Search Engine Optimization: Best Practices, Web Tools for Site Audit

The algorithm for broadcasting content on social media is opaque and relies heavily on artificial intelligence. The aim is to increase engagement rather than disseminate information. Without access to this algorithm, broadcasting content on social media has become increasingly difficult. Social media platforms favour sponsored content because of its monetary value. The flood of sponsored content obfuscates essential information. Centralized institutions force social media owners to moderate and censor the content. The appeal process for censored content is lengthy and strenuous; it can lead to unfavourable outcomes in critical situations. A personal website can solve most of the abovementioned issues and provide a reliable platform for content delivery. While centralized institutions regulate the Internet, it is difficult to moderate and censor website content. Moderating content on social media is easy due to opaque algorithms. Blocking a domain to censor content can be quickly identified by users and increases the accountability of centralized institutions. It is essential to understand that centralized and decentralized technologies are not black and white but belong to a spectrum. On this spectrum, a platform controlled by an opaque social media algorithm is more centralized than hosting your website for content propagation. Creating quality content is essential both for social media and personal websites. What differentiates the two is the mechanism for broadcasting the content. Social media platforms handle content dissemination for the user, but posting on an individual webpage requires extra effort from the user. To reach the target audience, the content creator needs to enhance their website's visibility through search engines, as users primarily rely on search engines to search for specific information on the web. This blog will guide such creators in making their website (1) accessible to search engines for indexing and (2) improve ranking to be featured on top of search results. Indexing allows a search engine to populate its database and refine its search results. Ranking decides the order of the search results for a search query. Rank is equivalent to the reputation of a webpage. Building a reputation for a webpage is similar to building a reputation for yourself. One can improve the reputation of their webpage by making themselves known to others and asking others to give you a reference. Technically, this is known as building external backlinks. This blog primarily focuses on making your webpage accessible to search engines. Specifically: What are meta tags and how to use them to summarize the content for search engines? What are good coding practices for writing a website? How do you inform search engines about new content? What site audit tools are available to identify and correct errors?

Head, Meta, OG, Twitter tags

Best Practices

Web Tools

Handling Increased Website Traffic

Monetizing websites

Author

Anurag Gupta is an M.S. graduate in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Cornell University. He also holds an M.Tech degree in Systems and Control Engineering and a B.Tech degree in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay.