This is most frequently asked question by professionals hoping to build themselves a career in online marketing. The answer to this question is No.. SEO is not dead or dying. In fact, It is evolving every day. But, If you think there are some Quick Hacks and Tricks that someone can teach you and you will also become a pro, then you are Mistaken. SEO expertise comes with experience and not shortcuts.
Those days are long gone when People use to do a lot of so-called Black Hat SEO tricks, paid link building, pushing Keyword Stuffed Content on Multiple sites. Google is Smart enough and can figure all that. The Key to Success is Content and it always was. People forget this very basic thing while doing SEO.
If you really want to learn SEO then you should learn from those who are killing on Google Search results in whichever industry they are working in. Try to figure what have they done right, and try to reverse engineer.
Following are the few Basics of SEO:
- Content – 70%
- On Page Optimisation – 25%
- Off Page Optimisation – 5%
Content
- Make sure you write for end users not for Bot, not what your boss likes but what the end user would want to read, just make sure your content is always fresh and constantly updated, two things are really important:
- Recency – when did you post the content?
- Frequency – how regularly do you update the content?
- Page Title and Meta description is very important, it tells Bot what your page is about. The more relevant you keep it, the better. If you don’t update Meta Tags regularly, google will even start ignoring it and will pick content from your page to show it as a snippet in Google search results
- Avoid Copying content from other sites or duplicate content within your site.
- Make sure whatever you write should have a specific purpose and Target Audience.
- You should never have separate SEO pages. Your original site flow and content should be optimized for SEO
On Page Optimisation
- Make sure to make full use of H1, H2, and H3 Tags
- All images on the Site should be optimized for speed and should have ‘alt’ Tags
- Page load time is really important, in fact, is the most important thing.
- The site should be Responsive and Mobile Optimized. Avoid creating separate pages for mobile.
- Site navigation as well as internal linking, is very important.
- Make use of rich snippets where ever possible as well as schema tags
Off Page – is useless or at max contributes to 20% to overall SEO effort, If you get the first 2 things right, don’t worry about this.. you will do well
There are a lot more important things that I can’t share in one article. Feel free to ask any questions and email me at email@chetansharma.me and you will get a reply back for sure.