Search Engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo are the answer machines. They read billions of pieces of content and analyze thousands of crucial factors to determine which available content is most relevant and can offer the right answer to your query. Search engines do these activities by finding and cataloging all available content on the Internet in web pages, images, PDFs, videos, etc. It is done via a process known as “crawling and indexing.” These engines put the order to the content based on relevancy which we refer to as “Google website ranking.” This beginners guide to SEO will cover what SEO is and why it matters.
- What is SEO
- What is Technical SEO
- How to do keyword research
- What is On-page SEO, and how does it work
- How to create a link-building strategy
- How to analyze your SEO metrics
Chapter 1: What is SEO
Search engine optimization, aka SEO, are technique and practice used to increase the Google website ranking and visibility of web pages on search engine results. Many organizations across the globe follow a combination of these tactics to get a higher Google website ranking for their web pages. It is observed that SEO for beginners is usually challenging to understand as it is riddled with many new terms. This beginners guide to SEO will offer a detailed explanation for each new term.
For a successful SEO strategy, you need to focus on two optimization categories.
On-page optimization: It focuses on the content of your blog posts, webpages, etc. It includes keyword research, technical SEO, and content optimization tactics.
Off-page optimization: It incorporates multiple tactics like social media, links, videos, and more. It is done through link building, guest blogging, social media marketing, and influencer marketing.
Building and optimizing valuable web content signals to Google that your website is trustworthy, but it provides relevant and effective content for those who are searching. Though there are many search engines like Bing and Yahoo, this guide will focus on the most popular search engine, Google.
Chapter 2: What is Technical SEO
SEO is all the behind-the-scenes work on your site, but it is also vital to the user experience. Wherever there is the user experience on a webpage, there is SEO! Before moving on further in the beginners guide to SEO, let us understand an example.
Imagine trying to read an important article on ‘Birds and their Habitat.’ This article involves multiple images of various birds. But as soon as you open this article, the text loads quickly, and the images are loading slowly. The text shifts slowly to the bottom with every new image loaded, hindering your user experience. Will you still keep struggling to read? Or will you open another source where the whole page loads within 2-3 seconds? The answer is obvious.
Technical SEO focuses on decreasing users’ struggles and offering the best possible experience. It involves website and webpage infrastructure and helps the search engine optimize your webpage. The importance of clean code and speeding up load time for search engine rankings cannot be understated.
Technical SEO work influences how Google can crawl and index your web content. If any technical errors are present, it can result in less visibility and low engagement rates, ultimately affecting your business bottom line.
Seems difficult? No, it isn’t that difficult.
This beginners guide to SEO offers a checklist to create a well-rounded approach for your website’s technical SEO.
Your Website’s Technical SEO Checklist
- Site structure: Is your website easy to navigate
- Mobile user experience: Is your website responsive and mobile-friendly
- Accessibility: Do you offer dynamic content in video or audio?
- SSL (Secure Sockets Layer): Does your website have secure links?
- Page speed: How fast does your site load?
- Internal linking: Are all the links between your web pages working?
- Migrations: While making big changes to the website, can you successfully transfer the authority, indexing, and Google website ranking signals?
- Status codes: Do you have links that turn up a 404 error or other error when users click on them?
- Crawling/ indexing/rendering: How easily Google can browse/crawl your website and index and render it accordingly.
Chapter 3: Keyword Research
Your website should have a distinct and concise topic. Keywords should appear in page titles, page headings, metadata, or images on your site. These errors may be due to broken links or faulty filename extensions. Status codes help you identify information about how visitors can interact with your page, and they are displayed below the browser’s address bar.
A site’s ability to crawl and index webspace is essential for a well-optimized site. Crawling matters when scanning pages and identifying what keywords and links matter most. Google’s crawler, RankBrain, can see important page elements such as video captions, forms, and headings.
How to choose the right keywords?
Choosing keywords is very important in developing quality content. Keyword research is an art where you need to access the keyword database with a hint of imagination. One needs to identify the most fitting for your topic and write content specific to them. This beginners guide to SEO will explain the basics of keywords and how to leverage them for content optimization.
Generally, the choice of keywords should have High Volume and Low Difficulty. The more time you dedicate to researching the best keywords and phrases, the better the results are.
Before moving ahead in this beginners guide to SEO for more tips, let us understand this with an example.
Imagine you are working as an SEO for a shoe company.
It would be best if you created a blog for your company website, and your target is to bring more website traffic to read the blog content. You need to develop keywords related to your shoe products and what prospective readers might be Googling when searching about your products.
That’s a difficult goal to achieve if you can’t see what people search for in the shoe industry on Google. You can find all the relevant keywords with a quality keyword research tool. All you need to do is enter the right primary keywords into the search bar and watch as the tool populates all the relevant keywords that people are searching for. Using these keywords, you can craft your content.
Any Keyword Tools?
To find the keywords for your website, you can follow either of the following keyword-finding tools.
Which Keywords to target first?
When selecting which keywords to target, look for high monthly search volume and low difficulty scores. A keyword difficulty score indicates how saturated the keyword is in search and how much competition you’ll face if you target them.
Some marketers also target keywords with slightly lower monthly search volume, especially focusing on a niche with a low difficulty rating. We will explain the right path to keyword planning in this beginners guide to SEO.
The role of SEO is in covering more search grounds possible with a broad range of related topics.
Keyword planning is highly essential to developing an all-around content strategy. Develop a detailed content creation strategy to saturate search engines with quality content that routinely appears in the first few search engine rankings. Search engines will quickly update your site to their results by writing engaging, informative content that includes keywords people search for and use. To keep the balance in the act, you must know how search engines work.
SEO is complicated, as there are many variables to keep track of. If a website has poor SEO, they risk being seen or ranked poorly. However, clear headers can make the user experience smoother and read better than sloppy headings.
Keyword research takes patience, effort, trial, and error. Content targeting keywords can take time to become popular, but with enough time and dedication, keyword content will eventually be successful. We will talk later about how to measure your SEO success.
Pillar Pages
Many SEO for beginners guides refer to advanced content strategies that include main ‘Pillar Pages,’ connected to various other web pages of the same websites focusing on subtopics in detail. To maintain a broader focus on your industry and its information, you can work on clustering keywords into topic clusters.
Let’s understand this with an example.
The current blog you are reading is the best example of a Pillar page. Being a Beginners guide to SEO for 2022, this includes all the major aspects of SEO. We discuss a few subtopics such as technical SEO, on-page SEO, and Off-page SEO. I have already researched and written detailed blogs on technical SEO and on-page SEO which are linked to this pillar page.
Similarly, starting with a long-form blog post that broadly covers the topic will allow you to learn SEO basics and the more advanced topics your readers might need. You can strengthen the article with keyword-targeted posts researched and written, then linked to on your pillar page. You also need to take the help of SEO competitor analysis to learn why your competitors are ranking higher for specific keywords.
The way we search for information has changed thanks to our reliance on the Internet. With their ability to keep us connected, we may use them to find answers, entertainment, or a quick task guide. SEO is now essential for building ranking and driving traffic to your website from these searches.
Chapter 4: What is On-page SEO, and how does it work
Your content needs to be optimized for two major stakeholders. They are,
- Users
Understanding the principles, elements, and processes behind on-page search engine optimization will help you use your content to rise on the SERP.
On-page SEO is much more than just finding the right keywords and writing content using them. If a webpage rich with relevant keywords and rich content can’t save your website if it is disorganized and not easy to read. On-page SEO helps Google bots to crawl your page smoothly, index it, and help your users to understand it completely.
A webpage with clear headers (H1, H2, H3), meta tags, and meta descriptions will help Google bots to crawl it seamlessly. It will also enhance the user experience by adding ease of navigation. Clear headers help you organize your content into sub-sections that flow well and tell a clear and compelling story that users want to read.
Let’s understand this with an example. After identifying your primary keyword (sports Shoes), you have started creating content to emphasize the secondary keywords.
You also found that people searched for things like ‘Best Sports Shoes’ or ‘Sports Shoes Under 5000’. Using these keywords, you can capitalize on this opportunity to build content as the H2 headers.
Core On-page Activities for Quick Optimization
Besides clear headers, paragraph formatting, and good content flow, following on-page activities helps optimize content.
- Your images should have alt text
- Add infographics and other dynamic content elements to improve accessibility and engagement.
- Focus on above-the-fold content relevancy and optimize it for mobile users
- Follow the character limit of meta descriptions (160 characters)
- Your title tags are clear and concise.
Chapter 5: How to create a link-building strategy
Since link building is such a critical piece of SEO, I’ll go over this process in greater detail. Link building secures links that point back to your site on other websites.
Google’s algorithm evaluates the relevancy of higher-ranking sites linking to your content and whether or not the rank of the initial article’s target keyword. By attracting the attention of authoritative websites and backlinking to your own, you can build brand recognition for your site. Let’s understand three types of backlinks.
- Do-follow backlinks: These types of backlinks are very crucial for better optimization. Do-follow backlinks count in your favor and improve the page rank. They should be from trustworthy and genuine sites in your industry.
- No-follow backlinks: These backlinks do not count in your favor and don’t impact your page rank. You should avoid these types of backlinks if your goal is to build trust and authority.
- Toxic backlinks: These backlinks derive from sites that do not have good domain authority scores. Even if these backlinks are do-follow backlinks, they don’t usually work in your favor and could potentially harm your Google website ranking.
How to Build a Rich Backlink Profile?
So far, in this beginners guide to SEO, we have learned that having a rich backlink profile of do-follow backlinks from trusted and authoritative sources helps SEO. But building a rich backlink profile is not an easy task. Businesses focus on building a closed network of publishers and influencers from a similar industry to secure backlink placements.
Outreach campaigns are essential to build, increase and maintain your influencer network. The publishers link your site organically or offer paid services per link rates. You can use multiple tools available digitally to improve your backlink profile.
Link Building Tools
These tools collect a list of link-building opportunities for your domain. They also offer a simplified interface to run an outreach campaign to acquire links.
Backlink Audit Tools
As we learned, toxic backlinks are penalized by Google and backlink audit tool helps identify any toxic and no-follow backlinks that point to your site. You can request the publishers to remove or update the backlink to maintain or boost your page ranking.
As Google focuses on EAT, having backlinks that are not relevant to your website and content may prove harmful. For example, your content on leather shoes is hyperlinked to an article on second-hand cars for no relevant reasons; you will lose trust. You can build trust with relevant and authoritative content linked within the same industry.
Chapter 6: How to analyze your SEO metrics
SEO is no easy task, so once you’ve invested time and resources into your strategy, you’ll want to track the results of your campaigns to see if everything put in place has been fruitful. One effective method for measuring success is tracking keywords with different keyword ranking tools. Let’s learn more about this through beginners guide to SEO.
To analyze your SEO metrics, first, you need to set up your benchmarks. Average Session Duration, % Change in Organic Traffic (Annual), a visitor to lead conversion rate, etc., are a few benchmarks. The first step is to access and monitor your Google Analytics account daily to understand the traffic, the types of users, and how they interact with your content. Let’s discuss a few primary metrics that help you understand your SEO status.
Organic Traffic:
Your Google Analytics and Google Search Console will help you understand your website’s daily organic (non-paid traffic). You can analyze the daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly traffic.
Keyword Ranking:
Keeping track of the keyword positions for your content is highly essential. As you progress with on-page and off-page SEO for your chosen keywords, Google website ranking in SERPs is observed.
Click-through Rate:
CTR is the total percentage of individuals viewing a web page who view and then click on a particular advertisement that appears on that page. Click-through rates evaluate how successful an ad has captured users’ attention. The higher the CTR, the more successful the ad has generated interest.
Page Speed:
Page speed denotes how quickly your page loads. It’s one of the major aspects of good technical SEO that directly boosts user experience.
Bounce Rate:
A website’s bounce rate is the total percentage of people who land on a page on your website and then leave. They don’t click on anything else or go to another page. These users land on one of your website pages, stay there for just a few seconds, then leave.
Conclusion
SEO is thriving with the penetration of the Internet and awareness of digital marketing. Many businesses across the globe are shifting towards a strong digital footprint. SEO will offer the fundamental solution to achieve the much-needed reach and engagement in the coming years, especially in India. SEO competitor analysis is fundamental to keep watch on the success strategies and leverage them in the long run. ‘How to do SEO of a website is one of the common questions, even in 2022, where still many beginners are struggling to keep up. The answer isn’t complex but rather challenging to achieve. This beginners guide to SEO suggests, all you need is the best SEO tools in 2022, a flexible content strategy, and a focused approach to achieve the best Google website ranking in 2022.
