to save you from any regret later.

Link building – Interlinking and Backlinks:

Link building is an important part of your SEO, the reason being that it gives your website an authority.

Imagine the home page of your website as Subway Station A and the latest post being your Subway Station B. Now if your guest (reader) has to go to station B from station A, they will have to go through an underground tunnel connecting station B to station A. This underground connecting tunnel is called as Interlinks.

Backlinks sometimes are also called as In-bound Link (IBL). Its an incoming link to your webpage/website from another webpage on the internet.
There was once a time when even low-quality backlinks ranked a website to higher ranks but after the rolling of Penguin Algorithm by Google that changed. Better to have no backlinks than to have Lower quality backlinks. Higher quality backlinks can make a huge difference even if you have one of them pointing to your website.

Permalinks:

The permanent URLs used for denoting the individual pages or blog posts are known as Permalinks. These should never change.

Like we published an article about ‘Premium WordPress themes’. So our permalink is shown below:

This gives Google an idea of what this article is about. The visitor, as well as Google, can infer what the article is about. Had it been something like this:

No one would have been able to figure out where this link might lead you to.
They are made as user-friendly as possible so the reader can easily find the page they are looking for. Sometimes even a URL shortening is used to create a Permalink to make it easy to use.

Image Alt and Robots.txt:

Image alt is one of the most important SEO factor being overlooked by many website owners and even SEO professionals. The text in the image alt tag appears when the image is unable to appear or takes too long to load. It is even utilized by screen readers for the blind and visually impaired to read out the text, thus making it accessible to them.
If the added image is relevant to your piece of content, adding an HTML image tag via alt attribute can be boon.

Robots.txt is also known as the Robots exclusion protocol. It has its own set of commands to give access to your website and signal the web crawlers to specify which kind of crawlers you want to allow to crawl your website (phone crawlers/desktop crawlers) and also which part of the website should be processed or scanned.

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