SEO 101

March 6, 2020 |
By Sotiris Sotiriadis

SEO means “Search Engine Optimization”. In other words, SEO is the practice of increasing traffic to your website. Increasing your website’s traffic can lead to better exposure of your brand, more and better conversions or sales and long term results.

Despite what people commonly believe, SEO is not just meant for the Search Engines but SEO techies need to take consideration the human element and its practitioners should optimize for both search engines and humans.

The fundamentals of SEO

How does SEO work?

SEO is the process of optimizing three different kinds of elements of your website, in order to make it more attractive to search engines. Every SEO campaign is focused on these 3 elements:

  1. OnPage SEO
  2. OffPage SEO
  3. Technical SEO

In order to be successful in SEO, you need to fully understand each of these parts and recognize how to integrate it into your overall SEO campaign.

OnPage SEO

On-page SEO is the practice of optimizing specific web pages in order to make them more attractive to search engines and therefore, rank higher and earn more relevant traffic. On-page refers to both the content and HTML source code of a page that can be optimized.

In order to be able to achieve a proper OnPage Optimization level, SEO experts use correlational analysis tools such as:

  • CORA
  • SurferSEO
  • POP

OffPage SEO

OffPage SEO refers to the actions that are performed outside of your website in order to increase the likeness to rank for your target terms (keywords). OffPage is often considered to be the “Link building” side of SEO however, backlinks is not the only factor that affects your OffPage SEO. Other aspects of OffPage include:

  • Backlinks / Link Building
  • Citations
  • Mentions
  • Social Signals

There are multiple tools that you can use to analyze and plan your OffPage SEO. Some of the most used tools that SEO professionals prefer are:

  • Ahrefs
  • SEMrush
  • SEO power suite Link Assistant

Technical SEO

Technical SEO is the process of optimizing your websites’ code, server and media so as to improve the loading speed, crawlability and indexation of your pages. The result of SEO is to allow Search Engine crawlers to access, crawl and index your website in a more efficient way.

Technical SEO is extremely important to all kinds of websites. However, technical SEO is critical to large scale websites such as portals, directories, eCommerce or publications and news outlets. 

Some of the tools that Yoshiro Digital’s SEOs use are:

  • DeepCrawl
  • ScreamingFrog
  • SiteBulb
  • SEO Powersuite Website Auditor

Is SEO hard to learn?

SEO is not a difficult skill to acquire, but it requires deep learning skills. It requires a lot of practice and experience in different niches and web properties to make sure that you understand how to put together a solid SEO strategy that will provide sufficient results and a positive ROI.

Fortunately, there are a lot of free resources that you can utilize to learn SEO such as forums, blogs, Google Webmaster Central etc but nothing beats the experience that you get from testing SEO techniques on your websites.