SEO BASICS AND MORE
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. That alone should make you happy because it means we can easily figure out what we need to do in order to get ranked higher on SERPs (Search engine result pages). SERPs are the lists of links you see when typing something in the search bar of your favorite browser (Google, Yahoo…).
These are affected by a number of factors such as:
How frequently the website (the one owning the link) is updated; How many other websites are linking to that specific web page; How relevant that website is to your search term.
It means that if you manage to rank higher, you’ll have more people looking at the content of your web page (or any other webpage, for the matter). It’s not necessarily about getting as many visitors as possible, but rather getting qualified visitors. The last thing you want is random clicks coming from people that didn’t type the exact keyword you’re targeting. What those people probably did is click on the first link they saw, without taking care of what it was about.
That’s where SEO comes into play. SEO allows webmasters to get their website seen by more relevant traffic. It improves visibility, which will eventually lead to an increased number of visitors.
Components of The Beginners Guide To SEO
- Types of search engine success factors: A look into the various types of factors, both on-page and off-page that can affect your search engine rankings
- Content and search engine success factors: What are the various elements, when added can get you more quality traffic than a dull and boring blog post
- Site architecture and search engine success factors: The in-depth knowledge of what goes on in the hindsight, the technical paraphernalia of SEO
- HTML codes and search engine success factors: HTML tags and properly aligned content together make it easier for your search engine to understand your content
- Trust, authority, expertise, and domain factors: How to make the most out of the credibility factor and make your website rank higher
- Link Building & Ranking In Search Engines: Link building is gold, even if it has a long history
- Personalization and search engine rankings: Tap into customer-specific factors like utility, location, and choices to make the most out of your customer base.
- Toxins & Search Engine Spam Penalties: Know what not to do while playing the SEO game.
- Emerging Verticals in Search: Discover trends and up-and-coming ways to increase the richness of what you serve your customer with.
Types of SEO
There are three main types of SEO: On-Page; Off-Page; Technical.
I’ll start with the easiest one first.
On-Page SEO means that you need to do some optimization on your web page, which has nothing to do with off-page or technical SEO. You can hire someone to optimize it for you or follow tutorials that will teach you how to do it yourself.
You will need to know about keywords and keyword density for this method to work. There are many tools that will help you find the best keywords to use, I will talk about that later.
Off-Page SEO is the part of Search engine optimization which mostly involves building links to your website. It can be done manually or you can hire someone from Fiverr to do it for you. There are many kinds of links: Do-Follow; No-Follow; Comment links.
Technical SEO is all about setting up your website properly and making sure that search engines can crawl it without any problems. It’s really technical stuff, but you can hire someone to do this for you or follow tutorials. The truth is that this part of SEO isn’t as important as it used to be, because Google has become really good at crawling most websites.
In order to achieve this goal, you will need to follow some steps, but before we get into that I’d like to make something clear. It’s called “White Hat” and “Black hat SEO”.
Basically, White Hat SEO means you follow the rules and play it fair, Black hat is the opposite. I’ll talk about both in more detail later on, but just to give you a heads up: never rely on Black Hat tactics, they might get you banned from search engines.
How does it work?
It’s a long story, but I’ll give you a quick example in order to make things easier to understand. Let’s say that you want your website about mountain bikes to rank higher on Google for the keyword “Mountain Bikes”. You will need to do some basic SEO techniques such as:
Optimizing your title tags and description; Optimizing the content of your web page (such as headings, links structure, images…); Building links to the website.
All those steps are fairly easy to do manually. You can either hire someone to do it for you or follow tutorials that will teach you how to do it. If you’re not into tutorials and like to save time, then hire someone (you can easily find affordable on Fiverr). There are other factors that influence your ranking such as:
Backlinks; PageRank; Domain Authority (DA).
Is SEO important?
Now, here is where things get interesting. If you want to rank higher for a specific keyword in Google, then yes it’s important. It’s also time-consuming if you have to optimize your web page manually, in order to get the perfect balance between keywords and content. If that was the only thing that matters then SEO wouldn’t be that much of a hard job, but there are way more factors to take into consideration.
The good news is that you don’t have to do all the boring stuff anymore. There are tools out there that will automate everything for you, so the only thing left to do is put in a bit of work and get your hands dirty.
How can I do SEO?
There are many techniques that will help you get ranked for a specific keyword, but the main point is to find out what people are looking for and give it to them.
While there are some ways to do SEO manually, there are many others that require you to put in a bit of work.
That’s not an easy question to answer, because there are many ways to get it done.
- Keywords are words or phrases that people type into search engines in order to find information online. By using those words or phrases (keywords) on your website you make it easier for search engines to find.
- So for example, if I want to find information about SEO, then I will type “beginners guide to SEO” in the search bar on Google. Now that you know what keywords are, let me show you how to use them.
- If I’m an affiliate marketer and I want to get traffic from Amazon, I also want to make money from each sale that someone makes after following my link. So the first priority is to find a product that might interest people, the larger lot that is. In the cold season, it would be something like: “electric heating belt”.
- In order for me to get ranked for this keyword, it’s important that I use it more than once on my web page. However, you shouldn’t overdo it either, because that will have a negative impact on your rankings.
- The next step would be to find out how many people are searching for this product and then try to get the link up as high as possible on the Google search results. There are many ways to ace the SEO game and they require work and time.
The reason why SEO is a marketing strategy and not a product is because it’s free. Anyone willing to put in the work can do it themselves or hire someone to do it for them. But with the right SEO practices, there is a wider field for growth than one can see at first.