About
How I got into SEO, and how I practise it
I am Riwaj Bhandari, an SEO intern and third-year BIT student at Informatics College Pokhara. This page is about why I am learning SEO, what I am studying, and how I try to get better at it.
Why SEO
SEO appealed to me because the work is checkable. You can open a page, read its title, look at its canonical tag and see whether the decisions make sense. There is judgement involved, but not much guesswork. When I am wrong, the page usually shows me where.
Being an intern means most of my learning happens alongside people who have been doing this longer than I have. I take what I learn there and test it on this site, so I can see the result myself instead of accepting it second-hand.
This site exists for that reason. It is a real multi-page website with real URLs, metadata and internal links, which means I can audit something that is actually mine and fix my own mistakes.
How I practise
Every review I do follows the same four steps. It is not a clever method; it is just an order that stops me from changing things before I understand them.
- Audit before changing anything. Record the current title, meta description, canonical tag, heading order and HTTP status for the page.
- Write the finding in plain language. Name the page, the problem and the date. If I cannot explain it simply, I do not understand it yet.
- Fix one thing at a time. Two changes made together make it impossible to tell which one did anything.
- Re-check and keep the note. Including when nothing improved. That last part is the one I am still getting used to.
The template I use for this is the on-page SEO checklist, which lists what to record and in what order.
What I am learning now
On-page SEO
Title tags, meta descriptions, heading order, and matching a page to the query it is trying to answer. This is where most of my practice happens, because the feedback is immediate: I can read the page and see whether it is clear.
Technical SEO
How a crawler reaches a page, what stops it, and how canonical tags, robots directives and XML sitemaps affect what gets indexed. I am comfortable reading the output of a crawl; I am still learning to interpret it quickly.
Keyword research
Turning a broad topic into a set of queries, then deciding which single page should answer each group. The hard part is not finding keywords. It is choosing what not to write.
Content optimization
Editing an existing page so the answer arrives sooner, without adding words for their own sake. Most pages I review do not need more content; they need less.
Internal linking
Using descriptive anchors to connect related pages, so a reader and a crawler can find the next useful page without going back to the navigation.
What I want to get better at
- Reading crawl and index reports without needing someone to translate them.
- Measuring performance properly, and telling lab data apart from field data.
- Writing audits that another person could follow and repeat.
- Publishing often enough that this blog is a record, not a placeholder.
Education and current role
| Period | Role or qualification | Organisation |
|---|---|---|
| Current | SEO Intern | [Add company name] |
| 3rd year (current) | Bachelor of Information Technology (BIT) | Informatics College Pokhara |
Add the start date of the internship and your expected graduation year when you are ready. Leave the company name as a placeholder until you are happy to publish it.
Elsewhere on this site
The projects page shows the audits and exercises I have written up, the blog is where I explain what I am learning, and the contact page has my email if you want to get in touch.