SEO for Beginners

SEO; What is SEO? Essentially, the meaning of search engine optimization (SEO) is to increase your website’s visibility in the organic search results of major search engines.

To achieve this visibility, you need to understand three basic components:

What types of content search engine users and their customers are looking for or need? How search engines work to discover, index, and publish content on search engine results pages.

How to properly promote and optimize your website to tell search engines more.

While search engines and technology are constantly evolving, some fundamental underlying elements have remained unchanged since the early days of SEO. That’s why, together with some of the leading authorities and experts in the field, we’ve created these in-depth overviews and tutorials, to define SEO for aspiring SEO professionals and explain how search engine optimization actually works today.

How does SEO work? SEO is a fast-paced and dynamic field. It can also be frustrating at times, especially if you rely on outdated tactics that no longer work. That’s why it’s crucial that you stay well-informed and continually learn. Search engines are constantly updating their algorithms to deliver quality search results to their users.

Artificial intelligence is constantly improving algorithms to ensure better user experiences. This means that SEO is also more complex than ever today. Marketers should continue their SEO education to track what tactics are currently working and what tactics should be dropped from their search marketing plan. It’s not enough to create links, create old content and add a few keywords to improve your organic search ranking and increase the visibility of your business or brand.

Why should you care about SEO?

Lots and lots of people search for things. That traffic can be extremely powerful for a business not only because there is a lot of traffic, but because there is a lot of very targeted, high-intent traffic.

If you sell blue widgets, would you rather buy a billboard so that anyone with a car in your area sees your ad (whether they ever have any interest in blue widgets or not), or have it appear every time someone in the world writes “buy”? blue widgets” in a search engine? Probably the latter, because those people have commercial intent, which means they’re standing up and saying they want to buy something you offer.

People are looking for any type of thing directly related to your business. Beyond that, your prospects are also looking for all sorts of things that are vaguely related to your business. These represent even more opportunities to connect with those people and help answer their questions, solve their problems, and become a trusted resource for them.

Are you more likely to get your widgets from a trusted resource that offered great information each of the last four times you turned to Google for help with a problem, or from someone you’ve never heard of?

What really works to drive traffic from search engines?

First, it’s important to note that Google is responsible for the majority of search engine traffic worldwide (although there are always changes in the actual numbers). This may vary from niche to niche, but Google is likely to be the dominant player in the search results in your business or website would like to appear in, and the best practices outlined in this guide will help you rank your site and content. in other search engines as well.

The good news is that you don’t have to be a search engine expert to rank for useful terms in search results. We’ll look at proven, repeatable best practices for optimizing websites for search that can help you drive targeted traffic through search without having to reverse engineer the core competency of one of the world’s most valuable companies.

The first step in search engine optimization is actually determining what you’re really optimizing for. This means identifying the terms that people are searching for (also known as “keywords”) that you want your website to rank for in search engines like Google.

SEO On-page optimization

Once you have your keyword list, the next step is to implement your targeted keywords into your site content. Each page on your site should target a central terminal and a “basket” of related terms. This is what an on-page SEO-optimized page looks like:

SEO Title tags

While Google strives to understand the true meaning of a page better and to minimize (and even punish) aggressive and manipulative use of keywords, including the term (and associated terms) for which you want Ranking on your pages is always valuable. And the most impactful place you can put your keyword is in your page title tag.

The title tag is not the main title of your page. Hence the title on the page is usually an HTML H1 (or possibly H2) element. The title tag is what you see at the top of your browser, and it’s populated with your page’s source code in a meta tag:

The length of a title tag that Google will display will vary (based on pixels, not character count), but generally, 55-60 characters is a good rule of thumb here. If possible, you want to work on your main keyword, and if you can do that in a natural and compelling way, add some modifiers related to that term as well. However, keep in mind that the title tag will often be what a searcher will see in your page’s search results. It’s the “title” in organic search results, so you also need to consider the accessibility of your title tag.

Meta descriptions

While the title tag is effectively the title of your search listing, the meta description (another HTML meta element that can be updated in your site’s code, but isn’t visible on your actual page) is actually the extra ad copy for your site. Google takes some liberties with what you show in search results, so your meta description might not always show up, but if you have a compelling description of your page that people searching are likely to click on, you can significantly increase traffic. (Remember: appearing in search results is only the first step! You still need search engines to visit your site and then take the desired action.)

Body Content

The actual content of your page itself is of course very important. Different types of pages will have different “tasks” – your main piece of content that you want lots of people linking to should be very different from the supporting content that you want to make sure your users find and get a response to quickly. That said, Google increasingly favors certain types of content, and when creating one of your site’s pages, there are a few things to keep in mind:

Thick, Unique Content

There is no magic number in terms of word count, and if you have a few pages of content on your site with a handful of a few hundred words, you won’t lose Google’s goodwill, but in the recent Panda previews in particular favor unique and longer If you have a large number (think thousands) of extremely short pages (50-200 words of content) or a lot of duplicate content where nothing changes except the page title tag and, say, a line of text, it could cause you problems.

Take a look at your entire site

Are a high percentage of your pages thin, duplicated, and of low value? If so, try to identify a way to “fatten” these pages, or check your analytics to see how much traffic they are getting, and simply exclude them (using a tag meta noindex) from search results to prevent them from looking like Google. tries to flood you its index with many low-value pages in an attempt to rank them.

Engagement

Google is increasingly weighting engagement and user experience metrics. You can impact this by making sure your content answers the questions searchers have so they’re likely to stay on your page and engage with your content. Make sure your pages load quickly and don’t have design elements (such as overly aggressive ads above the content) that could discourage search engines and scare them away.

Shareability

All content on your site will not be linked and shared hundreds of times. But just as you need to be careful not to deploy a large number of pages that have little content, you need to consider who is likely to share and link to new pages you create on your site before deploying them. . Having a large number of pages that are not likely to be shared or linked to does not position those pages to rank well in search results, nor does it help create a good image of your site as a whole for search engines.

SEO Internal link

Internal linking is a fairly overlooked SEO practice. Yes, external backlinks are essential in SEO (more on that in the next chapter), but having a proper internal linking structure is just as important.

That is why:

Internal links improve the crawling ability of your website. If your pages are well interconnected, search engine robots will find and index all your pages more easily.
Internal links improve UX and engagement. If you have clear navigation, your visitors will find what they need more easily. With relevant contextual links, they will spend more time with your content instead of leaving the website to find their answers elsewhere.

Internal links can improve your ranking. Yes, internal links also convey link equity. If a page contains many relevant internal links with descriptive anchor texts, Google will better understand the linked page, consider it important in your page structure and give it more prominence.
The golden rule of good internal networking is as follows: any page must be less than 3 clicks from your home page.

Alternative attributes

How you brand your images can affect not only how search engines perceive your page, but also how much search traffic your site generates from image search. An alt attribute is an HTML element that allows you to provide alternative information for an image if a user cannot see it. Your images can break over time (files get deleted, users have a hard time connecting to your site, etc), so having a helpful image description can be helpful from an overall usability perspective.

You don’t want “keywords” and put your main keyword and all possible variations of it in your alt attribute. In fact, if it doesn’t naturally fit the description, don’t include your target keyword here. Just make sure you don’t omit the alt attribute and try to provide a complete and accurate description of the image.

URL structure

Also: If you don’t have to, don’t change your URLs. Even if your URLs aren’t “pretty”, if you don’t feel like they’re negatively impacting users and your business in general, don’t change them to be more keyword-focused for “better SEO”. If you have to change your URL structure, make sure you use the right type of redirect (permanent 301). This is a common mistake company make when redesigning their websites.

Schema and markup in SEO

Finally, once you’ve defined all the standard page elements, you can consider taking things a step further and better helping Google (and other search engines, which also recognize schema) understand your page.

Schema markup does not make your page appear higher in search results (it is not currently a ranking factor). This gives your ad extra “space” in search results, the same way ad extensions do for your Google Ads (formerly AdWords) ads.

In some search results, if no one else is using the scheme, you can get a nice click-through rate advantage because your site displays things like ratings, while others don’t. In other search results, where everyone is using the scheme, having reviews can be a “table stake” and you could be hurting your Google CTR by skipping them:

There are a variety of different types of markup you can include on your site; it probably won’t apply to your business, but chances are at least one form of markup applies to at least some of your site’s pages.

Q&A

What are SEO tools?

They help uncover opportunities and identify weaknesses or issues that may be preventing you from ranking and gaining visibility in the SERPs. Just as fundamental tools each have a specific function, so does SEO.

What makes a good SEO?

Quality authoritative content is the main driver of your search engine rankings and there is no substitute for quality content; this is especially true when doing SEO marketing. Quality content created specifically for the intended user increases site traffic, which improves your site’s authority and relevance.

Is SEO or PPC better?

SEO improvements can help your website rank higher in Google search by making it more relevant to users, while PPC ads such as Google Ads are paid online advertisements that allow businesses and owners of websites like you to bid on the ability to display an ad alongside searches. on Google.com.

Does SEO require coding?

The short answer is: no, SEO usually doesn’t require much (if any) hands-on coding. You can absolutely do a good SEO job without touching any code. But the longer answer is yes, a good idea of how programming works, or even the ability to code a little, is always a useful skill.