What Exactly is SEO? 5 Basic SEO Tips for Beginners
Search Engine Optimization or popularly termed “SEO,” is the practice of enhancing your website’s exposure when visitors use Google, Bing, and other search engines to look for items or services connected to your business. The higher your pages’ exposure in search results, the more likely you will draw attention and attract new and existing clients to your company.
Without proper SEO, your website does not show on the first page of a search engine’s result page. And that directly affects the earnings and the efforts placed in setting up an online presence.
How Does SEO Work?
Search engines such as Google use bots to crawl the web, moving from site to site, collecting information about those sites, and indexing them. Consider the index to be an extensive library where a librarian may pull up a book (or a web page) to assist you in finding what you’re searching for. Then, using hundreds of ranking criteria or signals, computers examine sites in the index to decide the order they should show in search results for a particular query. In a library analogy, the librarian has read every book in the collection and can tell you which one will contain the answers to your queries.
That said, there are many factors contributing to a successful SEO campaign. If you’re planning to enter digital marketing, here are five basic SEO tips for beginners like you!
Tip #1: Plan It All Out
It’s critical to establish your website’s business goals before getting into your SEO approach. Because each website is unique, identifying the correct audience is vital for SEO and tracking conversions, accomplishments, and benchmarks.
As a beginner, you could define your performance indicators based on the number of sales, downloads, email subscribers, contact form submissions, and phone calls. However, it would help to remember that successful SEO is not by metrics. Still, it is only a support to your business goals and sales.
Tip #2: Produce Fresh Content
Search engines, especially Google, love fresh content. Fresh, relevant content provides more value to users and lets Google know that you are still active. However, it is challenging to provide new high-quality content constantly. Therefore, instead of coming up with fresh, really fantastic high-quality posts, you can use what you currently have.
An easy tip on producing fresh, relevant content is to update one of your popular but older posts if you have one. Update the post with new information and republish it with the updated date. The postings with a year in the title are ideal candidates for this vital SEO tactic. For example, if you have an article entitled “Best Instagram Frames 2017”, you could update that post by adding relevant, up-to-date information and changing the title to “Best Instagram Frames 2022”.
Tip #3: Perform Keyword Research
A considerable part of a successful SEO campaign is using the proper keywords for your content. Search engine optimization relies on keywords relevant to your website and popular with users. It has a low competition rate with other businesses.
Finding a keyword research tool online, such as Google AdWords’ Keyword Planner, SEMrush, or Google Trends, is a fantastic place to start. You can use these to gather information on keywords related to your brand and in your on-page SEO approach.
Therefore, incorporating keywords into blog entries, landing pages, and meta tags can help you gain visibility when a user searches a query related to your content.
Tip #4: Don’t Ignore User Intent
Apart from performing keyword research on high search volume words, it would be best if you also considered the searcher’s intent to define the right keywords.
There are three search intents: Transactional, Informational, and Navigational.
Transactional is a user’s intent who wants to buy a product or service.
Information is the intent of a user who wants information on a product or service.
Navigational is a user’s intent who wants to go to a specific website.
Knowing which keywords to target depends on your understanding of these intents. A blog piece, for example, could need an instructional keyword like “How to brew the perfect cup of coffee.” But, a service or product page might need a transactional term like “coffee makers.”
If you utilize SEMrush for keyword research, you’ll come across a feature called ‘Keyword Difficulty.’ The statistic ‘keyword difficulty’ indicates how much SEO work it will take to rank in Google’s top 10 results for a given phrase.
Tip #5: Write Naturally
While keywords are still crucial, search engines have gotten more intelligent in ranking pages on the results page, rewarding websites with valuable, engaging content. Google’s recent improvements have placed a strong emphasis on user experience. So, quality trumps quantity. Also, remember that keyword stuffing will get you penalized if Google detects it.
Ultimately, you must write for people first, rather than search engines, as users follow search engines. Because if you’re recycling generic material, SEO tactics cannot be efficient enough to help you reach the first page of search results.
Key Takeaway
Whether you are new to SEO or not, there are still a lot of tips and things to learn because the practice of search engine optimization is constantly evolving. What you have just read is just scraping the surface of the big SEO world. However, keeping these essential tips in mind can help a beginner like you grasp the basic understanding of SEO.
