A simple complete SEO guide for beginners: Learn most of the things you need
to know about Search Engine Optimization.(SEO)
Maybe you have a basic understanding that it has something to do with Search
Engines. But wondering what exactly SEO is and why it's so powerful in Digital Marketing.
That’s why we wrote this article for you!
Frequently Asked Questions We've Answerd:
• What is SEO?
• How can I learn SEO?
• How does SEO work?
• How do search engines work?
• How can I rank my website
• Why is SEO so important?
• How long does it take to learn SEO?
• Do I need SEO tools?
Implementing Things From This Article Is A Great Way To Start Your SEO
Journey.
Key Takeaway: Search Engine Optimization is not something you can
learn in a day, week or month. It takes quite usually a long time and great
efforts for better results or success.
Mastering SEO largely depends on;
• Experimenting
• Reading reliable resources
• Consistency
• Practice
• Patience
SEO is evolving all the time. You should always stay updated with the
latest updates and related information about essential SEO elements that keep on changing.
As a beginner, when you start digging deep into SEO, you will definitely come
across various common terms or vocabularies.
Some terms are not so important from the practical point of view but it's
better we discuss about a few of them so that you can understand their
meaning.
Here are some common terms used in SEO that we thought might be the most
useful to you as a beginner.
Title Tag: A tag that contains the title of a web page. The title
tag is often displayed on the SERP and is one of the most important elements
of SEO.
Schema: It's a code used to provide additional information about a
web page to search engines.
Meta Tags: These are tags used to provide information about a web
page, such as the title, keywords, and description
Spider: A program used by a search engine to crawl the internet
and index web pages, also known as a Bot.
ALT: (Alternative Text) This is the text that appears
in place of an image on a website if the image fails to load.
Traffic: This is the total number of people who visit your website. Web
Traffic can be paid traffic or organic traffic.
Organic traffic simply means you don’t pay directly for traffic. These are
mostly people who click through to your website from Google's search results
or your media posts.
Links: (usually known as a hyperlinks)
Are clickable items on a webpage that connects one page to another. Links can
be shown as text, pictures, or buttons. It's a way for users to navigate
between pages on the Internet. Similarly, link building is the process of
obtaining or gaining hyperlinks from other websites to yours.
There are mainly 3 major types of SEO links that can affect your rankings.
Internal links, Backlinks and External links.
• Internal Links: These are links that point to pages within your
website.
• Backlinks: (also called inbound links) These are normally
incoming links or references to your website on other sites.
• External Links: (also called outbound Links) Are
links on your site that point to external webpages on other sites.
Click Through Rate: The percentage of people who click on a specific
link out of the total number of people who see it.
Content Management System(CMS) These are platforms used to create,
edit, publish and manage content on the internet.
Keywords: These are simply phrases or words users type in a Search
Engine to find what they're looking for. (Search queries)
If you want your site to be found on SERP, then consider using relevant
keywords. People will have a better chance of finding your content among the
results.
Types Of Keywords In SEO:
• Short Tail Keywords
• Long Tail Keywords
• Local keywords
• Focus Keywords
• Sematic Keywords
• Generic Keywords
• Product related Keywords
There's still a long list of keyword types not mentioned above. All you need
is to use the right Keywords for your SEO strategy.
Keyword research can help you find the most profitable keyword opportunities
and plan your content strategy
SiteMap: Also called a website map is a file that contains a list of
all important pages on a website. Due to the increasing size and number of
websites on the internet, Search Engines may find it difficult to keep track
on billions of materials/content on the internet.
It’s highly possible for your content to be buried deep in your website where
search engines can’t easily find it.
Sitemaps display important web pages so that search engines can easily find,
crawl and index discovered content and information. That's why you need a
sitemap, especially if you have a larger website.
There are 2 types of sitemaps and each has a different functionality on
websites.
1.HTML (Hyper Text Mark-up Language)
Is a central list of every link on your
website that helps you keep track of
your pages and subpages.
2.XML (Extensible Mark-up Language)
Provides a list of all URLs representing
your site.
XML and HTML are both coding languages used to create new web pages on CMSs.
WHAT IS SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO), can be defined in various ways, but let's
take this simple definition!
SEO is simply described as the process of optimizing your website
or blog
with the aim of appearing on Search Engine Result Pages (SERP) in order to
gain more organic traffic.
SEO activities are categorised basing on whether you perform them on the
website or off the website.
On-Page SEO:
These are activities you do on your website. Basically, On-Page SEO are all
things that you can directly control on your site. (Similar to
Technical SEO)
When dealing with On-Page SEO, here's what you normally focus on.
• Your Web design and layout
• Keyword research and analysis
• Optimizing your content
• Optimizing title tags & meta descriptions
The best way to remain competitive in the SEO world is knowing how to make
Search Engines completely understand your content. On-page SEO activities are
what help Search Engines understand what your website is all about.
Off-Page SEO:
These are mainly activities which involve external optimization practices that
happen away(offline) from your site.
What you do on your website(On-page) is only half the effort, Off-Page SEO
makes the huge difference on your website because it's all about building
reputation.
Experts say that Off-Page SEO can boost or make up to more than 50% of
Google's ranking factors.
Normally, this is mostly about getting quality backlinks to show Search
Engines that your website or blog has valuable content and can be
reliable and trusted.
Off-Page SEO Practices includes,
• Brand Mentions
• Guest blogging
• Email outreach
• Influencer marketing
Note: Sometimes Off-page SEO can be a little more difficult or hard
because it's entirely not within your control. That's why a good SEO strategy
should consist of both On-Page and Off-Page SEO activities.
The difference: On-page SEO describes specific elements of the pages on your
website that you control.
Off-page SEO, on the other hand, mostly take place beyond your website.
Local SEO: This is the process of optimizing your site with a aim
of gaining more local search rankings. People often prefer searching about
things near them and that's why Search Engines can base on locations to show
results.
It's important to note that Search Engines like Google penalize websites
which participate in using manipulative SEO practices. So it's clever to
follow the guidelines while optimizing your site.
We've explained 2 types of SEO so that you can better understand which
practices are considered bad or good.
White-Hat SEO(Ethical SEO): Refers to all the regular SEO practices or activities both on or off
your website which are in line with the rules and policies set by Search
Engines.
It's a long-term strategy in which good rankings are a side-product of good
optimization, quality content, and a user-oriented approach.
Implementing White Hat SEO practices is the best way to create an ethical,
sustainably successful website and business online.
Black-Hat SEO(Unethical SEO): A set of activities aimed at manipulating or violating Search Engines
terms of services, guidelines and policies.
These techniques can get you to the top of the Search Engines Results Pages.
However, google will most probably penalize and ban the website sooner or
later.
And once you've been banned from Google, there's no guarantee that they might
ever re-list or rank your site again. A lifetime ban will have tremendous
consequences.
It's much better to never get your website into that position at all. Here's a
list of some Black Hat practices you should totally avoid.
• Keyword Stuffing
• Manipulating Links on your site
• Publishing pages with malicious content
• Hiding Links and content
The Black hat and white hat thing originated in ascent Western movies.
Where black hats were used to represent bad guys and white hats definitely
represented the good guys.
You may have probably seen black hats used to describe those who perform
unethical actions with computers. (Hackers)
HOW SEO AND SEARCH ENGINES WORK:
Yes! You must have probably understood what SEO is, but do you know how it
really works? Let's Dive a Little Deep.
Basically, SEO focuses only on organic search results or organic traffic. It
works by optimizing a website's content, conducting keyword research, and link
building in order to increase a content’s ranking and the website’s visibility
on a Search Engine.
A Search Engine is an online tool that people use to search for information on
the internet.
A typical example is Google and
when we talk about Search Engines in this article, we mostly mean Google
because honestly, it's the common example you need to know.
When people have a query and are looking up or searching for something online
and you provide answers or solutions to what they are looking for, google
looks for clues to give searchers the exact results they are looking for.
There are three steps it needs to take: (1)Crawling (2)Indexing and
(3)Ranking
1.Crawling: This is the first step or process. Google sends out
robots(crawlers or spiders) to follow hyperlinks and discover new content and
webpages on the internet.
Crawlers will then gather all the information about your webpages and report
back to google what they've discovered.
2.Indexing: After crawling, the information about your webpages
will be stored in a huge database known as "Search Index" where it can later
be retrieved.
The information may include discovered URLs, images, videos or documents.
3.Ranking: Once your site has been crawled and indexed, the
ranking process begins.
This is when Google will determine where to place a particular web page on
it's Results Page. (SERP)
Google organizes results from most relevant to least relevant.They aim at
providing users with the most relevant information.
In general, Google wants to show searchers the highest quality and most
trustworthy content at the top of the result page.
So, in order for your website to show up on the first page of Google, you have
to provide top quality and relevant answers to what people search for.
BEST SEO TOOLS YOU SHOULD BE USING.
It's needles to invest a lot of money in order to gain traffic and If you’re
serious about SEO, you shouldn’t neglect the useful data and insights provided
by these tools.
That's why we've given you access to these powerful SEO Tools, broken down
into the following Categories:
Keyword Research Tools:
Tracking and Analytics Tools:
• Semrush
Link Building Tools:
• Ahrefs
SiteMap Generating Tools:
User Experience (UX)
• Pingdom
WHY SEO IS SO CRUCIAL AND IMPORTANT.
Remember, your site is the center-piece of your digital marketing
activities. Your main goal is to be easily found and reached online, and
that's where SEO comes in.
Now, Here's Why SEO Is So Important:
Our top reasons why you need SEO.
Visibility and Ranking: SEO is the major key to increasing your
visibility and ranking on Search Engines, the higher you rank, the more likely
prospects will be able to click through your website. Definitely a great
opportunity to generate valuable leads and sales.
With a proper SEO Strategy, it's possible to push your website to the
forefront of Search Engines like Google, enabling you to generate organic
traffic.
Here are some crucial ranking factors you should definitely know. (Some
confirmed ranking factors have a small impact on your website while others are
not yet confirmed but it's so important to put all these factors into
consideration and implement them)
• Adjusting your website speed
• Obtaining quality backlinks
• Making sure your content can be Crawled
• Publishing unique and fresh content
• Website must work on any device
• Use of https and Having a Sitemap
• Creating well structured pages and content
If you provide prove that you're an authority in your field and you create
high quality content that can be trusted, you will definitely earn better
rankings on search engines.
Organic Traffic: Organic traffic is one of the main goals of SEO, This
means you don't need to pay any single coin to be on top of the SERP. Google
Analytics is a perfect tool you can use to examine and monitor the general
performance or traffic of your site.
Credibility and Authority: Authority means that your website can
be trusted and can be reliable with quality and relevant content highly useful
to visitors.
In SEO, Page Authority(PA) scores from the range of 0–100 and the higher your
score, the more authority your site will have. You can find your PA ratings by
using tools like Google Search Console.
Builds Trust and User Experience: SEO will help you build organic
trust for your business and User Experience (UX) is how your visitors interact
with your website.
This includes how well your visitors can navigate through your website. A good
web design, tone, and a faster page load speed will reduce your bounce rate
and encourage visitors to spend longer times on your site.
If your site has a good User Experience (UX) and you provide what visitors are
looking for, you often become a trusted source they can rely on. Whether you
provide answers to questions, products or services.
Furthermore, SEO practices or activities which adjust User Experience (UX)
benefits your website to rank better on Google.
Customers or visitors know exactly what they're looking for, If your website
doesn’t meet user standards, Google will know it and you might get left
behind.