SEO Search Engine Optimization for Beginners
SEO or search engine optimization is the core of your online business to get you noticed organically on search engine results. Therefore, you need to understand how it works and what works best for your website to get seen. Here are some beginner SEO tips to help.
What is Search Engine Optimization?
SEO is a process you use to optimize your website to rank on the search results leading to more non-paid (organic) traffic. The business of SEO is ever-growing and changing as it focuses on both PPC (paid per click) and organic SEO results.
As people use the search engine for answers, you want to provide them with one. So to achieve this, you need to know some technical aspects. In addition, you need to deliver great content with quality backlinks to increase your website authority.
Vocabulary You Need to Know
When looking at SEO, you find a few terms from on-page SEO, off-page SEO, black hat SEO, to white hat SEO. Using on-page SEO is everything you can do on your site from:
· Keyword research
· Optimizing content
· Title tag optimization
· Your page performance optimization
· Internal linking
Using these in your content shows what your brand is all about on the search engines. Using off-page SEO is getting backlinks from quality websites to establish the authority and value of search engines. These you can achieve with email outreach, broken link building, and guest blogging.
These also go hand in hand with branding and social media marketing. For this reason, you need to have a logo that will attract visitors’ attention when created with a logo maker. Why? As it is the first thing people see and remember.
Therefore, your on-page and off-page SEO activities go hand in hand. Lastly, it helps to use white hat SEO that adheres to Google’s guidelines to achieve the best results. While black hat SEO techniques do not come highly recommended.
Go for White Hat SEO
When using this form of search engine optimization you:
· Provide well-written and valuable content compared to cloaking it, making it sneaky
· You provide natural links without hidden text
· It provides brand-building without keyword stuffing
· You have a content strategy without link manipulation
· You use on-page optimization without using irrelevant backlinks
· You did your keyword research without link farms
· All your content focuses on quality and not the word spam
How Does Search Engines Work?
A search engine crawls, indexes, and picks results based on keywords searched. Further, it works with an algorithm constantly updated to rank websites. In the process, you need to consider various aspects:
1. First, the search engine needs to understand the person’s query and what they are searching for.
2. Your page needs to be relevant to the search, and it picks quality content to provide results.
3. Your web pages need to be usable, meaning readable, safe, accessible, and more.
4. Lastly, your location, setting, and search history are considered as well.
How Do You Achieve This?
You need to provide your audience with well-targeted content to identify their needs when searching. Next, your website needs to be crawlable to rank high on the SERPs to be found. Finally, all your links need to be of quality and quantity as the more authority it provides, Google will find you.
A fact is that SEO is not only about using the right words, but your content needs to be comprehensive to make visitors happy. Also, never use duplicate content on your site and provide fresh content all the time. In turn, your click-through rate helps to have title tags and meta descriptions to help improve your pages.
