SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization”. Search Engine Optimization is the whole of the work done to ensure that our websites gain more visibility in search engines.
We can increase our visitor numbers by placing in better positions (rankings) on Google and other search engines.
The way to be successful in this field is about understanding the Google search engine and its purpose. Now is the time to learn what SEO is, how it is done and the details. If you’re ready, let’s start:
Contents
1. What is SEO (Search Engine Optimization)?
2. What is SEO Expansion?
3. Why is SEO Necessary? Why is it Important?
4. What Does SEO Mean? Are You Ready to Learn?
4.1 How Do Search Engines Work?
4.1.1 3 Important Stages
4.2 Why Are Keywords Important?
5. SEO Examples
6. What is On-Site Optimization?
7. What is Off-Page Optimization?
8. How Can I Measure My SEO Performance?
9. How Can I Improve My Business with SEO?
10. Google Webmaster Guidelines
10.1 Basic Principles:
10.2 Things to Avoid:
11. What Should Be Considered When Choosing an SEO Expert?
12. Content You Should Review
13. How is SEO Done?
14. SEO Training
15. Conclusion
16. Curious Questions
What is SEO (Search Engine Optimization)?
SEO is the non-paid (known as “organic”) effort to increase visitors to your website through search engine results.
In other words:
It is the name given to all the work done to make websites perform better in search engines.
SEO is the abbreviated form of the words Search Engine Optimization in English. The goal is for websites to rank better on the search engine results page (SERP).
With SEO, you can increase the performance of your website and reach more visitors.
Thanks to this content, What is SEO? You will learn the answer to the question and information about how Search Engine Optimization is done. You will also be able to get quick answers to all frequently asked questions after the content. Don’t let the long content scare you, you will enjoy reading it.
What is SEO Expansion?
The purpose of SEO is to rank websites high on Google or a targeted search engine based on words. Websites that rank higher get more clicks. More visitors make every web entrepreneur happy, but the most important thing here is the number of qualified users. In other words, you should do Search Engine Optimization not to get more visitors, but to get more qualified visitors.
If you do not have experience in this area, you can start working with an SEO expert. I recommend making sure you find the right specialist. Because unconscious work can cause serious damage to your site. Most specialists usually offer the following services:
- Examine the General Structure of Your Site.
- Reviewing, Revising and Suggesting New Content on Your Site.
- Making Suggestions for Improving Your Website According to Google and Other Search Engines.
- Keyword Research.
- Competitor and Industry Analysis.
- SEO Training.
- Developing and Implementing Off-Site Strategies.
- Preparation of Professional and Clear SEO Reports.
What Does SEO Mean? Are You Ready to Learn?
SEO includes various techniques and strategies you can use to increase website traffic. Traffic from search engines is also known as organic. Visitors are actively searching for what you have to offer and tend to convert more often.
Being ahead of your competitors can be a challenge, but this is where search engine optimization begins. If you struggle to get Google to read and understand your content (optimizing the website), you can rank higher on the search results pages.
In order to make your website stand out, you must first know how search engines work to learn how to optimize it. I have always compared this event to a game. This game has rules and these rules are determined by Google. If we, the website owners, know these rules and play the game according to the rules, the probability of failure is very low.
Are you ready to play the game by the rules now?
How Do Search Engines Work?
There are many factors that determine results in the SERP, but among the most important are relevance, expertise and trust. Understanding these signals and optimizing your site accordingly will benefit your website. It is essential to consider these factors, as Google and other search engines want to offer their users only the most relevant and authoritative results.
3 Important Stages
This process works in three stages:
- Crawl: Google scans and downloads text, images and videos on the pages it detects.
- Indexing: Google analyzes the text, images, and video files on the page and stores the information it obtains in its index, a large database.
- Ranking: When a user searches on Google, it presents the best new and most relevant content that matches the user’s search intent.
For detailed information, please visit developers.google.com/google-search-model.
Google is a quality search engine. It has come to this day because it provides a quality experience to its users. Whichever website provides this quality experience, it always rewards that website. In other words, if we help Google provide a quality experience, we will receive the reward in a short time.
After understanding the working logic of search engines, you should focus on user search intent. Because this is the most important issue that will help you get rankings. I would like to share with you the video in which I discussed this subject in detail.
Why Are Keywords Important?
Keywords are essential for your Search Engine Optimization strategy. Therefore, you should use an analytical approach. First, think about your potential visitor. What kind of search is he doing, what does he want? You cannot optimize your page for hundreds of different terms. This is why we need to choose very specific queries and decide what we are optimizing.
There are 3 important things to keep in mind: Frequency, Competition and Relevance.
The keyword research process is the relationship between KAH (Keyword Volume), frequency (how often people search for things) and competition (how competitive the market is).
When doing AKH research, most of us do not search for the keyword to target. The aim is to include important keywords that describe the content we prepare. This will make us more visible in search engines and will contribute more to our targeted keyword.
SEO Examples
Let’s say you own an e-commerce site that sells mobile phones:
Example 1: The user searches for “iphone”.
In this word, you may want to be in a good position on the search results pages. This is indeed a highly sought-after keyword, as well as a highly competitive keyword. Also, let’s consider that your potential user doesn’t want to buy a new phone, they just search to find some information and view pictures. Here, we will determine that your pages are not very relevant to this, and this search will not be converted.
Example 2: User searches for “iphone 13 Pro Max 128GB”.
Now, that’s a long tail and not a frequently searched keyword like “iphone”. However, this search is a word that is highly relevant to your site and has a high competitive rate and a very high probability of resulting in conversions. In this word, you can probably get better positions in a shorter time.
Keyword research is one of the most important parts of the SEO process. It’s all about what you want to do with conversions or inbound traffic. More traffic or traffic that will drive more conversions? Conversion optimization is a very different matter. I will cover this in the future and I will publish a related content.
What is On-Page Optimization?
As the name suggests, internal optimization is the type of optimization that deals with changes made to the website. It is important to know how your content is displayed to users. The SERP has a title, a description, and a website URL, and these are the first areas you should improve when you start optimizing your website.
You must enter a unique, descriptive title and description for each page on your website. You should also make sure you have a clear and intuitive URL structure.
I won’t be able to cover every aspect, but I felt the need to list some high priority factors below:
- You should provide fresh, great content relevant to the industry your website is in.
- You must use a unique title and description tag for each page.
- You can internal link with the targeted anchor text, but don’t overdo it here.
- Be sure to use the title tags (H1-H6) appropriately.
- Pay attention to the use of image optimization, image URL use and ALT tags.
- Make sure you have a mobile-friendly website.
- You should focus on the fast loading of your website.
You can also check out some design, technical and quality tips. All this can help you improve your rankings and much more.
What is Off-Page Optimization?
Off-site optimization is the whole of the work done to support the website from the outside and increase its performance. Here, the first thing that comes to mind is backlinks. Even if the most important factor in off-site SEO works seems to be backlinks, this is not so.
Here are the off-site channels that affect Search Engine Optimization:
- Strategic and Natural Shares Made From Social Media Accounts
- Social Media Ads
- Google Ads
- PR Studies
- YouTube
- Links (Backlink) / Promotional Articles, Sponsored Links etc…
Conducting such studies through channels where your target audience is active provides direct support to your Search Engine Optimization efforts. Success in this field is undoubtedly an issue that comes with external optimization. Therefore, after laying the foundation of the site and publishing high-quality content, you should support it with external strategies.
How Can I Measure SEO Performance?
There are many different data you can pull from Google Analytics to find out how your site is performing organically. Here are metrics that can help you understand when you’re going in the right direction when you measure the performance of your work:
Channel Grouping – How does your organic traffic perform compared to other channels such as paid search, referral traffic, social media or email marketing?
Average Position – What is the average rank of your website in the SERP for a given query?
Clickthrough Rate – What is the impression your website has received in a particular query in the SERP and the CTR (number of clicks divided by total impressions) of the relevant query?
Conversions – How many conversions are there compared to other channels? What is the conversion rate?
Behavior – What is the bounce rate of organic visitors? What is the page-to-visit rate per visit and the average time spent on the site?
How Can I Improve My Business with SEO?
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) can help you find high-performing keywords that are worth optimizing for return on investment (ROI). Instead of waiting for your organic traffic to increase, you can start a Google Ads campaign. In this way, you can identify words with great potential among the keywords you have used.
Thanks to Google Ads, you can also identify the words that bring conversion and focus on these words. Without wasting time, you can increase both your traffic and your income through visitors coming through organic traffic. However, do not find the keywords you are targeting and start SEO studies and definitely do not reduce the AdWords budget for these words and do not stop targeting these words. It would be much better to use these two channels together.
Good SEO improves quality score and helps Google ADS campaigns. This will reduce the overall costs per click and the campaign, as well as increase your chances of success.
Before doing SEO, you need to master the Google quality guidelines. You can visit google.com/quality-instructions for this. I have shared some of these guidelines for you below.
Google Webmaster Guidelines
Basic Principles:
- Make pages primarily for users, not search engines.
- Do not deceive your users.
- Avoid tricks aimed at improving search engine rankings. In particular, you should make sure that your website is helping your visitors.
- Think about what makes your website unique, valuable or attractive.
Things to Avoid:
- Automatically generated content.
- Join AutoConnect networks.
- Creating duplicate pages with little or no original content.
- The practice of displaying different content from visitors to Search Engine crawlers.
- Hidden text and links.
- Hyperlink pages built to rank well on certain searches to drive traffic to your website.
For more, be sure to visit: developers.google.com/quality-instructions
What Should Be Considered When Choosing an SEO Expert?
Before making the decision to work with a specialist, you should make sure that you have answered the following questions.
- What is your experience in the industry we are in?
- Do you follow Google webmaster guidelines?
- What are the most important criteria you consider?
- How long have you been involved in SEO?
- Can I see your work examples related to case studies, cases and successful projects?
- How do you do the reporting? Can I see an example?
- What are your communication channel or channels? How can I reach you?
- What is your preview? How soon can we get results?
- May I know your references?
- Why should I work with you?
You should definitely stay away from experts who manage work processes that do not comply with Google rules and criteria for you. This can put your website on an irreversible path.
How is SEO Done?
Let’s get to the most important issue. I would like to give you step-by-step information about how Search Engine Optimization is done.
- On-Page Optimization
- Content Production and Optimization
- Technical Audit and Optimization
- PR and Links i.e. External Optimization
- Continuous Keyword Research
Result
SEO is not a “apply and leave” type of business. You need to provide your visitors with fresh, unique content on a regular basis. There are many factors that can affect the results. These factors are constantly changing.
I would like to convey important information about the Search Engine Optimization process to you, our valued visitors. I mentioned it at the very beginning of my content, but it is worth mentioning again: This is a game. This game has rules and the rules are determined by the Google search engine. You will be rewarded if you play the game by the rules. This reward is long term.
Expecting results in a short time is one of the biggest mistakes in SEO. Be patient and work.
Is there something on your mind? You can direct your questions to me using the comment section. Rest assured that I will gladly answer your questions and very quickly. Come on, ask now.
Curious Questions
I have gathered the most frequently asked questions for you. Questions and answers are listed below.
What is SEO and what does it do?
It is an English word. It is the abbreviation of Search Engine Optimization. It means Search Engine Optimization in Turkish. It can be defined as the whole of the work done to ensure that the web pages are in good positions on the basis of words in Google and other search engines. Although I have explained this with examples in my content, I wanted to share it because it is a frequently asked question.
What is Off-Page SEO?
As the name suggests, they are factors that affect our web page from the outside. Backlink, Google ADS, Social Media Advertising and Account Management, Mail and SMS sending are in the external optimization class.
Who Is An SEO Expert?
It is the title given to people who optimize their websites for Google or other search engines, improve the organic performance of their website and follow it.
