The Ultimate Beginner's Guide to SEO: Everything You Need to Know

• By Fahad Khan
• 03-08-2023
• SEO

Walking in the shoes of a marketer requires you to know SEO basics. If you are just getting started with search engine optimization, you will find the beginners guide SEO relevant!

Billions of people use search engines to look out for information, products, and services each day. Why not capitalize on the tremendous marketing potential with a methodical approach to SEO? SEO involves optimizing your website and improving its performance, so that search engines can gain better visibility of your content.

As much as 68% of online experiences have a search engine initiating them. Operating in a digitized business environment, it’s tough to overlook the power of SEO. So, how about drawing high-intent traffic with specific keywords to your website? This beginners guide SEO will get you covered!

What makes SEO important for online marketers?

Whether you own a tourism company or an international ecommerce website, nothing beats SEO when it comes to drawing more customers. The ultimate goal of every marketer is to leverage revenue for their organization. Organic results on Google draw around 81% of searchers, who happen to click on the naturally-ranking sites. This leaves just 19% of traffic for paid advertisements.

This beginners guide SEO will help you rank your website organically on search engines. Before getting started, let’s take a look at the prime benefits of SEO for marketers.

• Ensure better brand visibility for your brand when potential clients search for relevant products or services on Google
• Provide you a strong competitive advantage in terms of branding and authority in the industry
• Deliver more organic revenue by ranking your pages naturally on Google
• Channel targeted traffic to your online platform, involving high-intent people

Source:

This chart shows the key factors leading to global search rankings in June 2021

Beginners guide SEO: Steps to rank organically on search engines

Starting with keywords research, we have taken you through all the stages in this beginner's guide SEO that will help your website rank naturally on search engine result pages.

• Keyword research

Keyword research involves finding relevant keywords or terms that potential clients or visitors would be searching for. For instance, if you are selling online trekking shoes, your keywords might include:

1. Best trekking shoes
2. Online shoes trekking
3. Cheap trekking shoes
4. Best shoes for trekking online, and more

Given that top-ranking pages on search engines enjoy 49% of the traffic, it pays to choose the right keywords to rank your website.

1. Find out the primary keywords

To begin with, use one of the trusted keyword research tools such as SEMrush or Ahrefs to determine the primary keywords. These are the terms that your customers would be searching for.

Your keyword research tool will provide you with some metrics for each of these phrases. You will find the keyword difficulty and monthly search volume attached with each. It’s logical to go for keywords with high search volumes. This brings you the potential to draw in a greater volume of traffic. On the other hand, common keywords land your website in a higher competition. This also implies a greater keyword difficulty.

Balancing this equation tactically, choose primary keywords with moderate or low difficulty yet high volume.

2. Use short and long-tail keywords

Further narrowing down on the search intent of your customers, it’s wise to use short and long-tail keywords in the right mix. We have covered how to use keywords in this beginners guide SEO.

Long-tail keywords are more specific while addressing the needs of your visitors. While the search volume of these keywords remains low, being specific with long-tail keywords makes your content relevant. Compared to short-tail or primary keywords, these terms can convert more traffic.

Besides primary keywords, shortlist around five to ten short and long-tail keywords for each page.

3. Use keywords in the right positions

Apart from the content you publish on your website, place the keywords strategically in the following positions.

1. Title page
2. URL of the page
3. H1, H2, and H3 of the website
4. Meta description
5. Meta title
6. Schema and markup
7. ALT text

• Developing content around your keywords

The quality, relevance, and engagement of your content, that you develop around the selected keywords go a long way in ranking your website. This beginner's guide to SEO will help you streamline your content marketing strategy.

1. Determining search intent

Before developing your blogs, articles, product reviews, or any other website content, it pays to understand the intent of your customers. Google’s algorithms are capable of determining whether or not your website fulfils the search intent of visitors. So, it’s important to figure out whether you should craft promotional content, informative or educational ones, or boost engagement.

Advanced keyword research tools come with an intent metric, which can help you find the intent of the top-ranking sites for a specific keyword. Accordingly, you can follow the beginners guide SEO to shortlist keywords accordingly.

2. Generate relevant content

Next, churn out flawless content that corresponds to the intent you just found out. For instance, keywords with a commercial intent generally go well on landing pages. Again, if your audience has an informational intent to visit your website, it’s wise to publish an article or a blog.

As a part of this beginners guide SEO, we will help you with a few more tips. Analyze the top ten ranking pages on Google for a specific keyword to determine the following:

1. What is the content structure on these pages?
2. What is the length of content that the websites have on their first page?
3. Should you include any product reviews or category pages in your website?
4. Are the blogs professional or casually written?
5. Do the websites cover any related content?

3. Optimize user experience with SEO

Apart from churning out relevant content for your website, it’s crucial to optimize the user experience. Therefore, optimize the section of the page above the fold, which largely determines the visitor’s first impression.

User experience has an impact on the ranking of your website. A positive UX may fetch more backlinks for your site. This is a part of technical SEO, which we have discussed later in this beginners guide SEO.

Try not to be too flashy or intrusive while integrating CTA buttons on your website.
Make your content scannable by breaking up the text using bullet points, listicles, or short paragraphs.

• Work on your on-page SEO

On-page SEO continues to be a crucial element to organically rank on search engines. This beginner's guide SEO will help you optimize your on-page elements.

1. Optimize meta descriptions

The text displayed on SERPs just under the page title is referred to as meta descriptions. With competition raging tough, optimizing your meta descriptions bring you an opportunity to motivate potential visitors to click on your website.

Meta description can positively impact your click-through rate. Naturally, digital marketers should know how to use meta descriptions accurately.

1. Don’t exceed 160 characters while writing the meta descriptions
2. Include the target keyword in the meta description
3. If relevant, add a CTA to this text
4. Don’t use the same meta description on multiple blog pages
5. Draft descriptive texts that complements your content

2. Optimize title tags

You will find title tags on the SERP listing as the title of your page. Optimizing title tags go a long way in ranking your website. So, your title tag should include the primary keyword and some of its variants. Here are some additional guidelines on how you should frame the title tag.

1. It shouldn’t exceed 60 characters.
2. Generate interest by using words like what, why, how, and where.
3. Incorporate words such as ultimate, review, best, or top that users tend to click on.
4. Each page of your website should have unique title tags.

3. Optimize heading tags

Heading tags refer to the H1, H2, H3, and further tags under which you break down the content on your website. As a part of this beginners guide SEO, you should know how you can optimize these heading tags. Try to include the primary keywords, along with other target keywords in these headings. This is a direct ranking factor that decides the position on SERP where your website would rank.

4. Image optimization

Images turn out to be a crucial on-page element, which you need to optimize. Apart from getting your images optimized for SEO, make sure to optimize them for size and loading speed. This beginners guide SEO for image optimization will help you carry out this process.

1. Firstly, describe the images properly and name them on your website.
2. If possible, include the keywords in the image descriptions.
3. Resize the images based on the necessary dimensions and resolutions.
4. Compress images to reduce the size of their files.
5. Insert descriptive text in the alt tags to optimize them.

• Link building

Link building is an integral part of your website’s SEO. In the first place, internally link your website pages. This beginners guide SEO will also help you understand the value of external linking. Internal linking enables search engines like Google to understand the structure of the website. It also helps users navigate from one page to another and pass authority between different pages.

Boost SEO through backlinking

Backlinking your web pages to high-authority sites projects it in a positive light in the eyes of search engines. When you receive backlinks from authentic sites, these links serve as a token of confidence to support you. Make sure to obtain backlinks only from relevant sites. This way, you can push up your rank on SERPs.

So, try to build links from connected businesses, suppliers, and associations. One of the easiest ways to gain backlinks is to cultivate the connections that your venture has. Therefore, you can get backlinks from your suppliers or the local commercial chamber. Also, brands can obtain backlinks from different associations that they belong to.

Work on your technical SEO

Enhancing your technical SEO is all ensuring that search engines can index and crawl your website. With this beginners guide SEO, you will get to know how to enhance technical SEO for your website.

Source:

This image shows the prime benefits of technical SEO, which include crawling, analyzing, optimizing, and monitoring your website.

1. Configure Google Search Console

Configure your website properly with Google Search Console. This is a free tool offered by Google, that does away with any potential issues related to the crawlability and indexing of your website. After setting up Google Search Console, check out for possible issues that might prevent your pages from indexing or being crawled.

Have a look at the ‘Coverage’ report for a holistic insight in this regard. Also, check out the ‘excluded’ pages, where you might find specific issues regarding the site page status.

SEO experts also recommend inspecting the site’s URL. This will enable you to check the respective page’s index status.

2. Optimize the website’s speed

Do you know that conversion rates on your website drop by 4.42% per second with increasing loading time? No visitor loves slow websites, and they would switch to a different platform if your website is too slow. This explains why you need to get your website speed optimized. A slow-loading website also invites the wrath of search engines. This explains why we have included website speed optimization in this beginners guide SEO.

Google considers website loading speed as one of the prime determinants of the ranking factor. By optimizing the website’s speed, you can reduce the bounce rate and boost conversions. Different SEO tools are available to detect potential factors reducing the loading speed of your site. With the right tool set, digital marketers can increase the loading speed of their websites.

3. Mobile SEO

Top search engines like Google consider page speed on mobile as a key ranking factor for websites. So, make sure to work on mobile SEO, given that a significant section of your visitors would be accessing the site from mobile devices.

SEO experts often recommend marketers carry out the Mobile-Friendly Test of Google. This way, you can get a clear idea on how the website appears to customers accessing it from mobile devices.

How to measure SEO success for your website?

Now that you have gone through this beginners guide SEO, it’s time to understand how to measure the success of SEO for your website. Here are a few parameters that will enable you to gauge this success.

1. Organic traffic growth

If your SEO tactics work, you would notice a visible increment in organic traffic. Using Google Analytics, you can track this growth. An increment in organic traffic is a positive indicator, and you would know that your SEO strategy is working out. However, if you fail to gain organic traffic, it implies that your links are weak or the keyword selection has been wrong.

2. Session duration and bounce rate

If you SEO strategy is working, your website would record a longer session duration. This implies that the average gap between two consecutive clicks on your website would be relatively long. When you offer valuable content or manage to engage your customers, the session duration would be longer.

Wrapping up

In this beginners guide SEO, we have comprehensively discussed the most effective SEO tactics for beginners. If you are a marketer, trying to rank your website and boosting your conversions, this guide should serve as a valuable resource to you. Also, you may consider undergoing training through an SEO certification course.

Make sure to stay abreast with the changing algorithms of Google. This way, you can tweak your SEO tactics on your website and gain an edge over your competitors.