SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is currently one of the most in-demand skills, with an average hourly pay of up to $100. If you are a good SEO, you can easily land a job at one of the leading SEO companies out there. Or better, you can start your own business providing SEO services to clients/businesses that desperately need to do better online.
But if you are just starting out in the online marketing industry, the journey to becoming an SEO might not be easy, mainly because there are no official university courses or degrees in SEO, as of yet.
So, what can you do? How do you become a successful SEO? Is it better to hire SEO expert team in India or do it yourself? Well, you can start by reading and implementing this simple, 5-step guide to becoming an SEO expert.
Become an SEO Expert in 5 Steps
So, here’s a simple yet proven process to become an expert SEO professional
1. Search Engines
The first step, of course, starts with search engines. A search engine like Google is a website where users search for other websites through queries or keywords.
Google’ bot keeps crawling the web in order to find and add new websites/pages to its index and update the ones already there. When a user makes a search in Google, the bot scans through the Google’s index (database) for relevant pages and shows them on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) ranked in terms of factors like relevance, authority, and others.
The key to successful SEO is to understand the factors that affect the ranking of web pages in Google search results for a specific query.
2. Google Ranking Factors
Google uses hundreds of factors in order to determine where a particular web page should rank for a specific keyword in search results.
It's not feasible to learn or implement all these factors, so we will, for now, focus only on the most important ranking factors, which are:
Relevance
How well a web page is related to the user query has a direct impact on where it is ranked in search engine results. Relevance is a combination of what users want (information) and why they want it (intent). For instance, when a user makes a search for “where to buy shoes online”, he is looking for shoes and wants to know about the websites that sell shoes. Google will acknowledge that and will show the web pages that either sell shoes or tells about places where you can buy shoes. You got the idea, right?
Authority
Authority is mostly about how well a website or page is regarded by its users. Google uses backlinks as a primary factor to determine the authority of a web page. The higher number of quality backlinks a web page has, the higher it’s likely to rank than a competitor with lower backlinks.
Utility
It is all about how useful a web page actually is for the end user. Beyond relevance and authority, Google uses the utility factor to determine the overall user experience on a web page. This includes whether or not the page has been optimised for mobile devices.
3. SEO
Now that you have a basic understanding of how Google works and how it determines the ranking of web pages, let’s dive into the world of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) to understand how it can help you improve the ranking of web pages.
So, SEO has the following three main components:
1. Keyword Research
Keyword research is the practice of finding the most relevant and useful keywords for a particular web page. Keywords is how Google determines the relevance of a web page with a particular search query. The more targeted keywords a web page has, the more it’s likely to be relevant to respective search queries. The idea is to find the keywords with high search volume but less competition.
2. On-page + Technical SEO
Before you can start building the online authority of a website or business, you first need to make sure that the website is well-optimized in terms of SEO. What it essentially means is that the website or page must have the right keywords, proper meta tags, informative and unique content, easy navigation, clean and attractive design, proper alt tags (for images), links to other pages on the site, and more. As for technical SEO, the page should not have broken links, use canonical for duplicate content, use robots.txt, and should be fast to load.
3. Link Building (Off-page SEO)
Link building is how you acquire backlinks (or votes) for a targeted web page in order to gradually build its authority in the niche. The idea is to build highly relevant and quality backlinks from high-authority sites in the same niche in order to boost the organic ranking and traffic of your targeted web page.
4. Launch A Website
That was the summary of everything that SEO is all about. You can easily find many online tutorials explaining in great detail how SEO is done and all.
Now comes the practical part where you have to put into practice everything you’ve learned about SEO so far. To do that, you need a website where you can practice your SEO skills and knowledge.
Setting up a website is the easier part. All you have to do is get a domain and web hosting and start a simple website using WordPress or any other website builder. Once your website is live, you can start adding content to it. Without content, a website has no value for the user.
So, the aim now is to optimize your site for SEO and get it ranked in Google for targeted keywords. Follow the steps above, including keyword research, on-page optimization, link building, etc. It will take time, but eventually, you’ll learn what it takes to get a website ranked in search engines using SEO.
Make sure that the content on your site is highly engaging, useful, unique and fresh. Nothing will guarantee the failure of your website like bad quality or duplicate content.
5. Master one SEO skill
SEO is a very broad industry with many variables and categories. So, rather than trying to master everything in SEO (and end up with nothing), you should instead focus on mastering just one skill.
For instance, if it’s link building you like the most, put your focus on mastering yourself in the art of creating high-quality backlinks in an industry. On the other hand, if you are more inclined towards the technical part of SEO, technical SEO is what you should be looking at. But, make sure you at least have a basic understanding of everything else in SEO.
SEO for one industry can be entirely different from SEO for another industry, which is why there are so many SEO agencies out there with specialization in particular industries. This actually is a nice approach, as you’ll have to put your entire focus on learning SEO for a single industry, which you can eventually master.
Conclusion
Even though the process of becoming an SEO professional may seem quite straightforward on paper, it needs considerable hard work and dedication. Remember, it’s equally important to implement what you’ve learned today and acquire the practical knowledge of SEO to complete your training. Keep learning SEO through blogs and online tutorials, and at the same time, practice your SEO skills through practical implementation. If you need to know more about SEO or want to best professional SEO services company at SAG IPL.
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