In short, it can be said that website optimization or SEO causes a site to be displayed in a higher position by search engines such as Google, that is, on their search page to people who search for words related to those websites. Those people are attracted to websites.
You must have noticed that the income of a website that is on the first page of a Google search is much higher than the income of a site that is on the second page because people enter a website through a Google search. They have searched for phrases related to the same website, which means that they have been looking for services, products, or content of that website, so the probability of doing a profitable action on their part is very high for websites. That’s why people who know what SEO is and specialize in it can earn a lot of money.
You may have often heard business owners or marketers talk about the importance of digital marketing or the benefits of SEO. You’ve also probably heard why every small business should be involved in SEO. But what is the comprehensive and complete definition of SEO?
SEO means site optimization for search engines and it may only be a three-letter word but it can make a world of difference in your digital marketing strategies. In the following, we will answer the question, what is the definition of SEO, and also examine some other common questions related to site optimization for search engines, so that we can help you gain a better understanding of the nature and importance of SEO for your site. bring.
In this context, the following topics are reviewed:
All these topics have been completely reviewed for you. This content is updated in different time intervals and we explain to you every new point in line with SEO.
What is SEO and how does it work?
The meaning of site optimization for search engines or SEO (SEO: Search Engine Optimization) is the process of changing the design and content of the website for better display in the search engine. By optimizing your website for search engines, you can improve your website’s visibility in organic and non-paid searches in search engine results. So far, we have provided you with a brief definition of SEO, but we will discuss it further.
In other words, the definition of site SEO is as follows: Search engines, especially Google, have put an important principle in their agenda in order to become popular and remain popular with users, and that principle is user satisfaction, now ask yourself a When is the user fully satisfied when using a search engine? Exactly! Your answer is correct when you find an answer and a suitable and comprehensive result for your searched question or phrase in the results provided by that search engine.
For this reason, in order to improve and increase the satisfaction of their users, search engines have created algorithms to score and audit websites in order to provide them with the best results for the terms searched by users.
These algorithms check various criteria on the sites to find out which site is a better result for the user’s questions and then the sites that have scored more according to those criteria are displayed on the search results page with a higher position than the competitors. become Now, the process and set of activities that are carried out on a website in order to comply with the criteria of search engines and improve the position of the site in the search results is called SEO.
By improving SEO, the position of your website pages and content in search engine results will be improved. The better your website is in the eyes of search engines and the more points it gets from them, i.e. it conforms to their factors and criteria, the more likely they will find you in relevant searches for keywords related to your products or services. Users will provide more and you will get a higher position than the sites that are related to those words but have fewer points.
For example, Alibaba’s site ranks first on the results page for the phrase “buy train tickets”. They do not pay any financial costs to attract people and customers who enter their website through Google.
By making small or complex changes to your website, your business can boost its SEO and improve your search engine rankings. The goal of most businesses is to rank on the first page of Google, Bing, and other search engines for keywords and phrases that are related to your products or services. The only way you can improve your rankings is to improve your SEO over time. In other words, the mentioned goal is the main goal of SEO.
What is ranking in SERPs?
Now that you understand what SEO is and what it means, we want to go a little further. Another common question we hear is; What is site ranking in Google?
SERP (Search Engine Result Page) means search engine results page. The ranking of your company’s site in Google means the position of your site in Google’s SERP. Improving your site’s search engine optimization will help you boost your rankings and increase your site’s visibility to search engine users. The higher your SERP ranking for relevant keywords and phrases, the more likely customers will find your site, services, products, or related topics in the search engine.
For the most part, most customers only check the first page of Google, Bing, or any other search engine. For this reason, any business that wants to increase its visibility in search engines and its customers should try to improve its SERP ranking and be on the first page of search results.
I know what SEO is and I have done optimization work; How do I improve my site’s SEO?
There are various factors that affect your ranking and SEO. Although Google uses complex algorithms to determine your ranking in the search engine, you can still improve your ranking by using the best available methods for website design and content creation.
In the following, we mention some methods that you can use to improve your ranking in search engine results.
- producing quality content; One of the best ways to improve SEO ranking is to produce unique and important quality content. The more quality content you produce, the more search engines will attach importance to your site and realize that your site is useful.
- Do a keyword search; Another important element to improve SEO is keyword research. You need to find the keywords that your customers and visitors are looking for. You should then create your own content based on these keywords and phrases to increase your chances of ranking in the SERPs.
- Make sure your site is mobile-friendly; If you want to compete in the digital market, you definitely need to have a mobile-friendly site. Mobile-friendly sites not only improve the user experience on your website but also affect your SEO ranking.
- website optimization for voice search; Did you know that according to Google, 41% of adults and 55% of teenagers now use voice search on a daily basis? Additionally, according to Gartner research, 30% of searches in 2020 will be voice searches. In today’s world where many people prefer to use voice search, this will definitely affect your website’s SEO.
The most important difference between voice and text (typed) searches is the keywords used. When a person wants to search by text, they write “cheap bedding” into the search engine, but when the same person wants to search by voice, they say “how can I buy cheap bedding?”. So you see that in voice search, longer keywords are used. Because naturally, spoken phrases are longer and have more questions. So, if you want to know what SEO keywords are, you must first determine whether the keyword is audio or text.
There are a few other SEO factors that you need to control. However, various factors are external, that is, these factors are influenced by the visitors or readers of your website. For example, the credibility of your site is based on the quality of other sites or people who use the link of your pages or share your page with others.
The more quality sites have used your link, that is, they have placed the link of your website pages on their website pages for their users to see, the more credit you will have. The fact that other sites put links to your site’s pages on their pages is called backlinks.
Another SEO factor that can affect your SERP ranking is whether visitors spend enough time interacting with your content or leave your site quickly. This parameter is also known as bounce rate. Because there is no way to guarantee that visitors will stay on your site for a long time and use your content, you need to create attractive content that your audience will want to use and stay on your site.
What are the negative factors affecting SEO?
There are certain activities that can help improve your SEO, but there are also factors that have a negative impact on SEO. In this section, we examine some negative SEO factors:
- Poor content or insufficient information; Some companies try to use simple methods to produce content and put poor content on their website. But, content that has little information usually creates a negative impact on your SEO. This content is not useful for your website visitors, so Google and other search engines will penalize your site for poor content.
- Content that contains too many keywords; Another issue that can have a negative impact on search engine rankings is the use of keywords. This happens when you use a lot of keywords in your content for no reason. For example, you may use a keyword twenty times in a blog post, but your post has no value or meaning. This text is just filled with keywords. Search engines penalize this behavior because it doesn’t really add value to visitors.
- link to spam content; In the previous section, we talked about backlinks from quality sources and their positive impact on your website’s credibility, which improves your search engine rankings. But if you have links from spam blogs, forums, or other less reputable sources, it may have a negative impact on your SERP ranking.
These are just a few of the limited ones that have a negative impact on your SEO. The best way to avoid being penalized for this behavior is to use the best SEO practices and focus on producing quality content. Search engine optimization takes time to generate organic traffic to your site. Now you might say that this process takes time and what is the benefit of SEO?
It is true that SEO is a time-consuming process; But, using the best methods and trying to create quality and useful content will definitely bring you a lot of profit in the end. In this way, when a site gets the first rank in the search results after a long period of time, it will not see a drop in the rank easily, and if it uses SEO techniques correctly, it may be at the top for years. The top positions of the search results remain.
What is the impact of social networks on SEO?
Another common question we hear is: Does social media have an impact on SEO? This question is very important.
There are several ways that social media activity can have an impact on SEO and site ranking. Generally speaking, your social media content will drive more traffic to your website.
By sharing links regularly on your website and providing links to your content on social media such as Facebook and LinkedIn, you will attract more potential customers to your site and present your content to more people.
Your company profiles on social media can also be ranked in search engines. For example, search the name of your company in Google right now. Are your social media profiles also displayed? Companies that are active in social media usually use Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other profiles so that these profiles are displayed in the search results along with the company’s website.
The best way to rank social media profiles is to engage and actively engage with contacts and followers on different media. Of course, you are still at the beginning; But if you know the function of SEO tools, you will realize that many of these SEO site analysis tools also show you social network profiles. This means that social networks can help your ranking in Google search results in many ways.
Sometimes your social credibility also affects the ranking of your site. This means that search engines consider the number of followers and their engagement with your social media pages for ranking. They then use this information to determine your brand’s ranking in search results.
The importance of SEO in business
Now that you know what SEO is and know a little bit about how it works, you might say to yourself, why should SEO training be important to me?
It doesn’t matter what field you operate in or how big or small your business is, but everyday customers are looking for online brands like yours in search engines like Google, and you can use SEO on your site. Attract these potential customers yourself.
Think of it this way: Where do you look when you want to get information about a product or service? Internet and Google!
For this reason, your customers also use the Internet and search engines to find answers to questions or research related to various products or services. For most customers, the process that leads to their purchase begins with a search on a search engine such as Google.
They search for phrases or keywords that match their needs and then go to a website that can provide them with a good solution. If they come across your business first, they are more likely to buy from you.
By improving SEO, you can improve your ranking on the search engine results page. This will improve your visibility, increase the likelihood of attracting customers and improve your ranking. By using quality content that focuses on relevant keywords and phrases, you can help customers when they need them and provide answers to their questions and solutions to their problems.
Search engine optimization is very important for small businesses that want to compete in the online market. Most small businesses have small digital marketing budgets. Although they may not be able to compete with big companies in the field of advertising, still SEO can have a good effect on their work. Any company, regardless of its size, can improve search engine optimization and improve its SEO.
Search engines and their importance in SEO
One of the most important things to keep in mind regarding your company’s website is that your vision should go beyond search engines. In other words, you have to think about the human users who come to your website and use your content. Of course, this may be a bit strange at first glance, but this attitude is one of the best ways to improve SEO and search engine ranking.
For example, you can write content that is perfectly optimized for search engines, but if this content is meaningless to humans, it will not benefit your business. It doesn’t matter how many times you use the same keyword in your post or page, if the content doesn’t help your visitors, they will definitely leave your site and never come back.
I suggest that you first get to know the search engine of the web world, how they work, and important points in this regard:
A look at search engines and their SEO
Many people use websites to grow their businesses, but they may not take advantage of digital marketing because they are not familiar with how search engines work. As a result, here you understand the importance of SEO and understanding search engines. Search engines make websites successful, so by using search engines you can improve your website’s performance and introduce your business to others on the Internet.
To succeed in anything, you must know the platform on which you are working. Therefore, having the answer to the question of what SEO is and knowing the search engines will help you achieve great success in your work and expand your activities under SEO.
Concept of search engine
Search engines have different functions, many people are trying to start a business on this platform. Before learning the functions of search engines, you should familiarize yourself with their concept.
Many people have these questions:
What is a search engine?
How are search engines created?
There are many questions that you need to do some research to find out. Search engines are computer programs that can use any platform to find information.
In general, in response to these questions, we must say that these are question-answering machines. Search engines are software systems that seek to find content in the global network, these engines find content that matches the search terms.
How search engines work
In order to be able to find the right information from millions of websites, search engines must understand what information is there and provide that information to users correctly. This process is carried out in three stages, which include the following:
- to crawl
- to index
- ranking
When these actions are done, the search engines will find the newly published content and categorize it for users. In the following, we will examine each of the said steps.
Crawling: All types of search engines have robots known as spiders and crawlers. Newly published content or changes made to them are sent to crawlers and spiders. These robots will examine the existing pages and by following the existing links, they will go to other pages and crawl them.
Indexing: After the website is crawled, search engines try to classify their information, indexing is generally referred to as storing crawled pages.
Ranking: When users search for terms in Google, search engines will refer to their databases to find information that matches the searched term, all the pages that are found are provided to users according to a certain ranking. Takes. As mentioned in this discussion, search engines can store millions of information in their database and provide them when needed.
All these things show the importance of SEO. SEO and its principles are trying to optimize your content and pages both for users and for better display in search engines like Google.
Common and widely used SEO terms
Well, we hope that by now you have understood well what SEO is; in this section, without having a proper understanding of the generalities of SEO, you cannot understand the commonly used terms of SEO.
Always try to create a good foundation in the beginning and build your desired structure on it. So if you still don’t know what SEO is, go back and read this article even a few times so that you don’t have any problems in the future; Of course, if you want to start your activity in the field of site optimization!
At the beginning of the Google search engine, it was difficult to answer the question of what is SEO; But the top websites that were active in this field expressed terms and terms to make the understanding of SEO concrete for everyone.
One of the things that these websites, including Moz, did was to categorize SEO-related activities into several sections. In the following, we will introduce these categories and names to you dear ones. All the information that we will provide you in the following is taken from the SEO Neoseo training course.
White hat SEO
White hat SEO is one of the most common SEO terms. Do you remember that we mentioned above that SEO means coordinating your site with Google’s ranking algorithm? Well, we must say that there are some activities that are outside of this framework and can increase the rank of your website! We will talk more about this issue in the future and we have nothing to do with this type of activity at the moment. White hat SEO actually means good SEO, Legal SEO, etc.
All the activities that are known as white hat SEO are in accordance with Google’s rules and its algorithm, and any website that is better than other sites understands this compliance to Google can rank in the top ranks of Google’s search results. to be classified
Black hat SEO
Another category in which some SEO activities are placed is black hat SEO. Black hat includes methods and techniques, the purpose of doing all of them is to bypass or fool the crawler of the search engine.
If you have been searching on the web for a long time, you must have searched for a phrase and entered one of the sites suggested by Google; But after logging in, you have not seen any content or articles that match your search term!
This issue was one of the black hat SEO techniques, during which different users entered the same page for multiple keywords, and that page greatly increased the rank and overall website traffic.
But nowadays, such actions are no longer possible on the part of webmasters; Because Google has made many updates in its ranking algorithm to prevent black hat techniques from appearing and succeeding. But there are still methods that some webmasters use to bypass Google’s algorithms and rank among the top.
But be careful that if a site uses these principles and Google notices this, it will generally remove the site from its search results!
Internal SEO or on-page SEO
You have probably heard the name of this type of site optimization a lot and you are somewhat familiar with it. Internal SEO includes everything that your users see on the site.
The main part of internal SEO is the content of the site. You must optimize all internal factors of your site for search engines and users. Internal SEO is effective in improving the ranking of your site if it provides structured, unique (non-copy), high-quality, and special content to the audience.
Content that provides the best answer to a user’s problem can rank well in search results.
So we understand that the most important part of inbound SEO is to make sure your content is high quality and awesome. But this alone is not enough and there are a number of other important factors that must be observed. If you are interested in getting more information in this field, our internal SEO article can be a good option for you.
External SEO or Off-page SEO
Providing a precise definition for external SEO is perhaps a bit more difficult than internal SEO. But briefly and comprehensively, external SEO can be defined as follows:
The external SEO of the site includes all the activities that are not done in the internal environment of the site and are related to other sites, and their purpose is to improve the ranking and credibility of the website.
The first and most important part of external website SEO is link building. Always remember that link building is one of the biggest parts of SEO and you will always need it. Some SEO experts consider link building to be the most difficult task in site optimization.
This is a very important issue…
Getting links from websites that have a good reputation with Google can have a great impact on the ranking of your site’s pages. Be careful that you can never measure the impact that a link has on a website. Naturally, getting links from reputable websites is not an easy task.
Social networks are another effective external signal that will improve your site’s ranking. If users talk about your website on different social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, etc., and you are there as a well-known brand, this issue can indirectly help increase your credibility in Google.
In addition, you can invite your social media fans to your website and get good traffic.
So far, you have understood what SEO is and what are the definitions of white hat, black hat, and internal and external sub-branches. There are two other important parts, namely technical SEO and local SEO, which every SEO should know well.
Technical SEO
Before we try to optimize a website, we need to check its foundation and make sure that there are no problems. If there is a fundamental problem with a website from the very beginning, most of your subsequent efforts to improve your site’s ranking will be fruitless.
This process, during which the site’s technical problems are analyzed and solved, is called technical or technical SEO. Code compression, improving site speed, security, the status of 404 pages and redirects, checking the status of tags, etc. are among the actions that should be taken in technical SEO.
Of course, performing some technical SEO measures requires knowledge of coding. For this reason, usually, SEOs who do not have skills in this field, transfer the identified problems to their website developer and ask him to solve these problems. After that, the site optimization path is paved and you can easily focus on other SEO parts of the site and get the best results.
Backlink
When you know what SEO is, one of the most important terms to know is backlinks. All the links that are given to your site from other sites are called backlinks. There are different types of backlinks. In the training course on building backlinks, we have completely reviewed their types, building methods, etc. for you.
Some of the most important types of backlinks are:
- Backlink by PBN method
- Backlinks using the honey method
- Backlink by infographic method
- Backlinks using social networks
- Backlink by Alexa method
- Backlink to the ad registration method
- Backlinks on EDU sites
- Backlink in the contest method
- Backlink by sending an email
- Backlink by guest post method
- Backlinks in the method of internal links
- Backlinks to free books
- Backlink by interview method
- Backlink to sharing method
- Viral report
- Advertisement report
- Backlink by question and answer method
- Backlinks by way of comments and side views
- Backlinks in a personal blog way
The important thing that you need to know about the definition of SEO and backlinks is that a website reaches the top results of Google when other sites have linked to it. In a simpler way, other sites recommend your site to their users. This will make your site more noticed by Google than competitors and it will be easier to reach the top results of Google.
Content production
Perhaps at first glance, the term content production is not considered an SEO term, but it plays a very, very important role in site optimization. Each page of the site should contain content to be well introduced to the users. Products must have content so that users can recognize and buy them. The blog page is the main content source of websites. In general, the production of high-quality content, as mentioned earlier, helps the SEO of the site and reaches the first results of Google.
Redirects
Redirect in Farsi means to change the path. In SEO, we need to change the path of some pages in order to optimize the site in all different ways. Pages of products that are not available, pages that have been deleted, pages that have become so-called viral, etc. are all redirected by different redirects.
The types of redirects are:
Redirect 301: It is a permanent transfer of a URL that usually transfers between 90 and 99% of the credit of a page.
Redirect 302: Same use as redirect 301 and only in some structures, these two redirects are different.
Redirect 307: This redirect also works almost like 302 and 301, but it is used for HTTP version 1.1.
Google Adsense
Google AdSense is a banner advertising platform of Google, which receives a commission from the advertiser for correct clicks by users. Of course, it does not receive money only per click. It may sometimes also get paid for banner placement and page views depending on site conditions. This platform is practical and suitable for those who intend to speed up their site’s SEO and do not have a problem with spending. Of course, those who know what SEO is and have learned its techniques well will never look for Google Adsense.
Anchor text
Text that contains a link and moves the user from one page to another is called anchor text. There are different types of embeddings and each one is used depending on the situation. In using various types of anchor text, you must be familiar with external SEO tips and techniques and build backlinks.
Some of the most important types of anchor text are:
- Exact Match anchor text or general matching
- Branded anchor text or brand name
- Partial Match anchor text
- Anchor text Naked Link or naked link
- Generic anchor text
- Anchor text Image or image
- Anchor text Brand + Keyword or keyword + brand
- Long Tail anchor text
Cannibalization
Sometimes a small mistake or negligence causes great damage to businesses, cannibalization or cannibalization is also one of the problems that result from insufficient information or negligence for sites and a heavy blow to SEO. The site enters. As a result, one of the important things that you need to know about SEO is, is cannibalization.
If you want to start SEO work or design a website for yourself and start working on it, you should be fully familiar with cannibalization so that if one day, God forbid, this problem affects you, you will know the solution to fix it.
What is meant by cannibalism?
Some people who have just entered the SEO profession and do not know much about it, think that if they use one or more keywords in all their articles, they can improve the ranking of that keyword in Google and get a better position. Google to find.
This notion is fundamentally wrong, when you have used the same keyword in several of your content, Google does not know which article to show the user, resulting in two or sometimes even three of your articles on the top results page. brings, with these explanations, you probably have understood what cannibalization is by now.
In this case, the different pages of your site that are displayed in a search, start competing with each other and each one tries to get more ranking and incoming traffic. This competition is called cannibalism because two pages of your site are trying to defeat each other.
If you don’t know much about SEO, you might think this is very nice and say what’s wrong with it? In this way, the ranking of my site in Google will improve! But the truth is that this issue not only does not help the development of your site but also causes a large drop in SEO and its ranking.
Why is homophobia bad for SEO?
In cannibalization, two pages of the site are competing with each other, and this causes the rank of both of them to decrease. Therefore, it is better to write only one piece of content about a topic and try to write that article in the best and most complete way possible.
The problem is that in addition to recognizing the same keywords, Google is also sensitive to the general topic of the content, and when you have written two completely different texts about the same topic, you may be cannibalized.
The second effect of cannibalism on the site’s SEO is that instead of competing with your competitors to reach the top of Google results, you will be competing with yourself, and at the same time that a civil war has been started on your site, competitors They overtake you and your rank drops drastically.
How to recognize cannibalization?
Now that we are fully acquainted with cannibalization, it is time to know how to recognize it on the site. Finding the origin of this civil war on the site is not easy, but with the various tools that are available, we can find the problem a little faster.
Google Search Console: Google Search Console has helped webmasters in many situations and we can use this powerful tool to detect cannibalization. For this, you must enter the Performance section in the search console and then select one of the queries. In this section, you can see how many pages each keyword is used on the site and check cannibalization.
Factors affecting the price of SEO project
So far, you have understood well what SEO is and you should also have information about how to make money and the prices that are considered for SEO projects. We have discussed this topic in detail in the context of SEO site price calculation, but in the following, we will examine some points that will give you brief information in this field.
It is true that it is not possible to determine a fixed figure for the SEO project, but in general, this pricing is done in two ways:
- The employer proposes an amount and they agree on it with the SEO specialist
- From the very beginning, the SEO specialist offers an amount according to the work he wants to do.
In both cases, regardless of the set price, either part of the cost is paid before the work is done and the rest after it, or the entire amount of the project is received at once by the SEO specialist, this matter is completely dependent on the parties to the contract. It depends only on their opinion.
There are many ways to determine the price of SEO services, for example, some people charge an hourly fee between 30 and 60 thousand tomans for each hour, and others charge the cost as a project. They get full SEO.
Next, we want to talk about the issues that affect the price and tariff of SEO based on the project.
The number of site sales
Those of you who know what SEO is, definitely know that the goal of improving the site’s status and SEO is to reach the first page and rank 1 in Google, by doing this, the site’s sales will increase. For this reason, some SEO specialists determine their fees according to the number of site sales that were due to their SEO.
To determine the number of sales resulting from Google input, you can use tools such as Google Analytics.
Keyword ranking
Pricing based on keyword ranking is one of the most common and popular pricing methods for SEO. In this method, the employer gives the SEO specialist a list of keywords he wants to rank better and sets a price based on their growth rate.
Despite the popularity of this method, it has more disadvantages than other pricing methods, for example, one of these disadvantages can be considered the amount of pressure and stresses it causes to the SEO specialist. In addition, there are no guarantees for anything and SEO cannot promise 100% to improve the ranking.
incoming traffic from Google
By learning how to use Schema, SEOs try to increase the number of Google traffic and site visits. Determining the project based on this is also one of the popular methods.
