SEO for beginners
Hi, have you started a blog but are having a hard time getting other people to find your content? Or maybe you already have a blog and want to increase your audience? Or maybe both?To get more views on your site and online content you need to know SEO for beginners. This is exactly what this article will show you, a step by step guide to understand more about being noticed by search engines such as Google, for example.
The acronym SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. SEO techniques serve to make the site better ranked in search engines like Bing, Yahoo and Google. To rank your site on Google, for example, it is essential to use several factors, and some are difficult to control. On the other hand, there are some practices that we can use to make the site more attractive.
Let’s start by showing some basic rules for making a website optimized according to the SEO rule:
Use Keyword – “Keywords are ideas and topics that define what your content is about.” SEO keywords range from single words to complex phrases and are used to inform website content to increase relevant, organic search traffic – This is the term used by Google to verify the text. It must appear without exaggeration so as not to disturb the ranking. Your audience uses them when searching something related to your brand.
Add the keyword in the post title: This shows that the text is relevant right from the start. In addition, the keyword must be on the left.
Relevance
If you want your website to appear at the top, then you need to work on producing content that helps the reader in some way. It is already mentioned in the previous article here.
Headings/ title and subtitles
Header tags aren’t as critically important for your site rankings as they used to be. However, these tags still have an important function for users and the Search – SEO.Divide the text into parts using H1 to H6 – headings. This helps the visitor not to get lost while reading, make your content easier for people to understand and be attracted to it. Headings can indirectly influence your rankings by making your content easier and more enjoyable for visitors to read (essential to a quality user experience) and in turn, boost your SEO ranking by providing keyword-rich context about your content for the search engines.
Checklist for an optimized heading:
? Can go from H1 to H6 (Remember that you don’t have to use all 6 levels)
? Use Headers to Break Up Text
? H1 will always be the most important: introduces the topic of your page – showing the most relevant element of the page, both for search engines and for the user.
?Use only on H1.
? The H2 will describing the main topics you’ll cover in sections of the article.
? Subsequent headers, H3s to H6s, serve as additional sub-headings within each section – multiple sub-topics.
Scannable text
Aligning the text to the left makes it visually more pleasant for the reader, as it creates a dynamic reading.In this way, the reading in F(Layout) is created which is ideal for online texts as it follows eye movement.
Hyperlinks
Using relevant links increases the chances of a good ranking because it shows that the site has authority on the subject. Linking with content from the site itself increases the authority of the site in search engines.
Also, the use of links from other sites shows that that page is linked to sites of the same subject. Using these rules makes text more attractive to crawlers, which are robots that rank links.
Basic SEO strategy for beginners
So far you have learned what SEO is, how ranking works and now you will learn some tips that cannot be missing from your website:
Title Tag
The Title Tag is one of the items that most influences positioning on Google, if not the most important. And it is easy to understand why. The purpose of Google’s algorithm is to be able to show people the results most relevant to their searches. If we do a search on Google and none of the results appear to be related to the keyword we are searching for, we will have a terrible experience with Google. The title of the search results helps us to quickly find what we are looking for. Take the test for several searches on Google and notice that 7 to 9 results usually have the keyword you searched for in the title of the search result.
Friendly URL
The acronym URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator. The address of the text must not appear full of random characters, the URL must contain up to five words, so Google can better read the content of the site.
Optimal Format for your URL
It consists in different parts:
https://www.example.com/category-keyword/subcategory-keyword/primary-keyword.html
Protocol: this indicates how data is transferred between the computer and the server where the website is hosted. The most common for websites and blogs are HTTP and HTTPS.
Domain: in a simplified way this is the name of the website accompanied by the extension that such as: .com, .co.uk, .ie, .org, among others.
Category / Slug: indicates which page you are trying to access within the site and where it is located if there are subfolders.
Subcategory: helps people understand which section of a webpage they’re on. More common in the Ecommerce website.
Permalink: Permalinks are an important part of your site as both search engines and visitors use these URLs to index and visit your site. The type of permalink you pick influences the way these two parties see and value your site, in a blog the permalink will be the article title.
For example:
https://www.designrelax.com/digital-marketing/the-4-cs-essential-for-the-21st-century/
In this case, we have:
Protocol - HTTP
Subdomain - WWW
Domain - DESIGNRELAX>COM
Category – Digital marketing,
Article permalink - name of the article.
Alt Tag Images
Alt tags provide a text alternative for an image for search engines and those using screen readers to access a web page. Alt text is the description of the visual elements of an image. Filling in this information is essential for search engines to understand what that visual resource represents. In addition, it is an important tool to make your website more accessible! Alt Text, then, is a description of the visual elements of the image (which search engines cannot identify), so that this image is better positioned in searches.
Tips on how to write a good Alt Text:
? Write Alt Text to a human, not a search engine
? Keep between 4 to 8 words to describe the image
? Do not fill alt text with keywords: Google can detect and classify your site as spam
? Be simple and precise
? Think about how Alt Text integrates with the text (more precisely with the part of the text where the image is inserted).
How search engines rank websites
Now that you’ve understood the basics of SEO a little, you’ll learn how search works. The ranking of the sites is done by the crawlers of the search engine system.
It is important to say that some evaluation criteria may change depending on the search engine used. Some pages may appear first on Google and third on Bing, for example.
This is because the crawlers of each search engine work a little differently. Imagine that the crawlers are little robots that read the sites and organize the links on the page. When we do an internet search, these robots take us to the sites. It is not overnight that a person will understand everything about SEO. To understand everything about SEO, you need hours of study and a lot of research and always keep up to date with everything new that appears. Some people hire website optimization professionals but there is no need to spend money to have a correct and well ranked website.
The good news is you don’t have to become an expert to put SEO for beginners into practice.
Nowadays with the growth of the use of the internet where everyone can write about what they want millions of texts appear about various niches. Among these millions everyone wants to have their content consumed and become a reference on search pages.
Currently, nobody has the patience to keep looking for what they want on all Google pages, “Time is money”. And with this scenario, SEO emerged, this “shortcut” to reach the top, despite its popularity, is not widely known and used correctly.
In the next article, we’ll talk a little bit more about some SEO tools that we can use to make your job easier and precise.