Simple SEO Guide for Beginners

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The word SEO is the most widely use and vibrant acronym used on all Internet platform, this acronym clearly stands for “search engine optimization.” This is a process of getting traffic from the editorial, organic and natural free sources for search results on search engines. All search engines such as Google, bing, yahoo and so on, have basic search results where Web contents such as videos, local listing and webs are listed and ranked based on how relevant they are to users as considered by search engines. It is a known fact that the first three results of a searched content or word usually get the maximum clicks. Search engine optimization helps you to be among the first few, this service doesn’t require payments unlike paid search ads. SEO professionals employ different strategy to make a website appears higher in the list of your search results. When a search is being made on search engines, there are a lot of processes going on behind the cover in order to provide you with a better search result. Search engines consider some major factors which determine how your website or Web contents are being rated, the most important factors are:

Your Question?

Search engines use a technology known as technology graph to make it better understand what you need and how best you can be served either with a graph, a map, definition or even a diagram

Your Location?

A search engine not only takes into consideration what you are looking for but also your location in order to provide you with the best possible solution in your vicinity. So it is important for local business to maximize their SEO efforts by optimizing their Google places page.

 

What does an SEO DO?

The main purpose of an SEO is to make your website or content visible to many users more easily but the way this is achieved varies widely. There are some popular practices that you will hear about when it comes to SEO.

 

  • Optimizing the site: Google and other major search engines found information about a website by crawling, so it is the work of an SEO to make sure the site can be easily located by search engines and crawl. So that means you have to do a lot of different things like making sure the site has a site map that can be easily located by Google, making sure it can quickly load and analysis of the site structural and architectural design for users easier access.

 

  • Search Keywords: Keyword is the name being typed into a search engine to find what you want, it is very important to have a keyword that is basically relevant to what you are offering. SEOs perform keyword research to determine which keyword is best for your site and places and times to be repeated for better optimization.

 

 

  • Builds links: The first main element search engine consider in order to determine which information is the best online is ‘builds links’ search engines check the website that are link to your site, if those websites are reputable and trusted sites, it is assumed that you are also a well trusted and quality website and this makes it more likely that you will be the first searchers see. SEO spend a great deal of time in getting quality links in a process called link building. The best way to get links is by creating an outstanding and quality content. Whether it is a blog post, video, tools. A great content attracts people as they click the link, read and share to other people.

There are some few basic steps you can take to make your website SEO optimized without employing the service of an SEO company or professionals and they include;

1) On site SEO basics

Majority of the most important factors for search engine optimization happens on your own website. You might have heard about link building as an important tool for making your website SEO optimized but without proper website content you are still short of being SEO optimized. Here are the minimum of on-site optimization factors you have to put on each of your website’ main page, most especially the homepage. One important thing you have to keep in mind when using any of these search engine optimization elements is not to overdo it. Don’t ever be tempted to use too many keywords in your website. In fact, Google has unleashed an over optimization penalty on website that has too many keywords in one page. So always keep it simple and few when it comes to keyword optimization. If you are not sure of which keyword to use, you can get some basic ideas on Google’s Adwords keywords tools. You can use up to 5 keyword phrases or keyword on each page.

Title tag

The title tag should be 70 words or less and it should contain your brand or business name and some keywords that relate to that specific page only. The title tag on pages of your website tells search engine what they need to know about that page.

Meta description

This gives search engines a little bit more insight of what your page contains. This is just like a brief description of that particular page. Although it is yet to be ascertained that meta description help with keyword rankings.

There are some additional on-site search engine optimization elements which are; internal links, header tags, image name and ALT tags, bolded text. But meta description and title tag are the most important factors of on-site SEO optimization.

How important is content?

If you have been keeping up with latest information on online marketing news, then you should have probably come across content development and content marketing. A good content is good for both website visitors and search engines, the better quality your content are, the better the chance of more website visitors and also the ranking by search engines. Quality content involves a variety of factors such as; blog posts, industry articles, infographics, videos, podcasts, tutorials and so on. Creating a quality content for your website can be a huge task and involves great investment but it is worth the stress as it can greatly affect your SEO ranking. Search engines will love this and even visitors as they will like and share your post, helping you get more visitors without stress. One of the key methods of achieving this is by creating blog posts and videos on your website, and as your audience grows you can introduce new contents to your website.

Architecture

This is a super-techy, super fast element of on-site SEO ranking. Great website architecture leads to a greater user experience when he navigates your page, through faster loading time, safe connection and a mobile friendly design. The more accessible your page is the better your chances of being ranked higher because they will be easier to crawl. You can make this task easier for Google by creating a site map, using a simple plugin if you are on wordpress or on an online XML sitemap generator. To see how a crawl works, you can use this tool.

Duplicate content: There are a lot of myth about duplicate content and how it can affect your SEO ranking. There is no harm in reposting content on other websites or your own once it is spammy free.

Mobile friendliness

It is a known fact that most internet users access website through their mobile phones than they do through pc. So creating a mobile friendly website is an important factor you have to consider for a better SEO ranking. There are several ways you can achieve this but, I strongly suggest you start by checking with Google’s tool how you hold up right now.

Page speed

In this era we are now, speed is an important factor in every aspect of our life so there is no exemption to that even when it comes to using the internet. You wouldn’t want to spend 20 seconds loading a single page. Again, Google has a tool you can use to check if you are doing okay in this aspect.

 

2) Off-site optimization

This is also known as link building, as I have explained before the main purpose of link building is to have trusted and certified website link to yours, link building is very important as it makes visitors and even search engines confident of your content. If you think of ranking on the apex of a search results as a result of popularity, then link building are like votes saying your website have to be considered first. There are a lot of ways to get link, some are good while some are not so good. The three main types of links are:

Organic link: These are regarded as the best type of link because you don’t have to ask for it and most especially they can be easily get on sites with high authority such as major news website and other well recognized website

Whitehat: This is the type of link you should strive hard for because they basically stand for good quality link building. If you are planning to make blogging a part of your life for a long time then this link is the perfect choice for you, it focuses more on human audience by giving them best content available and making it easily accessible to them by playing in accordance with search engine rules

Blackhat: I personally don’t like this type of link because it stands for low quality, spammy link building. This is the type of link I would strongly advise you to stay away from unless you are blogging to just make quick money and not considering the long term impact it can have on your website.

Most websites usually have a hard time generating organic links to raise their rankings in search engines. But you can get started with building quality links by doing some of the following activities:

  • Submitting great blog posts to reputable websites in your industry. By doing these, you will get a link back to your website which is provided at the top or bottom of your authors box.
  • Reaching out to related business to see if they will link back to you. A good way to do this is to see if the businesses you work with have a link page on their website for partners, suppliers and vendors. Submit your website to applicable industry directories or buy advertising.
  • Create link worthy contents. A great example of this is infographics- you create a beautiful image representing important information and you allow other website to use it in return for linking.

3) How Google + can help you with ranking

If your goal is to dominate Google, then you should consider joining Google +. Google’s own social network can help you rank better with people you are linked with. So, if you want to get into the personalized search game you have to create a Google personal and business page with a good profile and start connecting with people. Most importantly, the more popular you are on Google +, the higher the possibility of affecting the search results of people following you. Hence, it is best to take advantage of this social network and turn it into something of great benefits.

4) Monitoring your progress

And lastly, you will want to monitor your SEO progress. You can use either of these two methods to keep track of your progress.

  • Authority labs: you can create a free account after exhausting the 30 days trial of the Pro account. You can use this tool to keep track of the keywords ranking of your website.
  • Google analytics: you can use this to learn more about the visitors to your website. In particular, it monitors your organic search traffic, enables you to see what keywords people are using to find your website in search results. This will help you to know which keyword is getting you more traffic to your website.

There are other SEO tools that you can use to monitor your ranking and check if you are really improving. But these two listed above are the best and they are easy to use.

 

If you can follow all the steps listed in this article, you have a better chance of improving your SEO ranking and increasing the number of people visiting your websites on daily basis.