Guide to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) For Beginner

If you understand the significance of having an online presence for a business, you might already know why it is important to perform search engine optimization. SEO is the practice of optimizing a website so that it becomes search engine friendly and ranks in the top positions of Google SERP.

While many people carry in-house SEO, others prefer letting an expert optimize their website. Why? Because professional SEO will have expertise in handling SEO campaigns for different business niches. Whether you own a marketing company, an e-commerce website, or even a service-based website, the professionals at the company will utilize the best SEO tactics to make your website SEO-friendly.

However, if you are someone who prefers handling tasks on their own, you can also handle the SEO campaign for your website as well. To do so, however, it is important to have the required expertise in the best SEO tactics.

In case you haven’t performed SEO in the past before, it can get a bit overwhelming to apprehend all the SEO knowledge thrown at you. That’s why it is crucial to go step-by-step and understand the basic elements of SEO first. 

To help you along the way, we have compiled a detailed beginner’s SEO guide. If you haven’t performed SEO in the past before, continue reading, the following guide you will help you a lot in developing effective SEO strategies for your business.

Understand How Search Engines Work

Before, starting with the actual guide, let’s first understand how the search engine works. When you type in a search query into Google’s search bar, the search engine crawler goes to its database and crawls pages that are relevant to the query itself. Google uses different ranking signals to check if a website is appropriate for a specific query or not.

This is why every website owner should optimize their website so that it can be crawled and indexed by Google for the target keyword phrases. So, let’s jump straight into the SEO guide and turn your rookie knowledge into professional expertise.

Start With Keyword Research

Here’s the thing!

Every SEO campaign needs to start with keyword research. You can’t practically perform SEO when you don’t have keywords to target. Performing keyword research is one of the major primary pillars of SEO.

As far as keyword research is concerned, you can use an array of keyword research tools. The Internet is stacked with a wide variety of online tools that you can utilize to find all the potential keywords for your website.

Ahrefs, SEMRush, Google Keyword Planner are some of the most popular keyword research tools that professionals SEOs use. Not only these keyword research tools help you find potential keywords, but they also help you compare different keywords on the basis of metrics like search volume and keyword difficulty (KD).

Since you are just beginning with your SEO campaign, it is a wise strategy to find keywords that have a higher search volume and low competition, i.e., lower KD. These keywords are easier to target and rank for.

Perform On-Page Optimization

Once you have a list of all the potential keywords, the next step is to optimize the on-page elements of the website. Like keyword research, on-page SEO is also an important part of SEO. It involves several techniques that optimize the different on-page elements of the website.

On-page SEO involves everything, starting from content optimization to image optimization. Make sure to optimize each element of the website so that search engine crawlers can easily crawl and index your web pages for specific search queries.

Move Towards Link Building

Google considers a website’s backlink profile as one of the crucial ranking signals. That’s why every SEO in the world focuses on acquiring quality backlinks for their websites. Building backlinks is a strenuous task, though.

You can’t expect your website rankings to skyrocket with any type of backlinks. It is important to focus on building quality backlinks. While in a conversation with a team of SEO experts, we came to understand that the quality of the backlinks matters way more than the quantity.

They explained that 10 relevant and high-quality backlinks are far better than 100 low-quality backlinks. Even though it can take comparatively more time to build quality backlinks, they are most likely to benefit your website in the future and protect your website from an unexpected Google penalty.

Conclusion

As a beginner, this is everything you need to know about search engine optimization. However, as you optimize your website, you’ll eventually come across several SEO topics. It is also worth noting that SEO is a vast and ever-changing field. So, if you want to sustain top rankings in SERP, make sure to stay up-to-date with the latest SEO tactics and Google algorithms.