SEO Basics Every Digital Marketer Must Know

SEO stands for search engine optimization. SEO is the most important part of Digital Marketing. SEO is a tool for digital marketing more than a form of it. SEO is basically used for balancing the position or reputation of any site.

Search Engines are mainly interested in two things about every piece of content they find.

• One is the topical relevance of the page or what topic the page is about.
• The second one is how popular the document is.

Important on-page elements

The various elements on a webpage help Google to understand what the page is about.

The most important page elements as far as SEO are concerned are…

1. Title tag or title element.
2. Meta description.
3. Page URL.
4. Heading tags.
5. Body copy.
6. Images.
7. Links on the page.

In addition, search engines also look at …

1. Domain registration information.
2. Page speed.
3. User engagement metrics.
4. The freshness of your content.

Robots.txt

Search engines use robots or bots to crawl links and access web pages.

robots.txt is a simple text file that you can use to communicate with these bots. The most common purpose of this text file is to restrict access to your website by these bots. All search engine spiders or bots look for this file before they crawl your website. so these bots first read this file and follow the instructions you put there. This file needs to be at the root of your website.

.htaccess file

You can use the .htaccess file for the following purposes …

1. To rewrite URLs.
2. To restrict access to certain files and folders.
3. To set up redirects.
4. .htaccess files can be used only on Linux servers and not on Windows servers.
5. Some shared hosts disable several features of this file.

Focus Keyword or Primary Keyword

Every page you have on your website should have at least one focus keyword, The focus keyword will need to be used in the following elements of a webpage.

1. The page title.
2. The page URL.
3. Once in an H1 tag.
4. Once in the first 100 words of the body copy.
5. 2 to 3 times in the rest of the body copy – if the copy is at least 1500 to 2500 words in length.
6. Once in the filename of an image.
7. Once in the meta description tag.
8. The body copy should read naturally and you wouldn’t want to force the keyword into the copy.