Do you own a website or do you want to help others’ websites? this article will help your either way. If you are a business owner or a blogger you probably want to rank first on google. Understanding SEO basics will help you to increase your website visibility on google.
The topics we will discuss in this article
What is SEO
Why you need an SEO
On-Page SEO
Off-Page SEO
Technical SEO
What is SEO
Let’s start from basics, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and it helps a website or a web page to rank on google search results. Now you must be thinking of that’s it? Yes, this is all SEO does. But driving traffic from the search engines is not that easy. Google algorithm has 100+ ranking factors to check on your website then it will rank your site on the search engine.
Why you need an SEO
Whenever you search for something on Google you find some results related to those words you type in the google search bar. For example, if you search for “Gardening Tips” you will get a bunch of ( 10 results on every page ) results on the google page. Several more pages are holding each 10 more results for your search. Now think about it this way, you searched for gardening tips and now you get the results that might solve your problem.
I want to ask you a question about which search result you will click first? Of course 1st maybe 2nd and 3rd you will choose if that result has a catchy headline and meta description.
According to Smart insight, 24% of people click on the 1st result, 20% of people click on the 2nd result and 13% of people click on the 3rd result. For the rest of the results, the click-through rate(CTR) is very low. Tell me one thing, how many times have you clicked the search results that are not in the top 3 positions?
So if you want traffic on your website, your website needs to rank in the top 3 positions, and in this situation, SEO helps you in this SEO basics guide, you will get to learn many things about SEO.
There are 2 types of SEO and both are equally important for your website ranking. To get a perfect result you have to apply both. The first one is On-Page SEO and 2nd one is Off-Page SEO
On-Page SEO
Whether your website is newly created or it’s already in use, you need to optimize your website regularly. Optimization will help search engines and users understand your website.
Basic website optimization includes Keywords, Title tags, Content, URL structure, etc.
Keyword research
Google crawls your website for keywords. What are the keywords that you want your web page to rank for searchers and search engines? Keyword gives your website identity, what is your web page for, and for what a searcher can search for you. There are several factors when choosing the right keyword:
Search Volume
A keyword search volume tells you how many people are searching for that keyword, a keyword that has a bigger search volume means your web page can get bigger attention. If that keyword has no search volume on google so what’s the point to use it.
There are several tools on the internet for keyword research. Some of them are paid and some of them are free, you can use Keyword planner in Google Ads for Keyword research.
Difficulty
Keyword difficulty or Keyword competition both are the same terms, there are many tools to check for keyword difficulty that will tell you how easy or hard that keyword is to rank on SERP. Keyword difficulty calculated on other websites using that keyword, what are their Domain Authority(DA). The lower the DA, the higher your chance will become to rank for that keyword. Use Google’s Keyword planner or ahref’s free keyword difficult checker
Tip: For your start use low competition keywords
Relevance
What if you are using keywords that are not relevant to your web page content, you will not get your target audience those who are interested in your content. Using straightforward keywords that can describe your business right away will give you the right audience.
How will you find a relevant keyword?
When you do keyword research don’t just pick random phrases. Don’t think like a business owner, be in your customer’s shoes and then think about what they will search for.
There are a few questions that you have to ask to yourself
What they are searching for?
What problem do they have?
Tip: Solving their problem is our priority
Title Tags
The title tag is the first impression of your website to the searcher and it is one of the factors that google will rank your web page. A title tag is what the searcher sees after finding your page in the search result so if your title solves the problem of that searcher he/she probably clicks on your web page. Use the most impactful keyword from your page. There are no general rolls but keep your title tag between 50 to 60 characters.
Meta Descriptions
It’s just like a Title tag but you can’t see it on your page. A meta description is a sort of description of your page content. When your page has no meta description, Google will pick some random content from your page and display it in search results. Searchers will see it right below the title tag in search results.
Write the hilarious description so searchers can find your content useful and visit your website.
Body Content
This is where you solve your user’s problem, not just Cathay headlines and a good meta description can help you to get traffic. Not just the users but google itself wants useful content. If your content is not well written your webpage will get more bounce rate means users will exit your page more frequently and then google will lower your ranking on google search results because google understands users are not finding your content useful.
In 2014 google announced its panda update and this update was to filter designed to penalize “thin” or poor content from ranking well on your website. Your Blog or Article needs to be at least 1000 words but it’s not about length only there are other factors as well for better content to rank.
Headline Tag
They are also known as header tags, they are used to separate heading and subheadings on your body content. The heading tag is categorized as H1 to H6 where H1 is always a title. Headline tag improves your content’s readability and gives your page structure data so your readers find your content easy to read.
Keyword Frequency
How many times you can use a keyword on an article or blog? There is no such rule for this as well but there are many SEOs recommending using 1- 2 keywords for every 100 words.
There is a formula for it. To decide the keyword frequency of your webpage, calculate how many words your article or blog has then divide the total number of words your article has by the number of times that keyword appears in your article, and then multiply it by 100, you will get the percentage.
For Example: If your article is about 1000 words and the keyword appears 10 times in it, how am I gonna find keyword frequency?
Let me show you
10/1000 = .001
.001*100 = 1%
The conclusion is that 1 – 2% keyword frequency is good for your article.
If you don’t want to do all this process there are many tools on the web to calculate keyword frequency for you. You can use this tool for free research at smallseotools.com
Internal Linking
Linking your page to another page tells Google that you are genuinely solving your reader’s problems and giving them more information about what they searching for. That linked page can be yours or it could be from another blogger site. It improves your website ranking. Interlinking helps google bots find your website pages easily. While linking to another page on your webpage you need check to some facts.
- Is that page relevant to your content?
- Link with appropriate anchor text, it describes the basic idea of the page that you are linking to. Never write direct anchor text like Article, Read here and Click here.
- Make it different from other text for users to find it easily.
- Check before linking to that page, if the website is genuine and what is their spam score.
Alt Attributes
Adding an ALT tag on your web page’s image specifies your content to google image, For some reason, if your image is not loading, the alt attribute will be there to describe the image. It will help you to find your users from images.
In the alt description write a small line about that image, writing a long alt description can make your content spammy, and also using the only link to another webpage will and stuff too many keywords to your alt description.
URL Structure
URL we also call it web address, which gives your web page an address. It is a very important part of SEO. URL Structure is important for search engines and searchers’ perspectives. A few words of description in URLs is easy to understand your web address and your content. There are a few points you need to remember while creating an URL.
- Keywords in URL separated with a hyphen, avoid using joint keywords in URL
- Avoid using dates in your URL
- Don’t stuff keywords in the URL
Schema & Markup
Schema markup is also known as Structured data. From its HTML codes, google and your searchers will understand your web page better. It helps to improve the way Google reads and represents your web page in SERPs.
It’s still part of the discussion whether schema markup improves your ranking or not but it will increase your click-through rate.
Schema.org is a collaboration with Top search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Yandex. It will help you provide the information on how search engines need to understand your data.
Schema tells the search engine what your data means.
So schema markup is for all kinds of content types, and you can structure different kinds of data with it:
Articles
Book reviews
Events
Local businesses
Movies
Products
Restaurants
Software Applications
TV Episodes
TV Episodes with a rating
You can generate your code form: Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper
Importance of SEO for your business
Off-Page SEO
The work you do outside of your website that impacts your website ranking is called Off-Page SEO. Off-page SEO basics will helps you to earn trust for your website. Performing off-page SEO will increase the authority of your website and this is one of the important factors to rank your website.
Link Building
It’s all about links now, how many websites that are referring to your website is the matter most to SERP rank factor. Having high-quality backlinks on your website means you have more chances to show up on search results. But link building is not only for ranking factors it will also increase traffic to your website as well.
Nowadays people want to rank as soon as they submit their website to search engines so they deliberately create backlinks and this is against the Google algorithm policy it comes in Blak hat SEO. It may give you instant results but in long term, it can increase the Spam Score of your website. Google algorithm getting smarter day by day so be careful while creating backlinks.
Try to earn genuine backlinks for your website. Creat quality content gives so people can mention you, and collaborate with others so they can give you backlinks. Promote your content to get backlinks
Content Marketing
You can easily build backlinks while promoting your content. Social media is the best platform to promote your content. According to the SEO basics guide, there are several social media platforms to promote your content like Facebook and Instagram. Facebook ads are one of the best ways to promote your content, Learn about Facebook pixels for advanced Facebook ads setup.
Technical SEO
In the SEO basics guide apart from Off-Page SEO and On-Page SEO, there is one more thing that can also affect your website ranking and
In this era we all are busy we don’t want to wait we want everything to run smooth. So the same your searchers also want a smooth web page they don’t have to wait to load the page or image, it will only increase the bounce rate for your web page. Checking your web page’s technical health and fixing it is also important to rank on search results. We have to check a web page based on some factors
Page Speed
Page speed does matter for better ranking. Having a good page speed will not only be good for search engines it also be good for your users. The question is how you will check your page speed? Page Speed insight is a Google tool that will tell you about your web page’s health.
Mobile Friendliness
Every kind of content gets mobile traffic that’s why having a mobile-friendly web page is good for you because google considers more mobile-friendly web pages for better ranking. I hope you don’t want to skip this major traffic that came from mobile devices.
Use google’s tools to make your web page mobile-friendly: Mobile-Friendly Test
Broken Links
Broken links can affect your conversion rate. Having a broken link on your web page gives the wrong signal to search engines, It will take your web page as a spam page because you have too many broken links on your website. Find your broken links, You can use Ahref’s free broken link checker.
Duplicate Content
If your website has multiple pages and you have put the same content on all pages Google will consider it as Duplicate content. Having duplicate content on your website will give you less chance to rank compared to those websites which have quality content on there every single page.
Use the webmaster tool to check on your webpage.
XML Sitemap
Submitting a Sitemap will tell search engines that your website or particular web page is now live so they can check it and index it. Don’t submit a sitemap for unused pages. By Google search console you can submit your website to a search engine for indexing, submitting a sitemap doesn’t mean your web page going to index for sure because we all know google considers many factors to index your site
Robots.txt
According to SEO basics, this topic is a little technical.
There are ways where you can tell Google which page of your website needs to crawl and which note. The crawler will not index the web pages that are blocked by Robot.txt. It is a system where you hide your unused web pages from crawlers. Make sure your important pages wouldn’t blocked by Robot.txt. There are 2 reasons to create a Robot.txt file. Block those pages that are not used by your searchers
By blocking unused pages, Google boot can spend more time on your important pages.
Conclusion of SEO Basics Guide
Learning SEO basics with one objective, bring organic traffic to your website and let search engines and searchers find your content helpful.
Always do chase for quality, and give quality content to your users. Don’t do spam things on your website just for some backlinks. Learn through this article and apply it to your website step by step so you can get more exposure for your web page.
Very well presented. Every quote was awesome and thanks for sharing the content. Keep sharing and keep motivating others.