Introduction
What is SEO, and why is it important for websites?
SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is crucial for websites as it helps them rank higher in search engine results. This means increased visibility, organic traffic, and better chances of reaching target audiences. SEO ensures websites are easily found by users searching for relevant content or services.
In the digital age, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is crucial for anyone looking to improve their online presence. Whether you’re a business owner, blogger, or content creator, understanding the basics of SEO can significantly impact your visibility on search engines like Google. This beginner’s guide to SEO will delve into the essentials of on-site and off-site SEO, providing you with the tools and knowledge to boost your search visibility and, consequently, your site traffic.
The Basics of SEO
At its core, SEO is about increasing your website’s visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs). The goal is to attract more visitors to your site by making it more relevant and authoritative in the eyes of search engines. Google, for instance, ranks websites based on a combination of relevance and authority.
Relevance refers to how closely a page’s content matches the user’s search intent. This involves using the right keywords and ensuring your content meets the searcher’s needs.
Authority measures how trustworthy and credible your site is. It is often gauged through the E-E-A-T framework: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. These factors together determine how well your site will rank in search results.
SEO 101: An SEO Beginner’s Guide to On-Site & Off-Site SEO by Samuel Edwards, published on January 16, 2024, provides a comprehensive overview of the fundamental aspects of SEO for beginners. The guide emphasizes that the ultimate goal of SEO is to increase search visibility, boosting site traffic.
On-Site SEO
On-site SEO involves optimizing elements within your website to make them more understandable and accessible to search engines. This includes technical aspects like your site’s structure and content-related elements like keywords and meta tags.
Search Engine Indexing
Indexing is like a library catalog for search engines. Google scans the web and indexes pages using automated bots (crawlers). If your site isn’t indexed correctly, it won’t appear in search results. You can facilitate indexing by using sitemaps and a well-structured site hierarchy.
Passive SEO & Website Management
The passive approach to SEO involves letting search engines handle the indexing of your site. While this requires minimal effort, it might take longer for your site to be fully indexed. Ensure your content is of high quality and your site structure is logical.
Active SEO & Website Management
Creating an HTML sitemap can speed up the indexing process. This sitemap lists all the pages on your site, organized by category. It helps search engines understand the structure and importance of your pages.
Direct Website Management
An XML sitemap is a more detailed version of the HTML sitemap, providing search engines with a comprehensive guide to your site’s content. This can be uploaded directly to search engines like Google for faster and more accurate indexing.
Site Speed and Core Web Vitals
Site speed is a critical factor for both user experience and SEO. Search engines and users alike favor faster-loading sites. To improve site speed:
- Use a caching plugin.
- Limit the number of plugins.
- Compress files with GZip.
- Limit redirects.
- Choose a reliable server.
- Optimize images before uploading.
- Use a content delivery network (CDN).
Mobile Site Optimization
With mobile searches surpassing desktop searches, optimizing your site for mobile is essential. A mobile-friendly site adapts to different screen sizes, loads quickly, and is easy to navigate on smaller devices. Consider using a responsive design or a mobile-specific version of your site.
XML Sitemaps
An XML sitemap helps search engines understand the structure of your site. It’s especially useful for large sites, new sites, or sites with complex media. Tools like Yoast SEO can help you generate and manage sitemaps automatically.
Meta Data and Alt Text
Meta data includes titles, descriptions, and alt text for images. These elements help search engines understand your content and display relevant information in search results.
Titles
Title tags should be under 60 characters, include a target keyword, and make sense to users. They are crucial for both SEO and user engagement.
Descriptions
Meta descriptions provide a summary of your page’s content. Keep them under 160 characters and use them to entice users to click through to your site.
Alt text
The alt text describes the content of images for search engines. It’s essential for SEO and accessibility, ensuring the content is understood even if an image doesn’t load.
Structured Data Markup
Structured data markup helps search engines understand the context of your content. Using formats like Schema.org, you can mark up different types of content, such as articles, reviews, and events, making it easier for search engines to categorize and display your content accurately.
Technical SEO Errors
Technical errors can significantly impact your site’s SEO. Common issues include crawl errors, 404 errors, broken links, and duplicate content. Regularly check for and resolve these issues using tools like Google Search Console.
Non-technical, Basic SEO for Beginners
Beyond the technical aspects, non-technical SEO tactics are equally important. These include content quality, keyword optimization, and link building.
High-Quality Content
Content is king in SEO. Aim for at least 300 words per page, and regularly update your blog with informative content. This will not only help with SEO but also engage your audience.
Keyword Optimization
Research and use relevant keywords throughout your content. Focus on both head keywords and long-tail keywords to capture a broad audience. Tools like Moz and Ahrefs can help with keyword research.
Link Building Services
Building high-quality links to your site is crucial for SEO. You can achieve this through guest posting, creating shareable content, and contacting industry influencers for backlinks.
Search Engine Ranking Analysis and Reporting
Regularly analyze your SEO performance to measure success and identify areas for improvement. Track metrics like organic traffic, keyword rankings, and technical issues using tools like Google Great! Continuing from the SEO 101 guide, it’s essential to understand that technical SEO errors can significantly impact your website’s ranking. It’s crucial to promptly address crawl errors, 404 errors, broken links, and duplicate content. Utilizing tools like Google Search Console can help you identify and resolve these issues efficiently.
Moreover, while technical aspects are vital in SEO, non-technical tactics are equally crucial for beginners. Focus on creating high-quality content with at least 300 words per page and ensure regular updates to keep your audience engaged and boost your SEO efforts.
Keyword Analytics and Google Search Console.
Technical SEO for Beginners
Don’t worry. I’m going to make this as painless as possible.
In this section, I’ll cover most of the technical SEO elements you must consider for your campaign.
These SEO resources are not only presented to increase your SEO knowledge but also provide detailed, actionable steps so you can make appropriate changes to your site, understand the search engine ranking factors you’ll need to consider or monitor, and potentially shore up any technical issues that could come up during your SEO efforts.
I will cover these SEO basics as and thoroughly as possible so you can understand and use them, no matter your technical experience.
Search Engine Indexing
When you go to a library for information, librarians can probably help you by finding a book. But no matter how relevant a book may be to your interests, it won’t matter if it isn’t currently on the shelves. Libraries must acquire books as they’re released, updating old copies and adding new copies to keep the most recent information on the shelves. Search indexing works similarly.
To provide quality organic search results, Google (and other search engines) maintain shelves of “books,” in this case, a running archive of websites and web pages available on the web. Google uses automated search engine bots, sometimes known as “crawlers” or “spiders,” to continually search the web for new page entries, which it then logs into its central system.
Why is Indexing Relevant for Ranking in the Search Engines?
To be listed accurately in search engines, you must index your site correctly.
There are three main approaches you can take for search indexing:
Passive SEO & Website Management
The first approach is the easiest and probably the best for SEO beginners. Search engines want to keep the books on their shelves updated, so they try to crawl sites completely. In the passive approach, you’ll wait for search engines to index your site and trust its best judgment regarding canonicalizing and optimizing your URL structures. For this method, you don’t have to do anything; you pass the reins to Google and let it take care of the indexing work.
Other than forfeiting some degree of control, the only potential disadvantage is that search engines sometimes take more time to update their index—up to a few weeks for new sites and material.
Active SEO & Website Management
Using an on-site site map, the active approach lets you update your site’s URL structures and hierarchies. Known as an HTML sitemap, this is easy to create (as long as you’re familiar with creating new pages on your site). Create a web page called “Sitemap” and list all the pages on your site you want search engines to index, separated into categories and subcategories as appropriate, to provide hints to bots on how your links interact.
You should also include descriptions to identify what each link is used for (briefly). This doesn’t guarantee SEO rankings or indexation but can help clarify confusion and speed up indexing. The major disadvantage is that you’ll need to adjust it every time you change your site unless you use an automatic sitemap solution that updates itself whenever you publish new pages. There are WordPress plugins that offer this functionality.
Direct Website Management
You’ll create an XML sitemap in the direct route—different from an HTML sitemap. It’s essentially a txt file that contains a list of your site’s URLs, with descriptions that inform search engines how to consider and index your links about one another. Once done, you’ll upload it directly to Google.
This is a fair bit more complex than an HTML sitemap, but it is manageable if you take the time to read Google’s instructions properly. It isn’t necessary, but it could be useful in speeding up the initial indexing process and clarifying canonical confusion (which I’ll talk about more in a future section). You’ll also need to consider creating a robots.txt file for your site, essentially an instruction manual that tells Google’s web crawlers what to look at on your site.
You can create this file using Notepad or any program on your computer that allows you to create text files—even if you have no coding experience. On the first line, you’ll specify an agent by typing: “User-Agent: ____”, filling in the blank with a bot name (like “Googlebot”) or using an * symbol to specify all bots.
Then, on each successive line, you can type “Allow:” or “Disallow:” followed by specific URLs to instruct bots which pages should or should not be indexed. You wouldn’t want a bot to index a page on your site for various reasons, which I’ll get into later. However, you may want bots to index all site pages by default. If this is the case, you do not need a robots.txt file.
Site Speed and Core Web Vitals
Improving website speed for SEO has been an oft-repeated topic in digital marketing, as its importance has been somewhat overblown. While it is included in SEO basics and SEO 101 (and now is a ranking factor in search engines), the loading time of your web pages won’t make or break your rankings in search engine results pages (SERPs), reducing your load time by a second won’t magically boost a low-authority site to the top rank in the search results.
However, site speed is still an important consideration for your domain authority and your site’s user experience. Google (and other search engine algorithms) reward sites that provide content faster, as this is conducive to a better overall user experience, but it only penalizes about one percent of sites for having insufficient speed.
Regarding user experience, every second of improved site speed correlates with a two percent increase in conversions. In short, improving your site speed is a good idea whether you’re after higher rankings in search results or more conversions. It’s slow page speed search engines punish, but the punishment only comes in the most egregious cases.
Google Page Speed Analysis
You can check your speed using a site like Google’s own Page Speed Insights and start improving your site with the following strategies:
Use a good caching plugin. Your first job is to make sure there’s a good caching plugin on your site. Unless you have technical experience and unique needs, you only need one, so it’s best to leave your plugin unaltered (i.e., leave the default settings as they are). The caching plugin allows users to store certain information about your site on their respective browsers. This won’t do much for first-time visitors, but repeat visitors can load your site faster.
Limit the number of plugins you use. Your caching plugin is a must, and you’ll need a handful of other plugins (including a search engine optimization plugin), but try to limit the number of plugins you have on your site. Every additional plugin will increase the time users load your site.
Compress what you can. You can use an automated compression program like GZip to reduce the size of the files on your site, so they load faster. It’s not an intensive process, but it can shave a few milliseconds off your page loading times.
Limit your redirects. Redirects are sometimes essential for correcting site indexing errors and other issues—and I’ll talk about redirects in more detail later on—but only use them if you know what you’re doing. Every new redirect you create is another piece of information that can bog down the speed of your site.
Consider your server choice. Your choice in server can also affect your website loading speed. Most modern servers are adequate—especially big-name servers like those provided by WordPress or GoDaddy. However, choosing an inferior, low-cost server could hurt your average loading speed. A dedicated server may be worth the investment if site speed is your priority. In any case, once you’ve decided, your server won’t need much ongoing technical maintenance (unless you’re using one in-house).
Optimize your images. Images are some of the biggest content files on your site, so you’ll need to ensure they’re optimized to provide the fastest possible site speed. You can optimize images by ensuring they’re in the proper format (JPG, GIF, PNG, etc.) and reducing their size as much as possible before uploading them. This isn’t technically demanding; many free image resizing tools, including Pic Resize, are available online.
Clear unnecessary site data. Do you have a bunch of old content drafts for your blog that haven’t been published? Get rid of them. Every information on your site that doesn’t have a relevant purpose should be cleared.
Consider a content delivery network (CDN). A CDN is an automatic service you can sign up for that allows you to simultaneously serve or distribute your site content from multiple locations rather than from one central server. It’s an additional investment but doesn’t require any technical knowledge, and it could help you achieve a faster loading time if you’re struggling to hit your goals with other tactics.
Mobile Site Optimization
Mobile optimization is a broad category that includes both technical and non-technical elements. Mobile searches now outnumber desktop searches, so search engines have made extensive efforts in recent years to reward sites that optimize for mobile devices and penalize sites that don’t. But, if your site is “friendly” to mobile devices and capable of loading and presenting content in a way that works well for mobile users, you will see an increase in authority and rankings in search results. Incidentally, you’ll also become more appealing to your target demographics, possibly increasing customer loyalty and/or conversions.
So, what makes sites “optimized” for mobile devices? There are a few main criteria:
Content visibility. First, you’ll need to ensure that all your site’s content is visible to a user—without needing to scroll or zoom. On a non-optimized website, written text will often bleed to the right, forcing users to scroll to read the rest. On a mobile-optimized site, that text would be constrained by the edges of the screen.
Content readability. Your content should also be readable. Oftentimes, that means choosing a bigger, cleaner font. Mobile devices have smaller screens, so you don’t want your visitors to squint or zoom to have to read it.
Finger-friendly interactions. Instead of using a mouse with a fairly precise pointer to engage with your site, users will use their fingers to tap buttons and fill out forms. Accordingly, your buttons, tabs, and menus should grow more prominent and “tappable.”
Image and video visibility. Some types of content (such as Flash) don’t load on mobile devices. You’ll want your visitors to see all your cool images and videos, so mobile optimization demands that those features be visible on mobile devices.
Loading speed. Remember what I talked about in the site speed section? It matters even more for mobile devices. Generally, mobile devices load sites much slower than desktop devices, so a fraction of a second delay on a desktop device could cost you multiple seconds on a mobile device. Fortunately, mobile speed improvements are mostly the same as desktop speed improvements.
If all this sounds complex to you, don’t worry. There are simple ways to test your site to see if it’s counted as “mobile-friendly,” and simple fixes you can make if it’s not. The easiest way to make your site mobile-friendly is to make it responsive; your site will detect what device is attempting to view it and automatically adjust based on those parameters. This way, you can manage only one site, and have it work for both mobile and desktop devices simultaneously. You can also create a separate mobile version of your site, but this isn’t recommended, especially now that Google is beginning to switch to mobile-first indexing.
How can you make your site responsive? The easiest way is to use a website builder and choose a responsive template. Most mainstream website builders these days have responsive templates by default, so you’ll be hard-pressed to find one that doesn’t offer what you need.
If you’re building a site from scratch, you’ll need to work with your designers and developers to ensure they use responsive criteria. You should be in good shape as long as your site is responsive. If you’re in doubt, you can use Google’s mobile-friendly tool to evaluate your domain and see if any mistakes interfere with your mobile optimization. All you have to do is enter your domain, and search engines will tell you if any of your pages are not up to snuff, pinpointing problem areas so you can correct them if necessary.
XML Sitemaps
I’ve mentioned the importance of sitemaps in multiple areas of this guide so far. Now, I will get into the technical details of what sitemaps are, why they’re important for your site, and how to create them.
You can build and use two types of sitemaps for your site: HTML and XML. I’ll start with HTML sitemaps since they’re a little easier to create and understand. As I mentioned, HTML sitemaps exist as a page on your site, visible to human visitors and search engine crawlers.
Here, you’ll list a hierarchy of all the pages on your site, starting with the “main” pages and splitting down into categories and subcategories. Ideally, you’ll include the page’s name along with the accurate link to it, and every page on your site will link to your HTML sitemap in the footer.
Search engines won’t be using an HTML sitemap to index your pages, so it’s not explicitly necessary to have one. However, it does give Google search engine crawlers a readily available guidebook of how your pages relate to one another. It can also be useful for visitors, giving them an overall site vision.
XML sitemaps are far more important. Rather than existing as a page on your site, XML sitemaps are code-based files that you can “feed” to Google directly in the Google Search Console. They look a little like this:
As you can imagine, they’re a nightmare to produce manually, but you can use many free and paid tools to generate one.
Before I explain XML sitemap generation, you need to know what they’re used for. Again, these don’t determine whether or not Google indexes your site; Google will crawl your site anyway. Instead, uploading your XML sitemap to Google will instruct Google which pages you find most valuable on your site and how those pages relate to one another.
For example, you could exclude technical pages of your site that contain fewer than 200 words so that your worst content doesn’t drag down the overall perceived quality of your site.
Google explains that XML sitemaps are especially useful for the following types of sites:
Large sites with thousands of pages.
Sites with archived, poorly linked content make it difficult for Google to understand how all your pages link to one another.
New sites, which have few external links pointing to them.
Sites use specific rich media types, such as special annotations or visual media.
Note that excluding a page from your XML sitemap doesn’t mean that page won’t be indexed; the only way to fully block indexation is to use your robots.txt file (as I described earlier).
Does this all sound too complex? Don’t worry; the process you use to create a sitemap is fairly simple. Most CMSs have built-in features that automatically generate both HTML and XML sitemaps; for example, Yoast’s SEO plugin allows you to create dynamic sitemaps that automatically update your site as you make changes.
For example, you could exclude pages of your site that fall short of a given word-count threshold, and if you add content, they’ll automatically begin to reappear.
It’s helpful to know how sitemaps work and why they’re important, but for your sanity, it’s best to leave their generation in the hands of automated apps.
Meta Data and Alt Text
I will refer to “meta data” as a blanket category that includes page titles, meta descriptions, and alt text. These text sections describe your pages (or specific pieces of content within those pages). They exist in the code of your site and are visible to Google search crawlers, but they aren’t always visible to visitors (at least not in a straightforward way).
Google’s crawlers review this information and use it to categorize certain features of your site, including pages (as a whole) and pieces of content within that page). This makes it helpful for optimizing your site for specific and relevant keywords and phrases.
It’s also used to produce the entries in search engine results pages (SERPs) that users will encounter. Accordingly, optimizing your meta data is important to ensure prospective visitors are encouraged to click through to your site.
The title tags of your page will appear first, followed by your page URL in green, followed by your meta description, as shown in the example below:
Titles
Title tags are the first and most important description of your site’s pages. They should include at least one target keyword relevant to that page (and your site) and your brand name at the end and should make some logical sense to your visitors. They should also contain less than 60 characters, as this is the maximum displayed by SERPs. For blog articles, title tags usually correspond with the title of that blog post.
Descriptions
Descriptions are secondary ways of describing your pages and generally have more wiggle room to include secondary keywords, long-tail phrases, and more conversational phrasing. The limit here is 160 characters.
Alt text
Alt text is specific to images and important for search engines and visitors. When uploading an image, you’ll need to ensure your image file name reflects what the image contains—this will function as the image’s title in search engines. You may also include a caption that corresponds with that image. Beyond that, you’ll need some descriptive text, which helps Google “understand” what’s happening in your image; this is the alt text and is usually editable directly within your CMS.
The alt text will also appear instead of the image when a user attempts to load the image but cannot do so. Thankfully, optimizing your meta data is fairly simple. Most CMS platforms will offer blank, clearly labeled boxes for each page of your site that let you edit the corresponding meta data for that page.
Structured Data Markup
Structured data markup is a way of providing explicit information about a webpage’s content to search engines. It uses a standardized format to organize and classify data, making it easier for search engines to understand the context and meaning of the content. This structured data is typically added to a webpage’s HTML code.
The most common structured data markup format is Schema.org, a collaborative effort by major search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Schema.org provides a vocabulary of tags that can be added to HTML to mark up different types of content, such as articles, reviews, events, products, and more.
Remember, including critical keywords (including LSI and entity keywords) in your titles, descriptions, and structured data markup. But you should avoid keyword stuffing and focus on writing metadata that makes sense to your users.
Technical SEO Errors
The last component of technical search engine optimization (SEO) I want to cover is the possibility of technical errors; these are common things that can (and probably will) go wrong with your site, causing a hiccup in your rankings and interfering with your plans.
If you notice your site isn’t ranking the way it should in search results, or if something has dramatically changed without your notice (and no immediately clear underlying cause), your first troubleshooting step should be checking for the following technical errors:
Crawl errors
Crawl errors happen when Google attempts to crawl your site but is unsuccessful. There are a variety of potential culprits here, but thankfully, Google makes it easy to figure out what’s happening. Within Google Search Console, you can run a “crawl error” report that plainly states what’s happening with your site and why.
A handful of potential crawl errors could happen here; for example, there could be a DNS error that doesn’t prevent bots from accessing your site but could cause latency problems. In this case, you’ll need to repair any problems with your DNS server and ensure Google can access your site as intended.
You may also have a server problem, which is probably the most complex problem in technical search engine optimization since there could be many root causes (and many potential fixes). The potential solutions here extend beyond the scope of this guide but usually involve diagnosing issues with your hosting provider. Fortunately, they should be few and far between. Robots.txt errors will also appear in this report.
404 errors
In Google Search Console, you can also scan for 404 errors. 404 errors won’t seriously negatively affect your search rankings but may indicate a bigger problem and irritate your visitors. The biggest root cause of 404 errors is page deletion, but it may also be a symptom of a hosting problem.
You can easily correct 404 errors by restoring a deleted page, diagnosing problems with your hosting provider, or creating a 301 redirect. 301 redirects take incoming referrals and organic traffic to a page and forward it to a different, more relevant page.
Even if you aren’t an experienced programmer, you should be able to follow the basic step-by-step instructions necessary to set up a redirect.
Broken links
Broken or “dead” links come in several varieties. They might be internal or external, and they might be due to a typographical error in the site link or a 404 error for the intended page. In any case, they no longer take users to a functional page.
If these links exist on your site, you can remove or fix them by replacing them with a new destination URL. If they exist on an external site (i.e., an external site links to a page on your site that returns a 404 error), you can set up a 301 redirect to a better, functional page or ask the webmaster to update the link.
You can use Google’s internal links report to check for broken links on your site or a backlink search engine like Open Site Explorer to check for broken links on external sites.
Duplicate content
Duplicate content is an often misunderstood technical error. This isn’t necessarily an instance of intentionally duplicated or plagiarized content; instead, it’s usually due to a single page of content being indexed with multiple URLs, such as being indexed as both a https:// and https://www Google Search Console has a duplicate content report that can help you track down these instances.
They won’t necessarily hurt your search rankings, but cleaning these up is better to avoid misunderstandings by users or search bots. The way to do this is with a canonical tag, which is simple to implement. All you have to do is choose a primary or “canonical” page (flip a coin if you can’t decide), and add a canonical link from the non-canonical version to the canonical one.
A canonical tag looks like this:
<link rel=”canonical” href=”https://seoarticleboost.com/examplepage/”>
If you have an SEO plugin, you may be able to enter the canonical link manually, as you did with titles and meta descriptions. Alternatively, you could use 301 redirects to clarify duplicate content discrepancies, but it’s arguably easier to set up canonical tags.
There are some other technical issues you may encounter, such as images not loading properly, but many of them are preventable if you follow best practices and are easily resolvable with a quick Google search. Even if you don’t understand exactly what’s happening or why, following step-by-step instructions written by experts is a fast way for even amateurs to solve complex SEO problems.
Non-technical, Basic SEO for Beginners
In this section, I want to cover some of the “non-technical” tactics you’ll need to have a successful search engine optimization (SEO) campaign. None of these strategies requires much technical expertise, but it’s important to understand that the technical ranking factors I listed above aren’t the only thing you’ll need to grow your search results rankings over time.
Remember that each of these categories is rich in depth, and requires months to years to fully master, and these entries are mere introductions to their respective topics.
High-Quality Content
Without high-quality content writing, your Google SEO campaign will fail. You need at least 300 words of highly descriptive, concisely written content on every page of your site, and you’ll want to update your on-site blog at least two or three times a week with dense, informative, practical content—preferably 700 words or more. This content will give search engines more pages and more content to crawl and index.
Collectively, they’ll add to the domain authority and individual page authority of your site pages and provide more opportunities for your site visitors to interact with your brand and your site. Here are some resources to help you create and publish high-quality content:
Content Marketing Guide
Guide for Promoting Published Content
How Often You Should Blog for SEO
Keyword Optimization
All that on-site content also allows you to optimize for specific target keywords. Initially, you’ll select several “head” keywords (usually limited in length and highly competitive) and “long-tail” keywords (longer, usually representing a conversational phrase, and less competitive) to optimize for.
When performing your keyword research, you’ll choose terms with high potential organic traffic (typically measured by search volume) and low competition; then, you’ll include those terms throughout your site, especially favoring your page titles and descriptions. You’ll want to be careful not to over-optimize here, as including too many keywords on a given page (or your site in general) could trigger a content quality-related penalty from Google.
Keyword research is best performed using your favorite keyword research tool. We recommend Moz, Ahrefs, Cora, etc. The best keyword research provides deep analysis of your competitor’s websites, giving you the data on what they are doing and how they target various keywords, allowing them to rank above you in search results.
Your SEO strategy should involve diving deep into keyword research to find the keywords with the search volume and value that matter to conversions. Some keywords matter much more than others, even those with low search volume, which target high commercial search intent. These are those you should be focusing on in your extensive keyword research.
While keyword research isn’t technical SEO, it’s certainly one of the best methods for sourcing what terms you should target for improved organic search results.
Link Building Services
Authority is partially calculated based on the quality and appearance of your site, but the bigger ranking factor is the quantity and quality of links pointing to your site. Link building is an SEO strategy that enables you to create more of these links, generating more authority for your brand.
Old-school link-building tactics are now considered spammy, so modern link builders use a combination of guest posting on external authority publishers and naturally attracting links by writing high-quality content and distributing it to attract shares and inbound links. In any case, you’ll need to invest in your link-building tactics if you want your campaign to grow. For help, see our SEO link-building guide.
Search Engine Ranking Analysis and Reporting
Finally, none of your tactics will be worthwhile unless you can measure and interpret the search engine results they’re generating. At least monthly, you’ll want to analyze your work, measuring things like inbound organic traffic, ranking for your target keywords, and checking for any technical errors that have arisen.
By interpreting these results and comparing them to the amount of money you’ve invested in your campaign, you’ll get a clear picture of your return on investment—your ROI—and can then make adjustments to improve your profitability. For help, see The Ultimate Guide to Measuring and Analyzing ROI On Your Content Marketing Campaign, our SEO ROI Guide, or our SEO pricing guide.
Conclusion
Hopefully, after reading this guide to SEO basics, all the technical SEO details should seem much less technical, and you’ll be ready to start improving your site’s SEO. If you’ve followed this SEO beginner guide step-by-step, you should have been able to tackle tasks like building robots.txt files and improving your site’s speed, even if you don’t have experience in creating or managing websites.
Here, we cover some of the most important fundamentals of SEO. While these basic SEO 101 tips can help you through the SEO basics of technical SEO, it’s important to realize that search engine optimization is a deep and complex strategy with far more considerations than an SEO guide like this can comprehensively cover.
FAQs
What is SEO, and why is it important?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It’s important because it increases your site’s visibility in search engine results, leading to more traffic and potential customers.
How does Google rank websites?
Google ranks websites based on relevance and authority. Relevance refers to how well your content matches the user’s search intent, while authority measures the trustworthiness of your site.
What is an XML sitemap?
An XML sitemap is a file that lists all the URLs of your website, helping search engines understand and index your site more effectively.
How can I improve my site’s speed?
To improve site speed, use a caching plugin, compress files, optimize images, and limit the number of redirects and plugins.
Why is mobile optimization important?
Mobile optimization is crucial because more people use mobile devices to search the web. A mobile-friendly site improves user experience and boosts SEO rankings.
What are Meta SEO 101 Guide?
In this comprehensive guide, we delve into the essential steps of SEO, equipping you with the skills to handle tasks like constructing robots.txt files and enhancing your site’s speed. Even if you lack prior experience in website creation or management, these tips will empower you to navigate the technical aspects of SEO successfully.
FAQs
1. What is SEO, and why is it important?
SEO, short for Search Engine Optimization, is pivotal in augmenting your website’s visibility on search engine results pages. By enhancing visibility, SEO drives increased traffic and potential customer engagement to your tags.
Meta tags include titles, descriptions, and alt text that describe your content to search engines and help improve your site’s visibility in search results.
What are the three pillars of SEO?
The three pillars of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) are:
1. **On-Page SEO:** This pillar focuses on optimizing individual web pages to rank higher and earn more relevant traffic in search engines. It involves optimizing content quality, keyword usage, meta tags, headings, internal links, and other elements on the page.
2. **Off-Page SEO:** This pillar refers to actions taken outside of your website to impact your rankings within search engine results pages (SERPs). Off-page SEO includes link building, social media marketing, influencer outreach, and brand mentions across the web.
3. **Technical SEO:** This pillar deals with a website’s technical aspects that affect its search visibility. It includes site speed, mobile-friendliness, crawlability, indexability, structured data markup, XML sitemaps, and more. Technical SEO ensures that search engines can access, crawl, interpret, and index a website without problems.
What skills do you need to become an SEO specialist?
To become an SEO specialist, you will need a combination of technical, analytical, and creative skills. Some key skills required for this role include:
1. Understanding of Search Engine Algorithms: Knowledge of how search engines like Google rank websites and the factors influencing rankings.
2. Keyword Research: Ability to identify relevant keywords for optimizing website content and driving organic traffic.
3. On-Page Optimization: Skills in optimizing website content, meta tags, headings, and URLs for better search engine visibility.
4. Off-Page Optimization: Familiarity with building backlinks, improving domain authority, and managing external factors that impact SEO performance.
5. Data Analysis: Proficiency in using tools like Google Analytics to track website performance, user behavior, and conversion rates.
6. Content Strategy: Ability to develop high-quality, engaging content that resonates with the target audience and aligns with SEO best practices. After completing your keyword research, determine one primary keyword that you want to focus on for your specific website page.
By honing these skills and staying updated on the latest trends and algorithm changes in the field of SEO, you can excel as an SEO specialist and help websites improve their search engine rankings and visibility.