Complete SEO for Beginners - Learn how to rank websites on search engines

Simply, SEO is a process that is a part of digital marketing. The strategy focuses on the facts to optimise and maintain a website to increase its visibility in the search engine results pages. The goal is to get the quality and quantity of organic web traffic. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation.

A search engine is a software system that carries out web searches through the World Wide Web (WWW) in a well-organised way for providing particular information based on the web searchers’ query. The most popular search engine is Google currently Some other popular search engines are Yahoo, Bing, Ask.com, Baidu, DuckDuckGo, etc

Keywords are "search queries". In perspective to SEO, a keyword is a topic or an idea that defines the content of a website. An SEO keyword is a word/phrases that the searchers use to search using the search engines.

Keyword ranking means the web page’s position within the Search Engine Results Pages (SERP) for a particular SEO keyword. When the users search for a particular keyword, the search engine shows the ranked website URLs that are listed for that keyword search. You can get page rank for several keywords or phrases.

The term “organic traffic” refers to the online visitors who come to your website clicking on the unpaid/organic search results for any query. The main goal of SEO is generating quality organic traffic.

Paid traffic means the visitors to your website who visit the website clicking on the paid advertisement or sponsored search results for their query. You can generate paid traffic from several platforms like search engines, social media platforms, e-mail, etc.

The difference between the organic result of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and PPC (Pay Per Click) is based on the traffic source. Organic traffic comes to the website free of cost for SEO activities, while web traffic is generated from PPC campaigns investing money to the publishers.

CTR stands for Click-through rate. It is the ratio of users who make a click on a particular link to the number of entire users who have viewed a web page, or advertisement or email campaign. The term is commonly used to measure the online paid advertising success for the particular website or email campaigns.

On-page SEO strategy is a web page optimization practice to get a higher rank in the search engine results and get quantity traffic maintaining quality. So, the main goal is to increase effective organic traffic to your website. This optimization refers to both HTML source code and the page content.

Off-Page SEO optimization means all the activities that are done apart from the website for increasing the search engine ranking of your web-page. Though most of the people refer off-page SEO with link building, it operates beyond that.

Technical SEO is a part of On-page SEO that is for improving the website’s technical aspects. The main goal is to improve search engine rank by making the website easily crawlable and understandable for the search engines.

"White hat SEO" leads to SEO techniques with the best practices, and authentic strategies that are authorized by the search engines. This type is SEO is primarily focused on the users’ value. "Black hat SEO" indicates the techniques and SEO strategies that try to spam/fool the search engines. People generally try this to get a prompt result, but it puts the website at tremendous risk. The website can be penalized or de-indexed (removed from the search results) anytime following this strategy. It is an unethical implication. Once your website is penalized, your business may get closed. So, it is wise to follow white hat SEO techniques always rather than expecting a prompt result from unethical activities.

Webpage redirection or URL redirection is also known as URL forwarding. It is a technique to make a web page available from more than one URL address. When a user attempts to open a redirected URL, a new page with another URL will be open. For example, suppose XYZ.com is a webpage. There is now an updated version of this page and the new URL is ABC.com. So, the webmaster has redirected the old URL to the new URL. In that case, if any user clicks on XYZ.com, the browser will redirect automatically to the URL ABC.com.

Google Search Console is Google’s web service which allows a webmaster to check to optimize visibility and indexing status of their own websites. It is a free service from Google. You can maintain, monitor, and troubleshoot your website's appearance in Google Search results.

Breadcrumbs help manage the website’s taxonomy and structure to search engines. They help the users and also search engines determine how to get from one webpage to another easily within your site. They also strengthen the page authority of the parent categories of every topic.

Broken links refer the links to pages that either no longer exist or the webmaster have replaced the URLs with your own webpages. A broken link shows 404 server status code.

Link building is an off-page SEO strategy. It refers to acquiring links to increase a webpage’s link equity. The process is very effective to get a good ranking from the search engines. Both external and internal and link building is helpful to boost webpage authority.

The difference between the two types of links is, a follow link provides link equity. Besides, a no-follow link does not provide any link equity. That means, it tells the search engines not follow the particular link or not to count this as a additional link