It’s time for everyone to learn this simple and most needed skill! Who knows you may own a website in the coming days and may have to optimize a website by yourself for search engines or may have to make someone else’s website to rank up on search engines like Google or Bing for free without any paid marketing effort.

I foresee that many would badly need this SEO skill in the coming days and hence have developed an SEO tutorial step by step with examples wherever possible.

Note: The SEO guide I am providing is based on the real-time implementations that I have executed on the massive websites Redbus, Bigbasket, Babyoye, Mobikwik, Dailyhunt and many more. 100% success rate and are ethical and as per the norms or guidelines of search engines.

A knowledge talk/Facts about search engine optimization

• There are few millions of websites hosted on the internet and doesn’t have any kind of visibility and hardly 10-20% of the websites have visibility and 90% of them got visibility by optimizing them for search engines.
• Search engine optimization of the website is the only reliable channel when compared to other channels that supporting/driving the business and business owners to achieve their goals of selling a product or service through search engines
• Search engine optimization of the website has also improved the conversion rates of traffic coming from all channels by at least 3-6 times.
• 90+% of them do search engine optimization for Google

Search Engine Optimization for Google and other search engines

In search engine optimization you have to initiate a couple of implementations hand on hand or parallel so that your website optimization can be completed on time and the results will be on time.

I suggest one to read about search engines and their functionality before they start with the optimization of the website, read here.

Remember SEO’s main objective is to make the website rank on Google for keywords related to the content, product or service put on the website with an objective to help the user fulfill his/her goals or objective such as purchasing the product/service, placing the lead or just consuming the information needed.

Here are the quick hacker steps in optimizing the website for search engines:

Quick things to remember before you start with search engine optimization:

Optimizing the website involves the optimization of

1. Content, such as text, images, videos
2. Optimization of the website design, presentation, and delivery
3. Optimization of the user experience or Creating convenience for users (website visitors)
4. Creating convenience for bots/search engines to read/crawl/understand better as many web pages as possible on your website, so that it can make your website eligible to rank up on search engines for as many queries as possible.
5. Adding marketing elements on the website so that you can sell your product, service or content to the targeted audience or take control of their journey and achieve your final objective as well as user objective.

If you are staring SEO for a new website or seo getting implemented for the first time on a website make sure of the following:

There is enough content to optimize without content your optimization doesn’t make any sense.

“You cannot sow just a seed shell/dead seed and expect it to germinate, grow and yield the fruits”, you have to sow a good seed that can germinate, grow and yield the fruits.

Without content, you cannot see SEO working for your business. For SEO to work you need lots of content and that’s what is going to be optimized to rank on Google.

In case if you figure out that your website doesn’t have enough content you may have to initiate the content writing for your website for every single product, service or topics catering to your industry.

Optimizing the website design, presentation, and delivery:

Most of the website designers or the front end developers may not have followed the best design practice and in that case, your website will be prone to several issues and fixing them is very important for several reasons, and the two main reasons are here,

1. Improves the crawl stats (Crawl frequency and crawl rate)
2. Improve the user experience (Improves engagement, Gives stability to your keyword SERP, and also you will be achieving your goal or objective such as selling a product)

Working on Load times & Page Size:

High load times and heavy page size of your web pages is one of the biggest drawbacks that touches the core of your SEO progress and pulls everything down, which is mainly affecting both the user experience and crawl stats and fixing this is very crucial.

To fix this you may have to

• Reduce the number of HTTP requests that go to your website server in order to serve the web pages quickly to the end user
  • Combine external CSS and JS files
  • Create images in sprites
  • Reduce HTML
• Compress Images
• HTML, CSS, JS, videos, & Images have to be GZipped

To understand the actual problem use the tools like tools.pingdom.com or GTmetrix.com

These tools will help you in understanding the exact problem and so that you can identify and fix them.

Take away:

1. The web pages should load as quickly as possible, ideally, you shouldn’t keep it beyond/above 3s.
2. The webpages size should be as small as possible, limit ia t to few KB’s, ideally less than 1 MB

Understand valid and invalid URLs on the website and an action on the same:

There are two types of website and the website you are touching may be of any type, if its a dynamic website you may have to put an additional effort in understanding the valid and invalid URLs

Dynamic websites are basically websites which have to power to create multiple web pages which can be very similar to the original page, or a subset of the original page or can be a very thin page. Which also have a scope for creation of many random pages for the user registration, or any activity.

Invalid URLs:

Invalid URLs can be defined as the web pages that have,

• Thin content
• Possibly may create a duplicate content
• May be redundant web pages

Action:

1. Block them for search engines crawl and index, add No-follow, no-index meta tag in the head section of the HTML for all the invalid webpages.
2. Implement the rel=”nofollow” attribute in the anchor tags or hyperlinks when the invalid pages have got an hyperlink (internal link), you can do this to your social media pages, to your dynamic web pages, to thank you page, payment success pages and more
3. Block the crawling of URLs on robots.txt
4. In case if you cannot do any of the things implement a canonical tag

Ideally you are avoiding wastage of crawl resource on invalid pages. This is one of the highest priority implementation that usually gets ignored by many.

Action on valid URLs:
Allow webpages for search engines Crawl and Index:

Some of the web developers may practice to block the web pages for search engines crawl and index regardless of the content, its quality and quantity and hence when you start working on Search engine optimization this becomes one of the important checklist item.

Action: Allow webpages/website for search engines crawl and index- Make sure that the no-index, no-follow tag in the head section is removed or changed to index, follow

URL Structure, Delimiter and length

why the URL structure is important?

Your website developer/designer may not know the importance of having the pretty URL and hence they retain the default system generated URL’s and in that case, you have to consider correcting them to sound appropriate and simple for your end users.

1. Make sure that URL is pretty, so that the CTR improves
2. User understands the page just by looking at the URL
3. Can revisit the website, helps in remembering the URL

URL need to have a specific type of delimiter,

Your pretty URL cannot have the multiple words written in some random format or separated by some random delimiter when you can actually benefit by practicing the right implementation in the URL.

Make sure that the words in the URL are always separated by Hyphen and not by underscores.

Action: Make sure the words in the URL are separated by Hyphen.

Outcome: Hyphens help your URL to rank for phrase keywords

Appropriate URL Structure for SEO Benefits:

Based on the content types it’s always good to have a specific folder destined for respective content types, for example when my website has various themes of content lets say blog, jobs, companies directory, forum etc, I would prefer to have the URL structures as follows,

Segregating the content becomes easy on the website especially when you are:

• Working on Robots.txt
• Working on URL data on analytics, webmaster and other tools
• While processing data on excel sheets for reporting purpose

And many other benefits

Appropriate Navigation on the website for 2 reasons:

You all follow a specific route to reach your home everyday and any disturbencs in betwen pisses you off, and the same is the case with your users and search engine when they face a problem or have to struggle to reach a specific piece of content, product, or information on your website and this would lead to a bad user experience for users and also would create a inconvenience for bots to crawl all levels of webpages appropriately.

1. User experience, the user should be able to reach any level of the webpage with 3 clicks
2. Bots should be able to access every single valid URL on the website

Action:

• Implement HTML sitemap for bots, so that bots will be able to pass the link juice to subsequent level pages
• Implement an appropriate header navigation and other navigations bearing the user and bot convenience in mind
• Implement a search box on the webpages
• Implement filters so that users don’t face much hassle in finding the content of their interest
• Outcome: Crawl rate improves, conversions improve, creates convenience to the user

Create a XML sitemap:

What exactly the XML sitemaps do,

Consider creating an XML sitemap for the following reasons,

1. Leaves a information of all the valid pages those can be accessed and crawled by bots
2. Leaves a information regarding the content changes on the webpages, in case of content changes bots would consider crawling/reading those pages and index them accordingly on their servers
3. Leaves an information regarding the priority or importance of the web pages from the business/website owners perspective.

The following details will go into the normal web sitemap and the structure or the details provided change with the type of sitemap.

• The url
• Last modified date
• The change frequency
• The Priority

Based on the content type implement the respective XML sitemap, there are various kinds of sitemaps, such as:

• Video sitemap
• Image sitemap
• News sitemap
• Mobile sitemap

Helping search engines understanding your content:

This phase also addresses the scarcity of content on the website and you cannot develop some random content for the sake of heck, you have to understand the product thoroughly, you have to understand the audiences and their objectives thoroughly as well as the objectives of your or business owners in order to develop the content.

Quick and easy steps to follow:

Keyword Research and allocation to respective webpages:

1. Find how user are searching for your product, service, or content and incorporate those terms on your webpage
2. You cannot incorporate all terms on one single page, so segregate all the terms and allocate them to respective webpages
3. After allocation, you have to update the terms in specified sections of the webpage and in the content Such as,
   1. Title & meta Description
   2. Heading tags- H1, h2 and more
   3. Alt Tags for images
   4. Optimize the webpage content with search terms
   5. Implement rich snippets/scheme to help search engines to understand the product the way real user understands
      1. Breadcrumbs
      2. Product snippet
      3. Review Snippet
      4. Rating snippet
      5. Recipe snippet
      6. Event snippet
      7. Author snippet
      8. Article snippets
      9. Organization rich snippet
      10. Educational event snippet and many more

Note: Rich Snippets make the webpage content rich and hence make sure that you are implementing an appropriate one based on the content type.

Helping user to understand you web page and creating convenience to fulfil his objective:

This is the core of all implementation and helps you to reap all the benefits of the prior implementation done, promotions done and the marketing efforts on other channels as well.

1. You helping the users starts with helping them land on the appropriate webpage by Optimizing the page for the right keyword or drive only relevant users to your webpage
2. Understanding the intent of the keywords and optimizing the page accordingly is very important
3. Check for the functionality of the forms, payment pages, payment gateways, or any other interaction elements on the webpage
4. Create a convenient navigation for the user to reach the content
5. Appropriate call to actions guiding them or taking control of their journey
6. Have call out statements to help them to make the decision
7. Present the content properly in a readable format
8. Highlight the important pieces of content
9. Prioritize the content based on the intent of the user

Implementing the Tracking, Setup the communication between bots and webmasters:

Implementing the tracking not only from an SEO perspective, but from a business perspective it becomes very important to Understand,

1. who is visiting your website
2. when they are visiting
3. with which content they are interacting
4. Their journey or actions performed on the website
5. The products that are converting

And lot more

With the understanding of the above mentioned information, the marketing activities can be planned well, you can scale up the efforts on a specific channel, region, product and more.

It also helps you to have a complete track from the day and you can compare or study the data.

Setup a communication between bot and webmaster

Setting up the communication between bot and user is easy, one can signup for Google webmaster tools and Bing webmaster tools and can have access to all the information that bot observers and want to let you know, same way whenever you have something to communicate to the bots you can do that as well through the webmaster tool and hence setting up the webmaster accounts for your website is very important,

Webmaster account helps you on the following:

1. Bots/Search Engines Help:
2. Understand the keywords the website ranks for
3. Understand the kind of content issues that bots have noticed/identified on the website and which also needs correction
4. Understand the sitemap errors
5. Understand the rich snippets errors
6. Understand the server errors, Header status errors
7. Understand the performance of the webpages and many more

User work at ease:

1. Can submit the sitemap
2. Test the robots.txt commands
3. Submit the disavow file
4. Do fetch as Google
5. Can implement the rich snippets on the website through data highlighter and many more
6. Can figure out the keywords website ranks for their position, CTR and Impressions

How to set up tracking:

The best way of setting up the tracking is avoiding the mess, not impacting the load times, and also able to tweak or implement any change whenever a marketer need without much help of develops.

Google Tag Manager is one such platform or tool that addresses all of the issues mentioned above,

• Google Tag Manager
  • Analytics
  • Google webmaster tools
  • Bing webmaster tools
  • Based on marketing channels, set up respective channel/tool tracking

Finally SEO Off-page:

SEO off-page cannot be part of Search engine optimization, it’s a search engine manipulation and which doesn’t sound well, so been called as SEO off-page.

In SEO off-page the main focus is to invite more and more bots to your website through those external websites and this is been discussed in my other articles on how to do SEO off-page and importance of SEO off-page.

Conclusion on search engine optimization of website

SEO implementations are not limited to the steps mentioned in this article, the information provided here is a basic SEO and is sufficient for small websites but when it comes to business that have complex websites, high competition, global presence, and region specific information the implementations will be a lot more advanced than what’s been explained in the article. But one who is aware of objectives and has clear understanding of search engines and user behavior can implement any level of SEO for the website and can achieve the success.

If you want to become an SEO pro let me know, I have trained more than 100 professionals at the desk on the real-time projects. I have guided them to become independent, decision makers, advisors and altogether have pushed to new heights in their digital marketing career.

Manjunath Chowdary

Digital Marketing Expert, consultant, Mentor and
Director of KandraDigital Marketing
Solutions Pvt Ltd.