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What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It’s the process of increasing your website’s visibility in search engines like Google and Bing. The better your site’s SEO, the higher its ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs).
Why is it important?
The higher your site ranks for relevant searches, the more people will visit it. Over time, this can increase brand awareness and improve conversions or sales for your business.
How does it work?
In short, it comes down to a few best practices: content, on-page optimization, and link building. When you do that, search engines will reward you with higher rankings on SERPs, which means more traffic to your site.
Create an SEO Plan
When executing an SEO plan, consider factors like time and resources. Ensure the plan is realistic and manageable.
Start your plan with a site audit; you can use tools like Webmaster Tools, GSC, and third-party tools like Ahrefs, Moz, Semrush, and more.
Your SEO plan should outline the content strategy, on-page optimization, and planning for building high-quality backlinks to drive organic search engine enrollment growth.
Create a List of Keywords
Keywords are words or phrases people type into a search engine to find information. When creating content, ensure the keywords on your page match the words or phrases people use when searching for information.
For example, if someone searches for “running shoes” and your web page is about running shoes, the keywords should include “running shoes.”
Many keyword research tools can help you choose the right keywords, including Google AdWords Keyword Planner and SEMrush.
No matter which tool you use, it will only be effective if you feed it relevant data. So, before you start searching for keywords, ask yourself these questions:
What is this web page about? What is its purpose?
Who is my audience? Who do I want to reach with this content?
Optimize your Site’s Structure
Now that you understand what SEO is and why it matters, let’s explore best practices for optimizing your website.
The first and most important best practice is thoroughly optimizing your site’s structure.
What do we mean by this?
There are many elements to consider when ensuring your site has an optimized structure.
These elements include:
The responsiveness of your site to mobile devices, because more than half the world’s population now accesses the internet via their mobile phones or handheld devices
The ease with which users can navigate through your pages and content so that they can find what they need quickly
How accessible is all content on your platform for search engines to crawl successfully and efficiently so it can appear in search results, increasing traffic and driving conversion rates up?
Write High-Quality Website Content
Writing content isn’t straightforward. You want to write helpful and informative content that helps readers or solves a problem, but you also want to rank well in search engines.
To do both, you must understand how people search for your content and what they’re looking for when they land on your page.
You should also verify your content's uniqueness before publishing it on your website. Use online resources to run a quick, free plagiarism check and determine which text is unique and which is plagiarized from online sources.
When you have a clear idea of your website’s target audience, it becomes easier to understand their intent and mindset when searching for information online. This is what we call keyword research:
Who is my target audience?
What are my audience’s pain points?
What questions does my target audience have about my industry that I can answer in an article?
How can I help them solve their problems or answer those questions?
Use Internal Links
Using numerous internal links (with anchor text) helps Google discover new pages on your site.
Internal links help spread the link juice (ranking power) of your “authority pages.”
Internal links help Google understand your site's structure.
Publish Long-Form Content
Google prefers longer articles. Interestingly, long-form content tends to have a lower bounce rate and higher time on page than shorter articles.
People are happy to read long articles when they’re good, but they often don’t want to waste time on short or poorly written pieces.
Your article should be at least 1,000 words long, preferably 3,000+. In addition to having a better chance of ranking well on
the more you write about your topic, the less likely you’ll cannibalize your keywords by targeting similar ones in different blog posts.
Longer posts also tend to get more social shares.
Optimize Your Meta Tags: Titles and Meta Descriptions.
So, you have an SEO strategy. Now what?
Optimizing meta tags should be at the top of your SEO checklist. Titles and meta descriptions are HTML elements that describe a web page's content.
Titles appear as clickable headlines on search engine results pages (SERPs) and as the title for social media posts; meta descriptions appear on SERPs as snippets below each headline describing a page’s content.
Create Sitemap
Sitemaps list all pages on your site that are available for crawling by search engines. They help search engines collect and organize information on your website, making it easier to crawl.
Creating a sitemap is not complicated, but you must be careful, as minor mistakes can lead to big problems. Review the different types of sitemaps (HTML and XML) and choose the one that fits your purpose.
To ensure that search engine bots can find all the necessary documents, it is best to use both types.
You can check out the Google Sitemap Help Guide if you have any difficulties or questions regarding creating a sitemap or submit your site’s URL on Google Search Console to see what pages were indexed by the Google bot successfully (or not).
Submit Your Site to Search Engines.
You can submit your site to search engines directly.
To make sure your site gets indexed, there are a few tips you can follow:
Your website should have lots of content related to the same niche. Make sure it is well-organized, up to date, and easy for people to read and use.
The website should be responsive and easily accessible through any device or browser. For example, if you are using WordPress, choose a fast-loading theme optimized for all screen sizes, including mobile devices.
Because Google’s indexing bot crawls only text links on web pages, you may want to submit your website's sitemap via Google Webmaster Tools to speed up the indexing process.
Link Building
Ethical Link building is a big part of SEO. It’s asking someone else to link back to your website. For example, if I have a gardening blog and I want more people to find it on Google, I might ask other gardening blogs to link back to it.
Sometimes, this can be a friendly request; at other times, you may need to pay for a sponsored or guest blog post on that site.
The primary consideration when building links is enhancing your website’s SEO ranking by acquiring links from reputable sites.
As a beginner, start by reading SEO books and blogs and watching videos to understand the concepts, then implement them.
