The SEO Project

If a couple of weeks ago (overwhelmed by my massive popularity) you were to look up “Kovid Bhaduri” on Google, you would find this-

The 5th search result displays my site. Thankfully, the four above also redirect to my own social media. Of course, there’s the added bonus of having a worldwide plague as my “did you mean”


At the time, I was trying to learn the basics of digital marketing. I was looking up different digital marketing strategies, and SEO was one that really caught my fancy.

If you don’t know what SEO is, SEO or search engine optimization is a series of techniques used to generate more traffic on websites by enabling them to rank higher on search engines.


I had decided that I will learn and apply all I could to push my website to search results ranking 1. This is what I learnt along the way-

(Goal- To have my website as the first search result for “Kovid Bhaduri” and to improve visibility from other searches.)

The already good things

Security- Google loves sites that are SSL secured. Secured sites use encrypted messages between users and servers. Thus, users can enter credit card information, login credentials, or other sensitive information without worrying about having it read by hackers midway. Almost every major hosting company will provide free SSL certificates upon domain registration. You can activate your SSL certificate by using plugins like really simple ssl

URL simplification- By default WordPress blogs have a scary and ugly URL. It is important to have your website set up in such a way that all URL’s make intuitive sense. Numbers and symbols are bad, and must be eliminated at all cost. A really easy way to have clean URLs is to set up your site permalink structure to “post name”. You can find this option in your “settings” tab at your dashboard.

WordPress also allows you to customise the URLs of each individual page, but that is a little more complicated and takes up more time.

The not-so good things

Site title and tagline- The site title is the main header that appears on search results and descriptions. For example, “Holiday lets, Homes, Experiences & Places” is the site title for Airbnb. You usually want a site title that is easily discoverable on popular searches and is relevant and descriptive of the content of your website. It took me about 2 months to realize “hack life and grab some pizza” wasn’t really a great site title. It was time to fix that.

The new site title is much more relevant to the content of the website, and as I keep filling up my site in the months to come, this title will prove very helpful in gaining more traffic.

Site speed- It is also incredibly important to have a really short load time in your website. Every additional 0.5 seconds that your website takes to load the number of people sticking around reduces drastically. Unsurprisingly, site speed is one of the key factors that search engines look to when ranking your website. There are some really good wordpress plugins that can help with this-

1. WP Super Cache– WordPress’ super cache plugin caches your website so that repeat visitors can view a cached version of your website. It reduces load time for repeat visitors significantly
   
2. Lazy Load– Lazy load allows images to load while scrolling through your website instead of all at once. Thus, it reduces load time without compromising on blog quality.
   
3. AMP– Accelerated mobile pages is the go to plugin to reduce mobile loading time. Fast mobile speeds can greatly affect search rankings.
   
4. Shortpixel Image Optimizer– The short pixel image optimizer optimizes images on your blog to reduce file size and thus greatly reduce load time. Images are the reason behind a major chunk of your total load time, hence, using an image optimization plugin can prove to be really helpful.
   
   
   

SEO Plugins– Good SEO plugins are a game changer. Yoast SEO can single handedly make a world of difference to your website. From customizing search appearance to providing readablitiy and SEO analysis (including ways to improve both!) installing Yoast really helped me push my search ranking up.

The things to take care of later

There are many other things I learned that I haven’t implemented yet. In the future, I plan to start-

Pushing for more inbound links from other places on the web– Google loves inbound links. The more that other places on the web redirect to your site, the higher it ranks on the search results.

Posting more consistently– Ok, admittedly, it is a little hard to drive massive amounts of traffic with exactly one blog post. Writing valuable content more consistently is something that definitely has to be prioritized some more.

Writing content based on google key phrases– Although I’m not a big fan of this, writing content based on google keyword predictions is one of the oldest tricks in the SEO bag. For example, if you search “Life, Learning, and Business”, you would be bombarded with content regarding “lifelong learning”. Although these two are pretty dissimilar, what this means is websites which write “life, learning and business” content can benefit greatly by writing content on “lifelong learning”.

And the big reveal…

The past couple of weeks have been a lot of fun. I learned the basics of SEO, and how to implement it to get tangible results. At the end of it-

I managed to get my website to the top of the search results. As a bonus, the second result is now occupied by the “about” page, also from my website. While the global pandemic still sits comfortably in its “did you mean” throne, defeating my own social media in this race still makes me pretty content.




Hope you found my case study valuable.

If you would like to learn the basics of digital marketing yourself, I highly recommend checking out this course from Accenture.

If you want all the tea on SEO and Google’s search algorithm, check out Brian Dean’s article where he writes about more than 200 of Google’s ranking algorithm’s factors

Thanks for sticking around, see you soon!