INTRODUCTION TO LEARN SEO - TUTORIAL SERIES
Learn SEO is a place where Soppnox will be publishing step by step learning guides for beginners in SEO. We believe this will help everyone who is interested in knowing or strengthening their fundamentals of search engine optimization. As time progresses we have a plan to add modules on more advanced SEO at a regular basis.
PS: - Do not be surprised if we refer only Google for a search engine throughout our learning series!
TUTORIAL 1: FROM THE GROUND UP
If you have heard about Search engine optimization or SEO quite recently, you might have lot of questions pouring inside your head. Do people talk about robots.txt, SERP, backlinks, link juice, bread crumbs, canonical issue and many more jargon which probably intimidate you?
We will clarify everything for you step by step.
WHAT IS SEO ANYWAY?
Let us consider that you are planning to buy an acoustic guitar. Before you head to the store for the purchase you would like to do a little research on the internet yourself to know - which is the best brand, the cost, popular stores nearby etc.
Definitely your use your favorite search engine for this purpose. You will be entering a query or a search phrase into the search box of Google (Or Yahoo! Or Bing). These search phrases are also called as “keywords”. You will most likely to enter, “best acoustic guitar brands”. This will give you a result page also called as SERP- Search Engine Result Page as shown in the screenshot.
Google has found more than 3 million pages which contained your query related information! Please refer the screenshot under search bar.
Now, which links you’d choose to click and refer? Certainly, not beyond second page! Or probably you will end your search in the first page itself. The action you are most likely to take is, glance through the first page quickly, decide which would be the most appropriate link that would give you the best information and click on it. If that gives you the satisfactory answer you may choose to end your search and close the browser window or otherwise may choose to read the content given by other links on first quickly to compare the information. That’s it.
This is how a typical search process happens. Hope this has demonstrated why it is important for websites to get featured on first page of SERP.
This is when Search engine optimization comes into picture. SEO makes your website to feature on first page of Google’s SERP organically or naturally. That means you do not pay Google for your website’s rankings. And for that reason, SEO is a long term process where you have to continually optimize your website to be on the top. If your competitor’s strategy beats yours then your rankings will drop. Also search engines change their algorithms frequently to stop spamming or to keep the results unbiased. SEO professionals must upgrade their knowledge according to the search engines in order to keep the rankings of websites they handle on the top.
