Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of increasing the traffic to a website by ensuring that the website is more visible to website users. It mainly deals with the improvement of the unpaid results also referred to as the organic or natural results. To optimize a website for the search engines, one can use a variety of techniques ranging from editing content to accommodate some frequently searched keywords or key-phrases, using backlinks and using cross-linking within the website pages. These techniques are all geared towards ensuring that the website ranks well in the search engine results page (SERP).To optimize a website for a specific search engine, one must research to know those search engines that are frequently used by the target audience to search the internet. SEO is normally used as a marketing strategy by businesses since the more the traffic a website gets, the higher the number of customers.
How Voice Search is Affecting SEO
The ease of the availability of the internet across the world has increased the use of handheld devices. Today most of the handheld devices ranging from mobile devices to tablets have a means of connecting to the internet. Better still the companies that manufacture these devices are in completion as to who shall offer the best mode of internet connection; 3G, 4G, and even 5G.With the evolution of technology, most handheld devices have voice recognition capabilities and users are increasingly using voice search to browse the internet. The devices have several voice assistance apps like Alexa, Google Home, and others. Among the search engines, Google has been frequently improving its search engine algorithm through frequent updates. It is one of the leading search engines in machine learning and artificial intelligence. It has majored on Natural language processing (NLP) based algorithmic updates Therefore, those websites that are more optimized for the natural queries that their target audience would ask when doing other chores find themselves in a better place. Mostly, when the target audience is probably driving, cooking or doing household chores, they would most likely opt to use a voice search rather than stopping what they are doing to type in the search on the web browsers. Also, Google trends have changed greatly. For instance, people are using questions to search the internet and especially during this time that the world is fighting the COVID-19 epidemic. To optimize your website or blog around this time when most of the people around the world are working from home, one should use queries with terms related to working from home. For example, how can I cut hair from home, how can I earn money from home, etc. also at such times, it would be wise not to monetize issues. On the contrary, you should try and build a long term relationship by showing sympathy so that the visitors can fall in love with your content.
Future of Using Link Building as a SEO Technique
In addition to artificial intelligence, NLP and machine learning in the search engine algorithms, you have to understand that the internet is full of content. Therefore, you have to get an authority to rank on the first page of the search engine results page (SERP). To gain authority, you could use backlinks from sources that are already highly ranked on the search engines. By using backlinks, the people visiting those highly ranked websites/sources, would also click on the backlinks and end up on your website also. Therefore, as long as there are search engines, backlinking will continue to be an integral part of search engine optimization in 2020 and beyond.
Myths About Link Building
There is a myth that goes around stating that you cannot buy links. Another myth also says that Google cannot track your content if you buy links. However, all these are just myths. There are very many use cases of people who have succeeded by paying some extra bucks to have articles bearing backlinks to their websites. What happens is that to get a backlink from a certain highly ranked website, you hire a guest post writer who writes a 500, 100 or whichever number of words of content relevant to the website where you want to guest post. The article should have links that link back to your website. However, the links should be placed on anchor texts that naturally appear in the text.Then, you approach the owners or admins of that specific website and ask them to post the article on their website. If they find the article interesting and worthy to publish on their website, they could go ahead and publish the article. However, most of the websites also ask for a small fee to publish the articles since they include backlinks to your website.
Skills That Those Pursuing a Career in SEO Should Learn
To excel in SEO, there are a number of soft skills that you should learn.The first skill that you should learn is email communication. Just by working on the settings of our email accounts, we can greatly improve the efficiency and productivity of communication via email. Email communication is very important when it comes to getting in touch with various marketers and other people who would be interested in your services/products. However, to excellently communicate via email, you have to work on your English communication skills. The other skill that you should learn is the use of Excel. SEO requires great skills in either Google sheets or excel. There are lots of excel courses available online and it should take very little time to learn. Excel helps you in organizing, managing, and churning data, which are all very important in SEO. Though email communication and excel are sufficient for SEO, it could also be great to learn how to use Google Analytics and Google Search Console. These applications help in analyzing data. And to do so, you shall also be required to learn a bit of coding language where you could choose to use Python. In fact, just as industries like pipe bending require specialized technical skills, SEO also demands that you develop a deep understanding of analytical tools and data management techniques.
Conclusion:
As you can see, even in times of pandemic, the digital world and SEO continues to move and evolve. That is why we cannot keep still, but look for new ways to position ourselves online either through content optimized for voice search, showing some empathy in our blog posts or by deepening our SEO skills, there is always space for improvement and innovation. An Interview with SEO Expert Parth Suba was tremendously worthy. What amazing insight they have shared related to SEO which we guess we all must know and implement for your business. To reach them, click the links below...
Listen: Podcast on Soundcloud
YouTube - SEO Expert Interview
