The Ultimate Guide to SEO (for Beginners)

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Do you run a new website or blog? One of your main worries is search engine optimization to bring in new visitors from search engines.

But SEO is a wide field. And things can get confusing really fast.

In this guide, you’ll learn all the basic details you need to know to optimize your website for search engines.

First of all;

What is SEO?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the steps you take on your website to ensure that your pages rank high for relevant keywords on search engines. This serves many functions. Some of them are:

• You gain more organic traffic to your website which increases your audience size.
• You improve your brand awareness.
• You can capture more leads from visitors coming from search engines.
• It’s an opportunity to turn these leads to customers.

Having said this, what makes search engine traffic so important? It’s for one simple reason: people are finding your website because they searched for a keyword related to your website.

Therefore, they’re more likely to gain value and interact better with your website.

Without further ado, what are the important steps to take to ensure you optimize your website for search engines?

Ensure your website is indexed

Whenever a searcher puts a keyword into the search box, Google will look through its index to find the best results that meet that query. If your website pages are absent in Google index, there’s no way your website can show up in search results.

Considering this, one of your first steps is to check whether your website pages are present in Google index. To do this, you have to register on Google Search Console.

When you’re through with that, go to your dashboard and click on “Coverage.”

On the next page, Google will show you details about your pages on its index. You’ll see pages with error, valid pages, valid pages with warnings, and pages that have been excluded from the index due to various reasons.

When you go down the page, you can get more details about these pages.

To know the pages affected your can click on each section and find pages with error or the ones indexed.

You can also check for all these details on your Bing Webmaster account. When you go to your dashboard, you’ll see the number of your pages indexed.

Alternatively, a way to check if your website is on Google index is to use the site search function. To do this, enter the search string “site:yourwebsite.com” into the search box and it will show you the number of your pages present on Google.

This will show you an approximate number of your pages on Google. At least, you’ll know that your pages are present in Google index.

Submit sitemaps

If your pages are absent on Google index, this means you’ll have to submit your website sitemap to these search engines. A sitemap is simply a document that contains your website URLs and helps search engine bots to crawl them.

Go to your Google search console dashboard and click on “Sitemaps.” On the next page, you can enter your sitemap URL and click on “Submit.” You can get your sitemap URL through WordPress services like Jetpack or Yoast.

You can repeat the same step on Bing by adding your sitemap URL.

After doing these, you can proceed to other steps in optimizing your website.

Carry out keyword research

People use keywords when looking to solve a problem through search engines. You can get the greatest benefits from search engines when you rank high for keywords that your ideal audience is using.

Generally, you have an idea of some keywords that your ideal visitors can use in search engines. But there are still many you’re oblivious to. And sometimes, your guesses might be wrong in terms of the keywords people looking for your services are using.

Keyword research helps you to validate your guesses and also find new keyword ideas that your potential customers use. You can get important details like:

• Search volume
• SEO difficulty
• Paid difficulty
• Click-through rate
• Cost per click
• Conversion rate

To carry out your research effectively, you need keyword research tools.

Examples of some you can use are SEMrush, Majestic SEO, Ahrefs, Cognitive SEO, KeywordTool.io, Ubersuggest, etc. Some of these tools are paid while some offer a free limited version. A tool like Ubersuggest is free.

To use this tool, enter your keyword into the tool and click on “Search.”

This will show you details about your keywords like search volume, SEO difficulty, paid difficulty, and cost per click (CPC).

You can also get more keyword ideas similar to the keyword you’re analyzing.

Another detail you can see is the search engine results for that keyword. This will show you the pages already ranking for the keyword so that you can see the competition level.

By the time you’re through with your keyword research, you should have a list of many keywords you want to target with your pages.

Consider searcher intent

An important aspect of keyword research that has become popular over the years is searcher intent. One of the reasons for this is Google’s machine learning system called Rankbrain.

This AI system aims to understand why searchers are using a keyword. Then it will present the best results that can meet their needs. While targeting a keyword, you need to consider the searcher intent.

Generally, keywords are divided into 4 types based on searcher intent. These are:

• Navigational keywords
• Informational keywords
• Commercial keywords
• Transactional keywords

Before creating content to target a keyword, ask what the searcher is looking for. And then meet this need.

Create great content

If you want your pages to rank high on search engines, you need to create great content. There are no 2 ways about it. In fact, Google’s search quality senior strategist, Andrey Lipattsev, said the 3 most important Google ranking signals are content, backlinks, and Rankbrain.

But the idea of what great content means is subjective. However, there’s a simple way to determine that your content is great.

If your content provides the right information to solve your visitor’s problems, then it’s great.

Google search quality evaluator guidelines reveal that the purpose of your page will determine what type of content is expected on such a page.

What are the points to keep in mind to create great content?

Produce long-form content

Over the years, long-form content have performed better than short-form content on search engines. In fact, a Backlinko study found that the length of a post correlates to its Google ranking. It also found that the average post ranking at number one has 1,890 words.

Now, what you need to know is that these pieces of content didn’t rank only because they were long. But because to provide enough details about a topic, it will require a high number of words.

You might ask: should you just target 1,890 words for all your pages? No. The truth is that how long your content should be will depend on the topic you’re writing about.

Content about a wide topic will usually require a higher number of words than one on a narrow topic.

The most important consideration is to provide as many details as possible on your page to satisfy your visitor.

Format your content clearly

Having large blocks of text on your page is a fast way to chase visitors away. Especially if you create long-form content. A high bounce rate is a problem that could make you lose your search rankings.

To keep your visitors on your website and ensure that they read your great content, you should format your content for easier reading. Follow these tips to do so:

• Use subheadings
• Use short sentences
• Use short paragraphs to have more white space on your page
• Include images in your content
• Use bullets when creating lists

This helps your reader to skim through your content and read the most important aspects that will solve their problems.

Repurpose your content

Whenever people talk about content, they’re usually referring to written content. But have you considered other forms of content?

The reality is that people rarely read everything on your page. In fact, a study by the Nielsen Norman Group found that an average visitor will only read 20 to 28% of the content on a page.

Some people do better with visual content than written content. And a study shows people tend to retain visual content better than written text. On average people remember only 10% of written text after 3 days while they remember 65% of visual content.

If you already have many pages of written content, you can create a visual form of these pages. Some formats to consider are:

• Infographics
• Videos
• Podcasts
• Webinars
• Slides

When you create great content, it keeps visitors on your website and helps to build trust with people who can turn out to be your customers in the future.

Build high-quality backlinks

This is the most important off-page SEO activity. In fact, when most people talk about off-page SEO, they’re talking about link building.

A backlink is a link from an external website to one of your website pages. It’s a vote for your website and search engines use this to determine the quality of your web page.

From Google’s perspective, this makes sense. If many websites trust your content enough to link to it, then it shows it’s a quality piece of content.

However, like many strategies, this can be abused. While building links to your website, you need to ensure you’re building links from authoritative websites.

Backlinks from these websites carry more authority and will give your page a higher boost than links from spammy websites. For instance, a backlink from the New York Times is more valuable than a website nobody knows.

You should also ensure that you’re building backlinks from authoritative websites in your niche. This will help you to rank for more keywords in your niche. What are some steps to build backlinks?

Start a guest posting campaign

Guest posting is one of the most effective link building strategies. In fact, Sean Si of SEO Hacker says that guest posting is his most effective link building strategy.

Guest posting involves creating content for other websites. This helps you reach a new audience and show your expertise. Consequently, you can gain new website visitors through your guest posting campaigns.

Another benefit from your guest post is a backlink. At the end of your guest post, there’ll usually be a backlink to your website. But to get the best results from guest posting, you need to find authoritative websites that will accept your guest posts.

See an example of a guest post bio where there’s a link to the author’s website.

Through guest posting, Bamidele Onibalusi increased a website’s organic traffic by 342.35% in one year.

Answer questions on forums

In some cases, people go to forums when they’re looking for specific solutions to their problems. As an expert in your field, you can go to forums in your niche and other general forums like Quora.

You can answer questions to establish your expertise in these forums. Apart from that, you can also use this to build links. If a question is related to your page content, you can answer the question briefly and then link to your page after the answer for more details.

You can also search for this topic to find questions that might be opportunities. See a question on Quora below:

See an example of a post with a link after answering the question:

Feature on podcasts on other websites

Some websites create podcasts on a weekly or monthly basis. Many of these podcasts interview people in their industry.

When you consider that 26% of Americans (about 73 million) listen to podcasts monthly, you’ll see that it’s a popular form of content consumption.

When you feature on these podcasts, there’s a link to your website in the introduction. See an example of this below:

This strategy can take a while before you can pull it off.

Building links is difficult. But it has important benefits for your website and you should engage in this activity.

Improve local SEO

If you run a local business, there are people in your locality who use search engines when looking for the services you offer. Do you show up for these searches?

If you don’t, you’re losing customers and revenue. Another part of the local search results is the local map pack. This shows local businesses relevant to a local search term.

Fortunately, users act fast on these searches. For instance, 50% of people who carry out local searches on their smartphones and 34% of tablet and desktop users end up visiting a local business within a day.

You can take the following steps to improve your local SEO.

Create and maintain a Google My Business page

Without this page, it’s almost impossible to rank on local map pack. On your Google My Business page, you can have all the important details like the name of your business, address, and phone number (NAP).

Others you can have are your website address, images of your business place, and customer reviews. To learn more, visit this page on how to create and run your Google My Business page.

Add your website to local listings

Apart from Google My Business, there are other local listings your business should appear on. Google uses your details on various local listings to establish your credibility as a local business.

You should ensure you have your business details on popular local listings and those related to your industry. Examples of popular local listings are:

• Google My Business
• Bing Places for Business
• Yelp
• Facebook
• Foursquare
• Yellow Pages
• Manta

Another point to keep in mind while adding your business details to local listings is NAP consistency. You must ensure that your details are consistent across all platforms to avoid confusion for search engines.

Check out this guide for details about 100 local listings you can add your business to.

Encourage user reviews

For someone who wants to spend their money on a service, they want to be sure they’ll get value for it. One way to know is to check customer reviews.

Here, a business’s customers can tell about their experience with that business. Based on this, a potential customer can then decide whether to use your service or not.

Online reviews are powerful. It’s no surprise that 85% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations according to a BrightLocal study.

This also affects your local search rankings. But most times, customers won’t leave reviews. You have to encourage them to do so. You can use these and other local SEO strategies to improve your local search rankings.

Improve website user experience

If users feel good when they come to your website, they’ll stay longer and come back again. For this, Google will reward you with better rankings.

Even with great content, a poor website user experience could chase visitors away from your website. Important parts of your website user experience to improve are:

Website speed

With the improvement in internet technology and high connection speeds, visitors want your website to load in the blink of an eye. In fact, most of them would bounce if they have to wait too long for your website to load.

A Google study found that the probability of a visitor bouncing away from your website has risen to 32% once it loads for up to 3 seconds.

Added to that, Google has stated that speed is a ranking signal for both desktop and mobile pages. To improve your website speed, the first step is to actually know the speed.

You can use tools like Pingdom, Google pagespeed Insights, GT Metrix, etc. to find your website speed.

To use Pingdom, go to the tool and enter your website address. Select one of the 7 servers located in 5 continents. You should select a server that’s closest to where your audience is. This will give you an insight into how long your website loads at that location.

After that, click on “Start Test.” This will then show you important details about your web page like load time, number of requests, page size, and others.

You can also get recommendations on some actions to take on different parts of your website to improve your website speed.

Whenever you take steps to improve your website speed, you can always use speed tools to track improvements. Some recommended actions that can improve your website speed are:

• Use a fast website host
• Use a content delivery network
• Minimize your image or video size
• Minify your page code
• Use Google accelerated mobile pages (AMPs)

With these steps, you can increase your page speed and make your website faster to use for your visitors.

Mobile-friendliness

When you consider that a larger share of search queries now come from mobile devices, you’ll see a reason to make your website mobile friendly. A study has put this figure at 60% of Google searches.

If you have a poor mobile website, it means you’re at the risk of losing the majority of your website visitors. How do you know if your website is mobile-friendly?

Use the Google mobile-friendly test to find out. Enter your website address into the bar and click on “Run Test.”

This will show you whether your website is mobile-friendly or not.

If you click on “More details,” you can see more about steps you can take to improve your website’s mobile-friendliness.

As a website owner, what’s the best way to make your website mobile friendly? Using a mobile-responsive theme on your website will ensure that your website is able to adapt to any screen size. You can eliminate issues that comes with having a different desktop and mobile versions of your website.

Conclusion

Search engine optimization is an important part of operating your website. And it involves doing many things right.

However, SEO is not a quick fix. It will usually take 3 to 6 months before you start seeing considerable results of your optimization efforts.

What have you gained from this guide? Share this guide with others who might need it.