Do you know that 64% of organic traffic comes from search? Only 10% comes from social media. You have to master search engines in order to successfully create a digital marketing strategy.
In case you don’t know, SEO or Search Engine Optimization is a set of techniques and tools that are used to optimize both landing pages and web pages, so that search engines can read them more quickly and easily. Why is it so important? Let’s say you use Google because you need information about a specific topic, for example, “best ways to create a website”; you type it and you will get a list of results, which one do you click? You usually don’t go to the second or third page so, the goal of a SEO is to optimize your website for search engines.
How do you do SEO for a website? Easy. Let’s look this 10 essential SEO for beginners’ tips:
Use keywords and relevant terms: Keywords are an important part in SEO. The keywords indicate the main topic of your article and it is what makes it possible for other people to find your article easily on search engines. Normally, short keywords have a higher search value so it makes them harder to rank for, and long keywords have a lower search value, but they are very specific.
Also, it is ideal to consider rank difficulty and search volume of the keyword you want to use. Keywords are vital, but they are not the only component that optimizes a website, so you need to focus on other aspects to boost your website’s traffic.
Place keywords throughout your page: Each webpage or blog post has different keywords. Ideally, your chosen keyword must be in the title of the post, the URL, the tags of images used, in the text organically throughout the post and in both the first and last paragraph.
Remember not to abuse keywords, as long as they do not disrupt the flow of the topic, put them in.
Include SEO in Permalinks: A permalink is the URL you normally see when you enter a website. The permalinks say a lot about the composition of your webpage so they should not be too long and at the same time they have to describe what the website is about. Search engine bots crawl the pages of your website to understand the topic of your site and index them correctly so use meaningful and clear words in your URL.
As the name suggests, a permalink is permanent so it is important to determine the right permalinks for your pages but it is not encouraged to use specific information or dates that might change. Why this? Because you will update your page over time and having a website that has been online for some time plays into finer SEO. Nobody wants a website that in the future you will delete right, the key is update your websites with relevant information.
Hyperlink the existing content: If the post you are currently working on is related to another post you already completed, link them. This will contribute to a better experience for the user by helping the reader discover related content and navigate through other pages.
Write high-quality content: Obviously, you have to write some good content that engages readers. Make sure to cover the topic in full and do not leave out any information that might be important. More words do not equal better quality, but indicates that the topic has been covered in-depth.
Besides covering your topic completely, do not place keywords all over the article in hope to have a high keyword density, that is practically cheating and it looks bad. Search engines are very intelligent and they usually recognize keyword stuffing.
Optimize your images: From the reader’s view, good images are very important; they help visualize the content and help make it more understandable. But they are important for SEO too; of course, an image can’t be crawled but the image ALT-text (the image description) can be crawled. Remember to compress your images, it is an important factor.
Using your keyword as the image description will make sure that Google will index it.
Always update your content and pages: It is always very important to have both your page and content updated, no one likes to read something outdated. Go over older sites and websites and check if everything is well optimized. If your topic has no purpose anymore, it will hurt your ranking.
Site speed: It’s incredibly important for your website to be fast because it has been used as a ranking factor by Google since 2018. Visitors will spend seconds on your homepage deciding if they want to explore it or go to another website.
A fast-loading website brings a very good experience for the user, nobody wants to visit a slow-loading website. It is almost a sin for your website to be slow. If the website took too long to load, it will result in a higher bounce rate.
Mobile version: As the time passes, cellphones are more and more like a computer, and as the time passes more people use their phone to navigate through the internet so it is necessary to optimize your website for smart devices. If you do not do this, you will end up having a high bounce rate because nobody wants to stay on a website that is not formatted for your phone.
A positive user experience makes visitors explore your website.
Technical SEO: We already talked about creating a good website structure before, which is usually considered a part of technical SEO. But technical SEO goes beyond choosing the right keywords and permalinks, it is all about creating a responsive design for your webpage. This content is very specific so it goes beyond what an SEO for beginners’ guide would explain.
Work with a technical SEO expert, as well as with your group to fully understand how the ideal website structure and design should be.
SEO is something that might take some time to get used to, but the rewards are there for all to see, so that’s something you should always take into account.