A Free Beginner’s Guide To SEO

SEO plays a massive part in your website’s marketing strategy online. You need to track and focus on so many aspects to get your SEO ranking up so that your website can be posted on the first page of search engines. SEO also helps with traffic to your website and promotes your brand in certain areas. SEO can seem like a lot, but once you dive into it, you will realize that it’s not too complicated at all. It just involves a lot of hard work.

Here we will discuss a bit about SEO and how you can quickly learn to use it yourself.

What Is SEO?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a process in which we optimize our websites and allow search engines to understand our website content better. It’s an important quality of the digital marketing space as a whole. Anyone, whether they have a small business to a large corporation, can benefit from knowing how to do SEO properly.

Improving your SEO can help your website in different ways. It lets search engines know that your website content holds valuable information that people need and bumps your SEO ranking so that your website gets boosted to the first page on search engine sites.

The key is understanding how it works.

seo infographic process

How To Do Keyword Research

Keyword research is key to getting your website in front of a bigger audience. Keyword research is all about finding the right words to add to your content. These words are what people research the most and will get search engines to put your website in front of people.

There are two types of keywords that you can use. There are long-tail keywords and short-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords are short sentences and phrases that are more specific to what people are researching. At the same time, short-tail keywords are one or two words that people type into research and are more general.

You may be asking the question, how do I know which keywords to use that people are researching? I’ve got the solution for you! Here is a list of top keyword research tools that you can look up and use to help you discover the keywords that people are researching the most.

  • SEMrush
  • AnswerThePublic
  • Ubersuggest
  • Ahrefs
  • Google Keyword Planner
  • Long Tail Pro
  • Serpstat
  • SpyFu

The Difference Between On-Page And Off-Page SEO

On-Page SEO

On-page SEO covers many aspects, but they are all aspects that you can control easily once you get the hang of SEO. You can always hire someone to optimize your on-page SEO, but it’s best to learn how to use SEO on your own if you’re on a budget. This way here you can also save money.

On-page SEO involves formatting your content correctly, monitoring the keyword usage in your content, the navigation of your website, URLs, meta descriptions, and alt texts. Although these are just a few factors that make up on-page SEO, you can quickly learn to track all this information to get the best results on your SEO ranking.

Off-Page SEO

seo guide beginnerOff-page SEO is everything that happens off of your website. This portion of your SEO ranking involves off-site link building, guest posting, social bookmarking mentions of your brand, high authoritative links, etc. Marketing your website and putting your brand out there can help with this. Also, if you have a social media presence, this can help boost your off-page SEO ranking as well.

Identifying UX Signals

Search engines want to show people the websites that have the most user-friendly and SEO-friendly content. Having your website optimized for user experience UX is crucial to your website getting one of the search engine’s first page spots. Doing modifications to your websites such as prioritizing user experience, creating a great design, the functionality of your website and navigation, and the content you have can make or break the user experience UX.

Identifying user experience UX can be easy once you know the right tools to utilize. The algorithms such as Google’s RankBrain helps you understand user behaviour by analyzing their levels of satisfaction and preferences. You also need to take into consideration the CTR, which stands for Click Through Rate. These are users that organically click through your website’s content. It’s essential to keep track of this because search engines use it to know if your website has valuable information to show to other people. Another aspect to keep in mind is how long people are staying on your website. Dwell time is important because the longer people stay on your site to read your content. This shows Google’s SEO ranking that your website attracts traffic and is more likely to put you on the first research page.

Create SEO-Friendly Content

Creating SEO-friendly content is how you make your website content more attractive to searchers and search engines. It builds your brand’s personality, and when you use SEO best practices with this, you can climb the SEO ranks.

Skillful content creation brings traffic to your website, which Google’s search engine and other search engines look for. Be creative and plant keywords all in your blogs, informative writings, articles, etc. No one wants to read boring articles, so be creative and give your brand personality. This will make you unique compared to other brands, and people will be more willing to read your content which leads to a longer dwell time on your website.

Backlink Building

Using reliable links in your content can help your website, but having others use your website’s link in their content will boost your ranking tremendously. However, you do need to be careful about this. Search engines are very strict when it comes to backlinking. You need to gain the trust of others so that they will honestly and naturally use your website’s link in their content. Another thing you can do for backlinking that is natural to search engines is having a social media presence and marketing your website’s link on there. This will also bring traffic to your site, and it looks good to search engines.

Final Thoughts

The data that drives SEO for your website is crucial to your marketing strategy for your brand. We’ve given some helpful tips that you can start on, but doing thorough research to learn more in-depth on SEO and how to use it will increase your SEO ranking in search engines. There are plenty of tools out there to help you with this and make it so much easier to track your website’s analytics and how your users are enjoying your website’s content.

If you’d like to discuss a hands-off SEO plan. Talk to our team today. 

Lark Begin is a digital marketer from Ottawa, Canada. Lark is an SEO Master, PPC expert and content writer. She helps many small businesses get ranked on Google each day.