You have heard a lot people talking about SEO.
“SEO is important for small businesses” , “SEO helps in marketing” , “SEO is important for website”.
This beginners guide will cover the basics of SEO,  why SEO is important, various types of SEO and all these with simple examples.

SEO for kids

Consider you as a school going kid, created a beautiful & innovative science project and want to show it at national science event where thousands of students, teachers & parents are going to see it. Event winner will be selected by number of votes team gets from audience. You are confident about your project to win the prize as you have spent nights building that. But there are many others who have also build their own projects (may be they are not innovative as yours).
After the event is over, you found that the team which won the award does not have as great product as yours.

You became upset and low in enthusiasm. But you try to find the root cause for same. You notice that despite of building best project out of all, there are very few who came at your desk to see your working project and crowd was full at the desk of winner. This happens because your position was after so many team’s desk and most of the audience was overwhelmed by seeing so many projects and not approached at your desk resulting in less number of votes. On the flip side, winner team presentation was at starting position and anybody who visits there must seen his product resulting in so many votes. Now, you plan the strategy and work towards getting the front out-case desk for further competitions.
This process of coming in front position is the concept behind SEO.

Taking our example one step further and considering real world, say you want to dine out at restaurant to give birthday treat to your friends. You plan to find some good restaurant in Chandigarh. Being new to the locality, you typed in Google “Best restaurant in Chandigarh city”. Now, let’s say Chandigarh have more than 100 restaurants and most of them have online presence (which is the truth anyway). When you type “Best restaurant in Chandigarh city”, google will show you lots of results having 10 results per page. You open the first few links and out of 4-5 links appearing on top of search results page, you selected some restaurant and confirm your booking.

Now, we have seen that every restaurant was present online but we open only top few links. This way restaurants coming in top position provides business to them. In other words, every restaurant will try to come at top position so increase their business and making their presence feel to public. The process of obtaining a high-ranking placement in the search results page including Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines to increase the amount of visitors to a website or a blog is called SEO or Search Engine Optimization.
You are now aware of the fact that your website content is of no use if it is not presented before your audience.

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is the name given to strategy that endeavors to enhance search engine rankings.

Types of SEO:

Now, you understand the meaning of SEO and why it is important for your website.

SEO is of 2 types :

> On page SEO
> Off page SEO

On page SEO:

In this, you optimize your page according to search engines. This refers to how well your website’s content is presented to search engines. Here, we structure the web page for given keywords so that it will be understandable to search engine crawlers. On page SEO optimization technique covers the quality of content, placement & density of your keywords and proper use of different HTML tags.

List of best practices while doing on-page SEO in 2016:

1. Mobile first: Mobile usage for consumption of internet is increasing and search engines knows that better. First thing to take care while building your website is to make your website mobile friendly. If your website is not responsive according to mobile or tablet, you are lacking somewhere to rank your website high.
2. Sitemap: You must create sitemap for your website. It will help search engines to better index all your web pages. If you are using WordPress, XML Sitemap plugin for WordPress will help you.
3. Page load speed: Google hates slow pages and so users too. Loading speed is one of the factor search engines count when ranking your website.
4. Title tag: Your title tag should include your targeted keyword and length of title should not exceed 60 characters.
5. Meta description: It has few words which user read before coming to your website via search engine. So, make it catchy and inclusive of your keyword.
6. Headings: You should structure your content divided as <H1>, <H2> and so on. It will not only give you SEO advantage but also enhance the readability.
7. Content: Use original content. If you try to use copied or spin content on your website, it may be penalized easily. Panda & Penguin updates are the history. Apart from original & quality content, always try to write large posts. Article with 2000 words is more worth than article with 500 words.
8. Keyword density: Don’t over-stuff your keyword. Although there is no defined density for keyword but try to put it between 2-3%. Over stuffing the keyword is considered under black hat SEO.
9. Linking: Linking is the word we common use under off-page SEO. But this also relates to on-page. Always interlink the different posts to pass link juice in internal pages and use external link to relevant resources used in your article.

Off page SEO:

This refers to overall authority of your website on the web. Unlike on-page SEO, off-page SEO is a continuous process and takes time to reflect. This aims to acquire high quality back-links to your website from high authoritative websites on the web. This can be achieved by various methods like guest posting, blog commenting, social bookmarking,etc.

List of best practices while doing off-page SEO in 2016:

1. Social Media: Social signals is one of the best way to drive traffic as well to rank better in search engines. Use your blog link into your twitter profile, G+ page, LinkedIn & Facebook page. Schedule your posts to get shared on all social media channels.
2. YouTube: Having video on topic you write about have many advantages. Number of searches in YouTube are second after Google and so you can rank on YouTube too. Adding your website link to video description also helps a lot.
3. Blog commenting: Although most of the blogs sent no-follow links to your website, but it is still one of the method to get traffic. When your response is authentic as comment, user gets the curiosity to check out your website. Same is the case with forums in your niche.
4. Guest posting: Try to guest post an article on blogs in your niche. This way you can get a link back to your website in your bio or even in the body of article.
5. Anchor text: While creating links for your pages, make sure to use varying anchor texts.

Hope, it clears the basic concepts of SEO.