In 15 minutes, you will learn 80% of SEO!
SEO may appear to be incredibly overwhelming at first glance. With all of these restrictions, keywords, sophisticated ranking algorithms, and so on.
But what if I told you that regardless of your digital marketing history, you can learn approximately 80% of SEO basics in less than fifteen minutes?
It doesn’t matter if you’re a budding?digital markete r or a small business owner looking to start driving traffic and generating leads from search engines without having to pay a fortune to digital agency.
In this article, I’ll lay everything out in order in clear, accessible English so that you can immediately begin boosting your website’s position after reading it.
Let’s get started without further ado!
What Is Search Engine Optimization (SEO) And Why Is It Important For Any Website?
Lesson Contents
Let’s start from the beginning and learn what SEO is and why it’s so critical for every website owner.
The term SEO refers to the process of optimizing a website for search engines.
It’s essentially a series of methods targeted at boosting a website’s page positions in the search engine results page, or?SERP , for specific keywords.
The greater the number of keywords for which your website ranks, the more organic traffic you will receive.
When it comes to company, traffic equals prospective clients and sales, which is why SEO is so important for anyone hoping to make it big online.
Furthermore, organic traffic has some distinguishing characteristics that make it more valuable than other types of traffic.
SEO’s Advantages
For starters, it’s absolutely free.
Of course, it’s worth noting that ranking for high-volume key phrases, often known as short-tail keywords, can take a lot of time, effort, and money.
However, short tail keywords are too broad, therefore it’s pointless to try to target them particularly because they won’t bring you any clients in the first place.
Second, long-term keywords account for around 70% of total search demand.
Because people who enter them usually know exactly what they’re looking for, they’re significantly more specific and extremely adaptable.
Long-tail keywords, on the other hand, are usually extremely unique because they contain three or more words.
Because of their uniqueness, they are low-competitive and allow you to start receiving traffic right away.
Finally, once your website’s page ranks at the top of search results for a keyword, it may continue to receive new visitors for months or even years until your competitors displace you.
Which is highly improbable if your page properly matches the search intent.
To recap, correctly done SEO may deliver masses of free, constant, and, more importantly, highly convertible traffic to your website, so please do not underestimate its power.
SEO’s Disadvantages
Of course, SEO has its drawbacks, the most significant of which is that it is a lengthy process, particularly for new websites.
Even if you’re targeting long-tail and, as a result, low-competitive keywords, it can take up to six months to start seeing results.
First and foremost, it is very dependent on your exact niche, the keywords you are targeting, the number of pages on your website, and other unique characteristics.
Second, keep in mind that search engines need time to identify and index your website, as well as assess which search intents it should be listed for and how high it should be ranked for.
So, obviously, SEO isn’t for individuals who want to gain a ton of traffic right away.
However, if you’ve done your SEO correctly, your website will get more and more trust from search engines over time, making it easier to rank for even more competitive keywords.
In general, the more trust your website has earned, the easier it will be to improve your rankings and raise the volume of incoming traffic.
As a result, it’s a good idea to start conducting SEO as soon as you create your website.
Another point worth mentioning is that in order to maintain your place, you must always be involved in SEO.
Search engines, on the other hand, are continually changing and improving their ranking algorithms in order to offer the most relevant results.
So all you have to do now is stay on top of things and change your strategy accordingly.
Furthermore, you should be aware that your competitors are also using SEO and would like to siphon off your traffic.
In practice, however, I’d say that dedicating just a couple of hours per week to SEO is enough to keep on top of the game, so it’s not as time-consuming as it may appear at first.
In light of the foregoing, let’s get right to the point and see how you may optimize your website for search engines.
Essentially, there are three aspects to this process:?on-page SEO ,?technical SEO , and?off-page SEO .
First and foremost, there is On-Page SEO.
On-page SEO, as the name implies, is a set of techniques for optimizing a website’s pages for certain keywords in order to increase search exposure and traffic.
On-page SEO is essentially two things: keyword research and internal linking.
Searching For Keywords
It’s reasonable to say that keyword research is the first step in search engine optimization for any website.
Keywords are the search terms that consumers type into Google to find your products, services, or information.
It’s critical to study them since putting them in the text and meta tags of a website helps search engines understand what the page is about and how it should be ranked.
You should also keep in mind that each keyword has its own competitiveness and monthly visitor volume, so if you’re just getting started with your website, it makes sense to start with the less competitive keywords.
Of course, finding such keywords in some of the most popular categories can be difficult, but it’s well worth the effort.
Furthermore, the more search engines trust your website, the easier it is to rank for more competitive keywords, therefore in general, SEO is about patience.
We’ll go over website trust in greater detail later in this post, but for now, let’s move on to learning how to conduct appropriate keyword research.
Well, I’d recommend using three of the most popular programs for that purpose:?Ahrefs ,?Similarweb , and?Semrush .
Because they all have a lot of the same characteristics, I’m going to talk about them as a single product so that you don’t get confused.
First and foremost, these tools are fantastic for keyword research.
You can discover new keywords, delve deeper into specific ones, receive suggestions for fresh ideas, and so on.
But, more importantly, these tools enable you to spy on your rivals.
You can learn everything about their monthly traffic, including which keywords and pages are driving the most traffic, how many backlinks their website has, and much more.
At least in my opinion, this is priceless information.
Because, as I always say, if you want to create the best product, all you have to do is take the finest ideas and approaches from each of your competitors and improve them.
So I strongly advise you to give these tools a try, especially since most of them provide a free trial period.
Also, I can’t resist but mention that Google has a keyword research tool called Keyword Planner that is entirely free.
Although it was created with the intent of selecting keywords for Google Ads campaigns, it is still rather effective when it comes to keyword research for SEO.
Of course, Keyword Planner cannot compete with specialized commercial keyword research tools, but it’s a great place to start and experiment.
Another significant aspect of keyword research that I can’t help but emphasize is that the methodologies for blogs and eCommerce websites are vastly different.
When it comes to blog articles, the important ranking variables are content uniqueness, relevancy, comprehensiveness, and even content format.
That’s why articles at the top of the SERP are usually pretty extensive, contain a lot of keywords and infographics, are written by a professional, and are always current.
In the case of eCommerce websites, you certainly can’t put a lot of text on the product page, and it would even appear strange.
Because search engines are well aware of this, various keyword ranking algorithms exist for eCommerce and blog websites.
Just keep it in mind as you work on your website.
However, starting a company blog and attracting free traffic from search engines to posts about your products or services is always an excellent idea.
Let’s move on to another important on-page SEO method, internal linking, now that we’ve figured out the value of keywords and how to correctly identify and use them.
Internal backlinks
An?internal link ?is a link between two pages on the same website, as the name implies.
The navigation menu is probably the most obvious example of internal linking because it appears on almost every website.
For several reasons, it’s critical to have all of your website’s pages linked to one another:
Aside from obvious examples of internal linking like the navigation menu, sitemap, articles or goods feed, and so on, there’s another sort of internal link we use inside the content called contextual links.
They have a couple of features that are worth discussing.
To begin with, search engines can recognize the text around a link and determine whether it is relevant or not.
Contextual links have a better SEO value than navigational links as a result of this.
Furthermore, the click-through rate, or CTR, of a link is one of the most important aspects in its effectiveness.
Highly clickable links are considered more trustworthy by Google, making them exceedingly SEO important.
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People are more likely to follow links within the text than navigational links, therefore include them is a terrific way to boost your website’s search rankings even further.
And since that’s generally all you need to know about on-page SEO to get started, we’re ready to move on to the technical stuff.
SEO in a technical sense
Technical SEO is also done on a website, but unlike on-page SEO, it pertains to the entire site rather than just specific pages.
In a nutshell, if you want your website to rank highly in search results, you must ensure that it loads quickly, displays appropriately on mobile devices, is free of duplicate pages, and has no indexing issues.
Except for loading speed optimization, all of these aspects are pretty personal, therefore I’m not going to go into great depth about them.
However, no matter what CMS or website builder you use, there are some versatile tools and practices that will help you speed up website loading.
Compression of images
Compressing photos before uploading them is probably the simplest thing you can do to increase the speed of your website.
According to my experience, the most common cause of sluggish loading websites is the high size of the photos.
This is especially true for online businesses where a product’s page may contain a large number of photographs, or for blogs with a large number of images on a single page.
Thankfully, there are a slew of internet applications that can help you reduce image weight in a matter of seconds.
TinyPNG.com, for example, is one of my favorites.
This utility may lower the file size of photographs by up to 70% without sacrificing quality thanks to sophisticated lossy compression techniques.
Minification and caching
Caching and code minification are two strategies I’d like to mention for improving website loading speed.
A website, as you surely know, is simply just a collection of files.
When a user loads a page, their browser downloads the files that make up that page.
Caching allows browsers to save copies of these files in a cache or temporary storage place, allowing them to be retrieved more quickly and so speeding up the loading of a website.
Minification is the process of lowering the weight of your web pages and script files by minimizing the code and markup in them.
These factors frequently combine to have a substantial impact on the loading speed of a website.
I also have some excellent news to share with you.
Most major website builders either have these features enabled by default or may be turned on in the options.
WordPress is in the same boat. There are numerous free plugins available for this purpose, so I’m confident you won’t have any issues.
CDN
Last but not least, a CDN, or Content Delivery Network, can be used on any website, independent of its platform.
In layman’s terms, this is a collection of geographically scattered servers that speed up the delivery of web content by bringing it closer to users.
That is why, if you have international traffic, connecting your website to a CDN is a must, but it makes little sense if the majority of your visitors come from the same location as your hosting servers.
Off-page SEO
Finally, we’ve arrived to off-page SEO.
As you might expect, it only includes operations that take place outside of your own website, and they all come down to establishing backlinks.
Of course, this notion encompasses a variety of strategies like as content marketing, brand building, guest posting, and so on, but the essence remains consistent:
The more high-quality backlinks you obtain, the better.
But why is it so important, how can you get others to connect to your website, and how can you tell whether the link is good?
First and foremost.
What’s The Best Way To Start Obtaining Links?
In a nutshell, when your website’s pages begin to receive backlinks from other websites, it tells Google that your material is worthwhile and that it deserves to be placed higher.
In real life, the higher the authority of the source that refers to you, the more valuable the link is. As a result, not all backlinks are created equal.
For example, on Fiverr, you can find several gigs offering to buy hundreds of backlinks for a few tens of dollars from persons that are active in so-called “Black Hat” SEO, a set of tactics that includes techniques targeted at fooling search engines.
Such proposals should be avoided at all costs.
It’s not just a waste of money, but it’s also a surefire method to be penalized by Google at some point in the future.
Websites in your niche that have already gained some credibility from search engines and have a good monthly traffic are ideal backlink candidates.
If you’re unfamiliar with the common link-building tactics, which we’ll discuss more, it’s usually rather difficult to gain a backlink from such websites.
For the time being, let’s figure out how to assess the link’s quality.
How Can The Quality Of A Link Be Determined?
First and foremost, I’d want to state unequivocally that the phrase “link quality” is fictitious and was developed by SEO specialists themselves.
The problem is that Google’s algorithm includes over 200 ranking criteria, the majority of which are hidden, including how they judge the quality of backlinks.
Fortunately, there are some characteristics that may be used to estimate the value of a backlink from a specific domain.
These include things like site visibility, monthly traffic, the number of referring domains, relevancy, and so on.
Obviously, you don’t want or can’t study every single website to see if it meets these criteria.
As a result, off-page SEO is nearly impossible to achieve without the use of specialized backlink analysis software.
And I believe it’s reasonable to state that Ahrefs.com, which I mentioned previously, is one of the finest.
The Ahrefs toolset lets you acquire a full image of the donor website and decide whether or not it’s worth getting a backlink from it.
Aside from that, you may use it to track the growth of your own website’s backlink profile over time.
Finally, as previously said, Ahrefs can be used to determine which keywords your competitors rank for in search and how much traffic each phrase generates.
With a nutshell, it’s an essential tool for anyone working in SEO.
There’s also some positive news for newcomers.
For only $7, Ahrefs offers a seven-day trial period, so I recommend giving it a try and deciding whether you’re ready to go deep into off-page SEO or whether the time hasn’t yet arrived.
Also, unless it’s your own link, I can’t help but mention that there is a secret signal of link quality that can’t be measured by third-party programs.
The click-through rate is the percentage of people who click on a link.
Links that are frequently followed are the most valuable in Google’s perspective since it shows that the link was not put arbitrarily and is extremely useful.
The beginning or middle of a highly related post is a common location for a backlink with a high CTR, therefore keep this in mind while constructing backlinks if you want to maximize efficiency.
Techniques For Increasing Backlinks
And I believe now is the ideal time to discuss backlink development tactics and techniques, determining which are the most effective and how to implement them appropriately.
But, before we get started, I’d like to make a clarification.
I’m not going to give you particular examples of backlink profile development because this tutorial is designed to be a brief introduction to SEO that is as easy to comprehend as possible.
It just won’t make sense because each instance is unique, and detailing each one would have made this guide considerably longer and less instructive.
Instead, I’m going to offer you an overview of general backlink building ideas that will help you figure out where to gain backlinks for your website and provide some food for thought.
Let’s get started.
To begin, you should be aware that different backlink building tactics apply to different types of websites.
Blogging
When it comes to blogs, the best and most effective method is to simply provide high-quality, link-worthy content.
Publishing in-depth and helpful articles that answer all of your visitors’ questions will certainly result in a large number of high-quality backlinks from pleased readers.
Furthermore, if you’re a well-known expert in your industry who publishes a lot of useful studies and information, it’s just a matter of time until your peers start referring to your work.
I might have highlighted some specific backlink-building techniques, like as guest posting, various sorts of collaboration, giveaways, and even begging, as I said previously.
But my major purpose is to make you realize that acquiring backlinks to a site is entirely dependent on the quality of the content.
Websites for businesses and online stores
When it comes to commercial and eCommerce websites, things get a little more tricky because individuals rarely exchange links to them, at least not outside of messengers.
However, this does not imply that you should do nothing.
Instead, you can approach bloggers and propose a partnership, such as mentioning your website as part of a study or even asking them to write a review of your products or services.
It will not only help you gain high-quality backlinks, but it will also help you receive some direct traffic and possible consumers, so it’s a win-win situation.
Despite the fact that you will have to pay for these backlinks, Google will not consider this to be “black hat” SEO because the backlinks will still be beneficial to the bloggers’ audiences.
Furthermore, starting your own company’s blog is usually a good option.
This is a very common method, particularly among businesses that provide online services and solutions.
The thing is, by producing posts on your blog that are targeted at specific keywords, you can attract informational traffic, increasing brand recognition and converting some visitors into buyers.
Furthermore, because having a blog helps you to behave as an expert in your subject, it’s a terrific way to get free and high-quality backlinks.
Conclusion
That was all I had planned to cover in this tutorial.
Despite being just a brief look at the most important information, I hope I was able to answer the most pressing questions and make getting started in SEO a little easier.
If anything is still unclear to you, please let me know in the comments. I’m always willing to assist.
Have a great day and I’ll see you again soon, bye!
Digital Marketing Specialist
2 年Thanks dear... ??
Assistant Professor at CT Group of Institutions, Jalandhar
2 年This is so amazing ???? thanks for sharing ??