What is SEO? And What to Expect in 2021

Updated on February 12, 2021

SEO is the abbreviation for Search Engine optimization and simply means tweaking your individual pages and the entire site to rank better on search engines.

SEO is a broad topic it has a lot of parts that work together to help bring results.

To clear the air, people can still get their sites rank on Google and other search engines without applying a tad of SEO knowledge. What do I mean? What I’m saying is, you can create a website, create content and still gain visibility on search engines without applying any SEO knowledge on purpose. 

So why is SEO important? Why don’t people just create content and leave it there?

SEO is important because if done right it can bring more visibility. By “more visibility” it could increase organic traffic up to 300% or even more. This makes sense as to why businesses pay thousands of dollars to hire SEO services. There are lot of companies providing SEO Services over internet just like Superstar SEO, but the challenge is hiring the one how can do your job perfectly below are different parts of SEO to keep in mind. 

Different Parts of SEO

There are 3 main parts of SEO of which every other thing falls within, they are: On-page, Off-page, and Technical SEO.

1) Onpage: This part of SEO is done on your content. 

It comprises:

Content: Content here includes text, audio, and video. They say “content is king” and that’s true. To be able to churn out quality content that solves users’ queries.

Your content should be readable and error-free. A lot of people buy the idea that long-form content help in ranking and it’s somewhat true only when you sufficiently answer a user query providing all necessary information that you think is helpful to a visitor.

Keyword research: Keywords are words your audience uses in search of answers. An example is “best ad networks in Canada”.

A user who supplies this query is simply looking for recommendations and content around this topic should do justice to it.

Going back, all contents should begin with keyword research as this will give you an insight into what users are searching for.

Relevancy: Don’t go by adding fluff words to attain a certain word count. An article should focus on the topic which is obvious in the title as bringing in unrelated information won’t help your blog, not your readers. It can affect your site as people are likely to go to your competitors who offer better solutions.

Proper interlinking of internal pages can also improve things.

2) Offpage SEO: This part of SEO has to do with things done on other platforms or sites that send good signals to your site:

It comprises:

Backlinks: Backlinks are links pointing from other sites to yours. If done right can they increase your site’s “Authority”. Authority here means “trust”. With more Authority, your site is likely going to rank better.

Over the internet, there’re a lot of sites linking to each other, some of the links are earned naturally while some in other ways. However, Google warns about earning “Backlinks” through incentives.

One of the most preferred ways of getting linked to is through submitting guest posts. By the side of your link-building effort, you should know that long-form contents are best for getting links naturally.

Social Signal: Social Signal is not a direct ranking factor but it does help in creating awareness and luckily it’s not difficult to create. Depending on how a topic is presented to a particular audience, shares and comments can be gotten easily.

Technical SEO: This part of SEO takes care of making sure your site can be crawled, indexed, and rendered. There are a lot of things in this field that requires an ample amount of experience.

Technical SEO also worries about site speed as this is a big factor in SEO these days too. Other things include duplicate content, structured data, XML Sitemap, and lots more.

How to Learn SEO in 2021

You have 2 options: through self-learning and through a paid course.

1) Through Self learning.

This won’t be organized but as a matter of months, a lot will start making sense. You can start by finding a good resource (better to use one at a time) then joining SEO groups and forums. Finally, practice what you learn.

2) Through a paid course.

You can enroll for a paid course on the internet or buy a course from demy. I personally have seen SEO courses recommended in SEO groups.

This path to learning is more organized and can make learning faster but comes with a fee.

You can join SEO groups and ask for recommendations or do personal research to find out.

What to expect from SEO in 2021

SEO has evolved in so many ways over the years thanks to consistent changes from search engines algorithm particularly Google.

With the introduction of Core Web Vitals focus has expanded giving more and more importance to user experience. Core Web Vitals was designed by Google to give an insight into how users’ experiences are on a page. It relies on 3 metrics: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Cumulative Layout Shift and (CLS) and First Input Delay (FID). 

The LCP measures how quickly the targeted page loads. The CLS measures how pages remain stable. And lastly, the FID measures how long elements of a page delays during user interaction. Know that the Core Web Vitals can affect a page’s rank on SERP.

Another thing Google announced last year was “Passage Ranking” this means the algorithm looks into more details of a page and rank passages, not just the entire pages. This doesn’t mean the entire page isn’t taken into consideration it means things have just gone further.

Another thing worth noting going into 2021 is “Featured Snippet”. Google featured snippets show an excerpt from a page that the algorithm deems as most relevant to a user’s query. There are many resources on the internet that promises to show how you can optimize for this. Stats show that about 12.29% of queries have featured snippets; that’s a huge number. 

There are a lot of things to look at SEO-wise in 2021. Get yourself ready for new updates and new knowledge. If you’re so new to SEO make sure to give it time while you learn it surely takes time to wrap your head around things here.

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