Are you planning to do SEO for your own website or blog? Or just looking for another career opportunity in the digital marketing field? It doesn’t matter what are the reasons behind this, but if you’ve decided to discover the world of SEO, you need to start from the basics. Read SEO basics for beginners’ guide to get in idea what SEO means, how it can help you in business promotion, and what you should do to achieve impressive results.
What is SEO?
SEO - search engine optimization is the way to build your website in accordance with search engine rules (that are constantly changing to be honest). The main goal of SEO is to gain organic traffic which is absolutely free comparing to PPC and can lead to additional sales, revenue increase, and help you in building brand awareness.
SEO appeared firstly in 90s and now its essential marketing strategy for websites of different sizes and persuading different goals. I’m sure that absolutely every website owner asked himself at least once how can I do SEO for my website?
If you’re really interested in this topic you should be ready to involve all your technical, analytical, and creative capabilities in optimization process. But search engine optimization is bigger than collecting relevant keywords, do website optimization and hunting for backlinks. It’s more about psychology. Always start by creating the portrait of your target audience. Proper understanding of how they can look for goods, services you offer is the key. Give an honor estimate of how convenient your website is and if the interaction and navigation are clear enough. You should remember that nowadays all your SEO efforts should be done for positive users’ experience, not for search engine bots.
Modern SEO represents the combination of technical parameters, high quality, unique content. And the cherry on the cake is backlinks, but not the spammy ones. When I say backlinks I mean links from the reliable resources with low spam scores. Well, search engine priorities have changed a lot since the 90s but the combination of main ranking factors is still the same.
Search engine optimization for beginners
From the moment you’ve decided to open for yourself SEO world, the following phrases should appear in your vocabulary.
On page / On site optimization. This refers to properly done meta-title and meta-description, well-optimized H1. Those tags should include the main keywords and have appropriate lengths. subheading structure, include keywords in a text, write alts, check internal links opportunities, and so on… There are a lot of factors that you can improve and optimize. More details about on-page SEO you can find in our guide.
Off page / Off site optimization is about backlinks. You can try different techniques to find out what works for you. But I have to say at least once in this SEO optimization guide for beginners, in terms of backlinks quality should always go over quantity. You can receive some of really good, high-value backlinks absolutely for free, need just to learn how to do that. Learn more about backlinks from our article.
You can choose from a variety of techniques on how to reach the main goal - attract visitors organically. Some of the methods are legitimate, some are not and can lead to a ban for your website. So, before playing with fire think twice if it’s really worth it.
As we’re started to talk about different approaches to SEO campaigns, it’s essential to mention the most popular tactics, used by SEO profs.
White Hat SEO - traditional, absolutely legitimate way to make your website rank high on Google or other search engines. The main disadvantage is that it may take some time to see the results, but the outcome will definitely worth it.
Black Hat SEO - a very risky way to optimize your website. May lead to a ban, but some people still agree to practice it. The results of black hat seo optimization, though the word optimization is not the best one to be used for black hat methods, so it’s better to change it to manipulation. can be visible within a short period of time but they don’t last work only for a short term period.
Grey Hat SEO - something in between. Not as good and transparent as white SEO but with some elements of black SEO techniques.
Let’s discuss in more detail the advantages and disadvantages of each method in our guide.
To understand how to get your website on search engines it’s essential to understand how search engines operate?
You have to inform the robots that you’ve created a website, organized everything in a proper way and Google bots are welcome to crawl your site. To simplify the process for crawling bots you need to create sitemap file with the list of pages created on your website.
Then the indexing process is taking place. It can take from several days up to several months. I usually send for re-index pages manually (as an additional measure). I do this if some changes were made on the page, for example I’ve updated meta title or decided to add more content. I want to tell crawling bots that I did some improvements on my site, could you please check and maybe will find them enough to change my rankings a bit? Or I try to check for indexing status for separate pages in Google Seach Console and sometimes see the following message, which means that this page may require more attention.
Google Search Console regularly send notifications about errors that should be fixed and may influence on your website visibility. Actually, comparing to Google’s way to inform about errors Yandex provides more details in this regard. Among the most common reasons are Low-quality content and non-canonicals. If you’re thinking about expanding your business and do Yandex SEO, read our guide.
As it was mentioned above bots have to crawl a lot of websites so index processes can take a certain period of time, sometimes up to several months. If you think that you can just relax during that time and enjoy you cup of coffee, sorry I have to upset you a little. You have to work even harder, start looking for backlinks opportunities, create content plans, collect topic ideas, and do keyword research, do competitor analysis. Search engines appreciate sites that are constantly growing and developing. And as you may hear “There is no limit to perfection”.
If you need assistance with SEO project for your website, please feel free to contact us.