Introduction

Introduction

This guide was developed to take the mystery out of search engines—how they function and how to make them work for you. To help you understand the basics of search engine optimization (SEO), we’ll cover websites, web design and online content. You’ll learn why SEO is important, and how you can implement your new knowledge of SEO principles. After you finish this guide, you’ll be fully acquainted with the SEO process and you’ll understand a large portion of the mechanics behind it.

What is SEO?

SEO is the method of increasing a website’s visibility and ranking on search engine results pages. SEO helps us create sites that are more search-engine friendly, and sites that deliver a better user experience.

Many things influence a website’s visibility, including design, on-page keywords, and links. Furthermore, many elements of SEO aren’t well known. As a result, people can’t take full advantage of SEO to improve the ranking of their websites and content.

Anatomy of a Search Engine

It’s important to keep in mind that search engines use algorithms that are still growing and developing. And search engine updates are created to help search engines deliver higher quality results.

How it works

To explain it in simpler terms, SEO works on the following principle.

Google receives over 57,000 searches per second on any given day which translates into nearly 2 trillion searches per year

Google estimates that the Internet now contains roughly five million terabytes of data – but the search giant has indexed only 0.04% of it all

Why it’s important

You have a purpose for creating your website and you want people to be able to find it. Knowing SEO can help you build your audience. You’ll know what design elements to prioritize and learn how to create content that will have high exposure and satisfying quality for your visitors.

Also, without SEO, all your hard work will be for nothing, since a website without any visibility is almost like a website that doesn’t exist. Finally, if you don’t have enough visitors, knowing SEO can help you figure out exactly why your site lacks visibility and guide you in taking steps to improve your rankings.

Can you do it on your own?

Google accounted for nearly 40% of all U.S. digital ad spending last year. Facebook’s share was about 8%

In theory, yes. SEO is something you can do on your own if you have the necessary skill set. You’ll need to know how to design a website, write quality content, optimize your website for smaller screen platforms and address other more technical aspects. The good news is that there are many tools to help you with these tasks.

SEO is a lifelong process and your website needs to be up to date, so you’ll need to add content and update your website frequently. Considering how much effort it takes to have a quality SEO campaign, many people choose to outsource all or part of it.

Now, we will go over some of the specifics related to SEO, and you will see just how many elements a quality SEO campaign includes.

When you’re working on SEO, you need to be aware of the existing factors that influence your ranking. These are elements that influence your ranking in either a negative or positive manner. There are two types of ranking factors: On-page and Off page. We’ll go over these factors and elaborate further on some of them throughout the rest of the guide. You’ll see how some are self-explanatory, whereas others might require clarification.

On-page SEO

Luckily, with the WordPress platform, there are several different plugins that will allow you to perfectly optimize your on-page SEO easily! Let’s take a look at a couple of things you should pay attention to.

Page optimization and loading speed

Web pages which load faster than 2 seconds are considered good in Google’s record books

Every single page on your website should load fast. It is no secret that Google ranks faster websites higher, and this is because they want to offer the best performance for their users. Also, if your website loads slowly, you can expect higher bounce rates. There are two important factors you should take into consideration when optimizing pages and their loading speeds.

First, your web pages should be optimized for different types of devices. Luckily, this is easy to check. Before you decide to purchase a WordPress theme, check whether it has mobile support; it will make your pages significantly better optimized from the start.

Slightly more than half of all U.S. online shoppers won’t buy from a site if it loads slowly

When it comes to loading speeds, there are plugins that can help you run your website a couple of times faster. Using these plugins might not be necessary for the beginning, but as the number of your visitors grow, adding a caching plugin will become necessary. Therefore, add it from the start, as it will make you WordPress website fly. One of the most popular caching plugins is WP Super Cache.

Read more on https://firstsiteguide.com/wordpress-seo/