The Ultimate Beginner Guide to SEO
This beginner guide to SEO introduces the basics and essentials of SEO that are a critical part of any digital marketing strategy.
Welcome to the digital world and SEO to your online strategies!
This beginner guide to SEO introduces the basics and essentials of SEO that are a critical part of any digital marketing strategy. Whether you are a beginner or a professional SEO, this SEO guide is for you!
Be ready to engage your mind to learn SEO basics, take notes, and enjoy it.
These are the guide topics to learning SEO:
Understanding SEO
Overview Search Engine
Aspects of SEO strategy
Measuring and Tracking SEO
SEO Consideration
Understanding SEO
What is SEO?
SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization”.
It is the practice of finding optimization on the quality and quantity of your website. SEO allows your website to be valuable, helpful, and visible for customers and any search engine and improves rankings in the search results.
In other words, imagine SEO as a coin. One side applies to knowing your audience, understanding what people are searching online, the answers they are looking for, the words and phrases that people enter into search engines, and the type of content they want to consume.
The other side applies to search engines. In charge of delivering the information that crawlers can find, understand, and rank your website at the top of the non-paid results (also known as “organic results”).
Organic results are the ones that use SEO to optimize their visibility and rank in search results for free just by having a solid SEO strategy. On the other hand, the paid results appear at the top of the search result which you have to pay for a prominent spot above the organic results. As soon as you stop paying, the ad will disappear.
What are the benefits of SEO?
When SEO is planned correctly, it has benefits such as:
Your website appears to be more credible and valuable to visitors.
Receives more clicks than paid advertisements.
Pay dividends over time and leads to free traffic, whereas ads need constantly funding to send traffic to the site.
Give competitive advantage.
Help search engines to discover your website faster.
Search Engine Basics
To take the most advantage of SEO is essential to understand search engines and how they work. Firstly, observe some search engines examples such as Google, Yahoo!, Bing, ask.com, and YouTube that search for video content. The most popular worldwide is Google because of its potential to send more traffic than any other search engine.
Look at this chart of the search engine market share worldwide as you can observe its leader is Google.
What are Search Engines?
The search engines display the most relevant results to what searchers are asking. They store an immense database of all the cyberspace content. Search engines are changing, updating, and adapting their algorithms constantly to improve user experience and to give the best high quality and most relevant content.
Now, you may be wondering, how do search engines work? Search engines like Google have tons of existing pages content for an individual should be impossible to visit each web page and rank its content.
To discover and store records of the immense internet content, Google follows three primary functions:
Crawling: The first function used to obtain the best information. This process uses automated programs called crawlers or spiders that scan URLs and follow links per link to discover new pages and update pages.
Indexing: The next step after the website is discovered by the crawlers is to analyze, understand, interpret, categorize the information, and store it in a gigantic library known as the index. The main purpose of this step is to have all the information together to be available and later use it as a search result.
Ranking: The ranking step is the one that determines which websites are the most relevant resources that satisfy the query. The websites are ranked from the highest quality and relevancy to the lowest.
By this moment, you may notice that to be visible on search engines is needed to ensure the best practices of SEO since algorithms are constantly changing.
SEO Strategies
This part of the guide talks about SEO techniques you need to follow right away to attract searchers and engines. Some elements may be more complex than others, don’t rush!
First, try to understand each at the time and follow as it is in the guide, from what supports all your techniques to the most advanced SEO techniques.
Keywords and Content
These two elements of SEO are the base of everything else and help prospects find the most relevant content, help brands connect with more users, and help search engines find your website.
There are two ways to do it:
First, get to know your niche and content ideas, then research keywords that are the most popular and profitable for the chosen niche, and part from there to plan your content strategy. Make sure to use those relevant keywords as possible.
The second situation is to do it the other way around. First, find the most popular and profitable keywords, and then research all the subtopics and contests that are interesting to that niche.
REMEMBER:
Interest in the keywords that are popular (high search volume), rankable (not too hard to find them), and relevant (match your content).
The content needs to be dynamic but also focus on having great content ideas. Since the Crawlers or spiders that rank the websites cannot see images or the design because they work by reading the content, so without great content, it is difficult to get much traffic.
On-Page SEO (or on-site SEO)
Now that you have targeted the relevant keywords and have chosen your content, learn how to use them wisely.
On-page SEO helps the search engine understand the purpose of the content and website using codes. The strategy involves improving the user experience, targeting the relevant keywords all over the website, and having great, informative, and unique content and basics of HTML codes.
Look at the critical elements of On-page beyond content optimization:
1. Title tags
Google and other search engines rank websites that emphasize title tags using their core keywords. This is the first headline searchers see in the search results. So, including the keywords in the title is wise, and also remember to make it sound natural.
2. URL structure
URLs are the addresses or locations of a webpage. URL can be part of the decision about which page to click. So, keeping the URL short and descriptive will help the searchers know what the page is about before clicking.
3. Image Optimization
Improve the experience with better quality images, sizes, and explained text at the bottom of the image. Make small images that lead to faster loading times since page speed is also a ranking factor.
Off-page SEO or link building
Off-page SEO involves external optimization practices. The purpose is to build quality backlinks from external sites to your site. This helps search engines and people to find your website from another website, and tell search engines that the website is valuable and high quality.
The resources to start getting more backlinks are:
Creating high-quality infographics that people can use and share via blogs, websites, or social media.
Being a guest on different blogs or websites.
Using social media (influencer marketing or creating a social profile).
Posting to forums and communities (This involves having an online presence)
Use Local SEO to ensure people in the business area come across your site. Try to have a presence on Google My Business local directories and Google Maps.
Technical Optimization for SEO
Last but not least is the technical SEO. This is an essential element to ensure websites work correctly and are a good structure for both humans and search engines. It involves checking the last details are not errors and that everything is optimized for search engines to find your website.
This guide covers some elements of Technical Optimization that may require less effort and work but have benefits to ranking websites. Technical SEO is more complex and involves more programming skills. These are the easiest to start over this topic and take advantage too.
1. Optimize the page speed
Optimizing the page speed helps search engines find and deliver the best pages to the users. No one likes to be on a slow website.
Include making efficient some of the strategies above as image sizes, URLs, and links to create a positive customer experience. Focusing on optimizing the page speed encourage customers to spend more time on the website, because they are waiting less time.
2. Mobile Friendly
Nowadays, the mobile is part of the daily basis and adds to the best customer experience. As everything else mentioned in this guide, having mobile-friendliness websites lead to having a happier customer, new niche, and consumers and is another key ranking metric for search engine. Adapt it as soon as possible.
3. Checking all links work correctly
It is general maintenance for the page to fix to work efficiently for user experience. Check all links work correctly along with none of them display as “Page Not Found” because it can negatively impact the user experience, and search engines work to find your page relevant.
Tracking and measuring SEO results
To conclude with the beginner guide of SEO, consider these key factors to measure the site performance:
Organic Traffic
Refers to the number of visits that your web content is reaching. When the number of this metric goes up, the content and keyword are working for your audience.
Time On-Page and Bounce rate
These two metrics tell how much time your audience is on your website. Time On-page refers to the time users stay on the website between the first click and the second click. Bounce rate describes the number of people that only visit one page on the website and then goes.
Conversion rate
These metrics tell the number of users that perform the desired action and goals of the website. Those actions can involve submitting an email address, contact information, or even purchasing a product.
Remember to consider the overall progress and changes from day today. Take your time to dig into details as deeply as possible to find the causes of the problem and solve it. SEO is a long-term strategy that needs time and work, as good things. Be patient, Be consistent!
This beginner guide will help you with so many different approaches. The team sends best wishes to everyone starting their business or just wanting to learn about a digital strategy.
This guide has the best secrets and ingredients for a successful seo strategies!
Use it wisely