SEO for Beginners: A Quick Guide to Search Engine Marketing

If you’re a beginner who wants to learn the basic of seo, search engine marketing or search engine optimization as it is referred to, here’s a quick guide for you.

When it comes to learning how to optimize your website for search, there seems to be an almost unlimited amount of information to learn.

But, there are definitely some principles that will give you a solid basis for your search engine optimization (SEO) education and make sure that your website has a fighting chance with all of the competing ones out there.

These are quick-start principles of SEO that will ensure your site has the best chance possible of getting traffic as soon as possible.

However, there will be more advanced concepts to learn after you master these. These tips give you a solid foundation though, so let’s get started!

Seo Meaning – What Is SEO

Either you call it Search marketing, search engine marketing or search engine optimization (SEO), it is the process of optimizing your contents online for search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.)

This marketing strategy will help search engines to show your contents in in top search result when people search for information related to your keyword.

In short, optimizing your contents for search engines give you a fighting chance to come up in search engines like Yahoo, Bing, etc.

Truth be told, millions of sites are fighting for free traffic from Google, and seo is one of the ways and, it is one of the 6 digital marketing strategies every blog owner should learn.

For example, when you type a set of keyword(s) like “loans for corps members” or “current ponzi schemes” or “most translated website” into Google search engine, you’ll find oasdom.com’s content in the top results.

And..

Why is being on the first search results of search engines so important?

When potential customers enter search terms that match your product or services offering offerings, you rank higher than other blogs or platforms.

Online searchers tend to click the first search results compared to the 4th, 5th or 6th results. Being on the first page of Google search result is good but being the first result is great!

It means you’ll get tons of free traffic to your blog without investing a dime in ads. So, how do you get started with search engine optimization and marketing?

Seo For Beginners 5 Tips for Optimizing Your Website

To create this foundation, we’ll look at the five most important tips that you need to follow in order to optimize your website properly.

If you can take these five things and put them into action, then you will have a major advantage over all of the websites that do not prioritize SEO or use these principles to guide their content policies.

Have a Content Strategy

First of all, you have to have a content strategy for your website. The term ‘content strategy’ refers to the development and management of content that you post on your website.

Having a good content strategy means that you will be able to choose the right keywords that rank higher in the SERPS as well as post titles that are too irresistible not to click.

You’ll also know what your optimal post length is, what keyword density works best, and how you divide your content up for best results.

The content strategy that you choose will be based upon what kind of website you have. For example, your strategy will be very different if you have an e-commerce site that has virtually no content except product descriptions and a review website that posts long-form reviews of various products and services.

How you define your content strategy will depend entirely upon what works best for your website. You’re going to need to do a lot of trial and error to find out what sort of content performs the best in your niche and how you can tweak it for even further improvement.

Unfortunately, the only way to really develop a content strategy is to start learning what works and what doesn’t.

Having a quality content on your blog is one of the best seo practices  you should adopt.

Also Read: Content marketing – step by step guide

Luckily, you don’t have to start blind. There is lots of advice you can get online about new strategies to try and which ones that should probably be avoided. And, when you are really feeling lost or confused, just take a look at what your competition is doing.

Keyword Research

Keyword research is absolutely essential if you want to rank well in the search engine results. Many websites do not optimize for keywords nor do any research on them at all, not realizing that it is exactly that lack of keyword research that is limiting their traffic.

Keyword research allows you to find out what search terms people are actually using to search on Google, and then you optimize for them so there is a greater chance of ranking high enough for that keyword phrase to be visible.

Although good keyword research can be challenging to learn, the basics are pretty simple and anyone can grasp the concept quickly.

To do keyword research, there are a number of free tools out there to help you find the keywords themselves, as well as information on how to use them within your content.

They can help with what sort of post titles to create, how to include them in your headers and what sort of keyword density to use in your content itself.

There are also tools out there to help you evaluate the competition so that you can avoid optimizing for keywords that you aren’t going to be able to rank for.

As you become more and more invested in your website and start to develop more advanced SEO strategies, you’ll want to do even more comprehensive keyword tracking.

You can use analytics software to see how your keywords are performing and possibly even invest in premium tools that will make keyword research even easier.

Use Headings

Something that you definitely want to do with your content is to use headings (Htags like H2, H3, etc.). There are a couple of reasons why headings are a good idea.

First, they break up your content so that it is easier and less intimidating to read. When someone sees a huge block of text online their natural inclination is to pass over it.

But when content is separated by headings that define each section, it becomes much easier to entice someone to read it.

There is another reason that you should be using headings as well. When you use headings within your content, and you put the keywords that you have found through keyword research in those headings, you are optimizing your site for search even further.

That’s because putting something in a heading or subheading tells Google (and the other search engines) that the words within that heading are important. That’s why headings should contain some of the keywords that you’re targeting.

Don’t Forget the Pictures

Content of almost any length should have at least one picture included with it. Websites that use pictures within content have several advantages over content that doesn’t have them.

First, you get the opportunity to demonstrate your point or tell your story using a completely separate method. You’ve heard the phrase a picture is worth 1000 words, right?

Well, that may or may not be true in content optimization, but there is no doubt that a good picture can speak volumes. In our content creation guide, there are more tips to using multimedia in your content.

You also have the advantage of breaking up content even further to make it more appetizing to the reader.

Content with pictures is more fun to read and more attractive than text alone – even if headings and subheadings are included.

Your pictures can make a good article even better, and when it comes to long-form articles and reviews, additional media content like pictures and videos are essential to hold a reader’s attention.

Finally, using images gives you the opportunity to optimize for your keywords even further by using alt tags.

Before you upload your images, rename them to feature the keyword you want to rank for and when you upload every image, make sure you put the alt tags.

Alt tags are descriptions for images that search engines see, and adding the right keywords to the right image can give you an SEO boost across your entire site.

Also Read: Using Google Analytics for Beginners – Quick Tutorial

Quality over Quantity

Finally, you need to make sure that you are always prioritizing quality over quantity. You might be able to write a post every day for your website, but it isn’t going to be nearly as good as one that is a little longer and takes you several days to research thoroughly and rewrite until it is perfect.

Quantity might get you listed in the search engines more often and might seem to drive more traffic on the surface, but what most people do not realize is that creating quality content is actually what gets you ranked higher for the keywords that you are already targeting.

Plus, an amazing piece of content is going to be shared by readers, and your comments section could give you a major SEO boost if it becomes particularly active.

You don’t have to be a perfect writer to create quality content. But you do want to make sure that you have a very firm grasp of the subject that you are covering, that your content is presented and organized in the best way possible.

Also you want to make sure that you have gone over it with a fine-tooth comb to find typos, grammatical mistakes, spelling errors and sentences or paragraphs that simply sound awkward and need to be rewritten.

If you aren’t that great at creating content yourself, there are plenty of writing services you can outsource your content needs to.

Seo for Beginners Summary

Getting started with SEO is not too difficult. You want to start with a content strategy. Developing this strategy will take some time while you research what works in your particular niche.

Your content strategy should include the sort of keywords you’re going after, how you set up your posts or other content, how often you post new content and many other factors.

You also want to make sure that you find out which keywords are attainable by your website and use them in your post titles, headers and content.

Keyword research and optimization around those keywords is one of the most effective ways to get traffic quickly.

Use headings within your content to break up the text and to tell the search engines and readers what a section is about. Make sure that your content is very high quality and that you are using pictures to enhance posts as well.

And lastly, always strive for quality over quantity.