What is SEO - Search Engine Optimization and its tools

SEO is an abbreviation of Search Engine Optimization, if it is translated into Indonesian, it means “Search Engine Optimization”.

The definition is more or less, SEO is a technique or process to improve the performance of a site so that it has a high ranking on search engine search results pages (SERP = Search Engine Results Page), so that it will maximize traffic to the site, be it a static website or blog.

Internet users usually use search engines to find what they are looking for. Most of them will then only be interested in the first 10 or 20 sites on pages 1 and 2 of the SERP, without any desire to see thousands, hundreds of thousands, or maybe millions of sites on the next page. on page 1 of search engine results with the keywords we are after, the more traffic will come to our website.

For information, the author has worked as a web developer, namely making websites for software house company clients. It often happens that clients who have finished creating a website assume that if a website is created, it will bring in visitors/customers by itself. Websites that are already online will not increase their visitors if they are not maintained with SEO.

For beginner websites that are just live, in the first 6 months Google will include the website in the evaluation category, so the results of SEO optimization will not have a significant effect on search results.

Actually increasing the rating of a website is easy, here are the steps:

1. Research keywords related to the theme of our website.

For example, if our website sells clothes, the appropriate keywords are usually selling cheap clothes, cheap sweaters, etc.

Here are the tools you can use for keyword research:

a. Google Keyword Planner

Google Keyword Planner is used to display keywords related to the theme of your website and also provides ideas for various keywords along with the level of competition for these keywords.

With the help of Google Keyword Planner, it is certainly very easy to determine good keywords to target.

Here’s an example of how Google Keyword Planner looks, with the theme of selling cheap clothes:

Google Keyword Planner

b. Google Trends

Google trends are used to compare search keywords over a certain period of time. The following is an example of a comparison of the search for the word cheap clothes with the cheapest clothes.

google_trends

2. On-Site Optimization

After knowing what keywords to target, do on site optimization, namely by filling in the following meta data: Meta Title, Meta Keywords, Meta Description. Actually, Google indexes websites using this meta data.

Attention, meta data is filled in based on the content of the website page, for example our website page tells about how to repair a computer, then the meta data will contain about computer repair.

The relevance between meta data and content is also one of the factors that increase our website rating.

After all the meta is filled in, generate a sitemap and register our sitemap to all search engines

For websites using wordpress you can use the All in One SEO plugin which can easily generate our sitemap. Or you can generate your own sitemap by opening the Google Sitemap address

For those who ask what is a sitemap? Sitemap is an xml file that contains all the urls / pages on our website, the function of the sitemap is to notify search engines such as google, what pages are on our website. With a sitemap we help Google index our website.

Sitemap is very important for our SEO process. although in the end Google will still crawl the website even without registering a sitemap but it will take longer.

Registering a sitemap to google is commonly used by Google Webmaster Tools,

In addition to registering a sitemap, Webmaster Tools is also used for various things, such as displaying any keywords that direct links to our website, displaying how many search results, the number of clicks, the number of visitors based on the operating system, location, and even information whether the visitor is using a desktop computer or not. mobile.

Here’s an example of how Google Webmaster Tools looks

Google Webmaster Tools

As much as possible, list your sitemap on all existing search engines other than Google, such as Bing

3. Off-Site Optimization

After all the steps above have been done, start doing off site optimization, which means introducing our website to other websites, this step is also called building backlinks.

Our website ranking will increase if more and more websites have links that point to our website. It would be even better if the website has a good ranking too.

All websites have a ranking given by google and known as PageRank, the value of pagerank starts from 0-9, the higher the pagerank of our website, the level of keyword searches that lead to our website also increases.

You can do various ways to embed our website link into other websites, such as adding comments, registering a location with a url on google map, creating articles with additional links to our website, registering urls in website directories, etc.

Finally, hopefully the information above can be useful for all.

I didn’t forget to include my writing references, references on How to SEO a Website for a more detailed explanation