7 steps in SEO that Beginner's should not miss!
Trending field where digital marketing is where all foot step into. SEO is the emerging strategy one should know before the journey!
Pandemic situation has made people to enter the digital world either by necessity to learn, explore, & business or by compulsion to binge something for time to pass by.
When I first started learning SEO, I was very nearly frightened off by terms like crawlers, backlinks, anchor text, nofollow vs dofollow, Meta description and the list goes on.
Here’s a part when I got nervous of working in the SEO industry — when approached with this question.
So…I’ve heard that this SEO thing is good for my business. Why and can you do it?”
I’ve since perfected my pitch:
When you’re good at SEO, your website gets on the first page of Google and Yes, I will try
The industry seems to be plagued with technical jargon and complicated concepts, to the point where people struggle to understand what needs to be done especially in Search engine optimization.
Sounds like you? If so, you’re in the right place.
Here I am to guide you perfectly with SEO with no hustle!
First things first,
What are Search engines, actually?
What’s the big deal with Google? What makes it different from Yahoo and Bing?
They’re all search engines.
Essentially, what search engines do is collect information and content from all over the web and store it in a database.
According to a November 2018 report by netmarketshare, 73% of all searches are powered by Google. In second place is Bing with 7.91%.
So… what exactly makes one search engine so different from another?
Google dominates the market because of the way it calculates page relevancy: i.e its algorithm (more on that in a bit)
In short, it’s proven itself to be by far and away the best at answering peoples’ queries with appropriate content. It’s now pretty much the way everyone in the
Fun fact: YouTube is also a search engine!
How does Google work?
Crawling
Imagine that you need to explore an unknown country. You start in a small town and drive down a road that connects you to the next town. You take the next road to the next town, and the next road after that. If you drive down every possible road from your starting point, you’ll eventually end up discovering every town.
This is how Google works–except the towns are web pages, and the roads connecting them are backlinks.
Ps: Crawlers are sometimes also called “spiders”–because they, too, crawl the web.
In SEO, by making the spider’s job easier. This, in turn, makes it easier for our webpages to get identified easily!
For this crawling to be done, we set up Google Search Console account by submitting the sitemap of our website to it in-order to be crawled 🕸
How do I optimize my website for Google?
On-page SEO is all about adjusting elements on a webpage so that Google understands what it’s about, recognizes and decides that it deserves to be #1 in search results.
“Rome was not built in a day”
On the other hand, off-page SEO is a fancy way to say “build lots of great backlinks & internal links so that google is attracted.
Here’s a 7 — SEO steps you can follow to well optimize
1. Set-up Google accounts
Submit your website with google search console & google analytics to be indexed under google algorithm.
2. Understand what keywords people are searching for?
People search for your brand or business in tons of different ways.
For example, let’s say that you’re a restaurant in India. People could search for “Restaurant in India,” “Indian restaurants ” or possibly even “Restaurants near me”.
So it’s really important to start by finding the most popular ways that people are searching for you. This way, you can cater to and optimize your content for those phrases (i.e., keywords)
Here are the links that I used to search keywords for free (Long-tail & Short-tail)
1. Google Trends
2. Semscoop
3. KWfinder
4. Keyword.io
3. Create content that searchers want to see 👀
Want to rank for a topic or keyword? Then we need to optimize our content for “search intent.”
If you are Good Content Writer it’s an added advantage or if you are not one of them?
Learn this Course from HubSpot to be best at Content Marketing for free.
Use Ahref’s keyword search in SERP section which drops down all contents on desired topics.
4. Keep URLs short and descriptive
Your URL could be https://www.startup.com/2018/01/15/287539884.php
Or it could be https://www.startup.com/Article-review/
Which one includes the keywords you’re looking to target with this article? Which one are you more likely to click on in the search results?
Keep your URLs as short and sweet as possible. The collective sanity of internet searchers thanks you.
5. Optimize your images
It may seem not relevant but it is added fuel, make sure to name all your images appropriately.
Optimize all your images by including alt tags with descriptions.
This is the text that shows up whenever your image fails to load or if the user is using a screen reader.
Remember how we discovered that spiders don’t “see” images on pages the way we do as humans?
Naming them helps Google to understand the images better.
Here’s what ranking in Google image search looks like for “bad links”:
6. Make sure your content is easy to read
It’s widely believed in the SEO industry that user signals influence rankings.
Do your best to optimize things like your title and image tags — but keep in mind that user experience is also important. If your content is difficult to read and digest, readers are going to leave.
Start using <h1>, <h2> and <h3> tags in your webpages. Since I worked on WordPress website, this widely helped to look pretty.
Additional tips to keep your content readable:
- Use formatting like paragraphs, bolding and lists to break up big chunks of copy.
- Include images (with alt tags, wink) to better illustrate your points.
- Use Grammarly recommended. It would be your last-minute savior (Mine too)
7. Get Quality backlinks & internal-links
Internal-links
These links are supposed to be of your own website links which leads to contact address or sections that are available for users to look through….
For Example:
Link to My Medium Profile
Back-links
Backlinks are very, very important.
It’s an incoming hyperlink from another website, or referring domain, to your target webpage. In plain English, when another website links to you, it’s giving you a backlink.
In general, any SEO will tell you that the more and better quality backlinks you have, the higher your chances are of ranking a page and the more search traffic you’ll get.
There are tons of tactics and strategies or even researching your competitors’ backlinks and trying to replicate.
1. Guest Blogging — check websites that accept guest blog.
2. Back-link checker of competitors.
Get links from people you already have a good relationship with.
Think about everyone you already have a connection to through your business: partners, suppliers, clients, agencies.
Plenty of brands link out to others on their websites. You just need to reach out and ask.
How should I get started?
“you can’t just SEO your website and be done. It’s a forever moving goal post”
SEO seems to be everything at once, from optimizing pages for search engine readability to creating content that’s a perfect match to searchers’ needs.
In general, you want to:
- Keep content up-to-date and relevant
- Produce quality content that targets high-converting keywords in your industry
- Actively work towards building backlinks
- Monitor your keyword rankings and backlinks — if there are sudden drops, you can investigate the issue using analytics
- Perform content audits every so often to optimize your existing content.
It can be very overwhelming to try and get everything right at one go, so my advice is: don’t bother.
You get the gist!
Start off small and expand from there. You’ll learn the skills needed and figure it out as you go.
Hopefully, this article gave you enough background information as well as valid tips to get started on your SEO journey ;)
