SEO for Beginners: 10 Steps to Optimizing Your Website Now
Seo (search engine optimization) is something that acts as fuel for anything that is published on the internet. Without SEO, everything on the internet is like a car with no fuel. No matter how good it is, it won’t be helpful to you. You can’t do what you want and what it is made for with it. Seo is not a single process, nor is it a one-time thing. You need to go through several things to be able to optimize your website for search engines. Also, you need to monitor your performance from time to time and do things to improve it. However, all these things are very technical and require expert knowledge.
What will you learn in this blog post?
You can also learn by doing SEO yourself. There are several ways to do it, like enrolling in an online course, watching free YouTube videos, etc. However, in this article, we will tell you 10 steps to do SEO as a beginner. Doing this will set your website for good, and you can run your business successfully on the internet as well. Moreover, if you want to make an attractive website for your business/brand, you can reach out to any good web design service.
Below We Discuss 10 Effective Steps To Do SEO
Step 1: Find What Your Target Audience Searches For
You run a business. You made its website to expand your business and make it more recognized. For this purpose, you made your business website. But do you know there are over a billion websites in today’s world? Do you think your website would get found in such a rush? It seems almost impossible, but it’s not, although it is difficult and requires lots of effort. You need to know what people are searching for to make your website popular. Sounds confusing? We’ll explain it.
How do Websites Appear in Search Engines?
What do you do that makes websites appear? You search for a query. For example, if you want to know about the benefits of green tea, you search for terms like ‘Green tea benefits,’ ‘Why we should drink green tea,’ etc. This is what we call keywords and key phrases. Sometimes people search for one or two words, but mostly their search is based on long-form queries. But you might have observed that there is not only one page with several websites on your query, but also so many more pages. So, how can you get adjusted in the first page’s search results as it is the only page that receives all the attention?
Here’s How
You need to find what your target audience searches for. Let’s say your website is about digital marketing. You need to know what is in SEO that people want the most help with. Find out the problems that they are searching for online.
Step 2: Do Keyword Research
Keyword research is one method to find out your user’s issues, problems, etc. Besides that, you can use Google Trends, Google automated search suggestions, etc. Keyword research is one of the most difficult things in the whole SEO process. You can use several tools for keyword research, both free and paid. Below we describe how you can select keywords to work on.
Step 3: Here’s How You Can Choose the Right Keywords
Keyword Difficulty, Search Volume, Search Difficulty, and some more terms like them–you need to understand them when doing keyword research. We measured most of these things on a scale of 0-100 according to the standard. The less the keyword difficulty is, the easier it is for you to rank your website’s page for it. Search volume tells you how much your target audience in a month searches for a keyword. The minimum search volume that is good enough is 100 searches per month. The more, the better, but it’s also related to keyword difficulty. Most keywords with good search volume can also have a high keyword difficulty. Therefore, you need to choose keywords wisely so that they can bring you traffic to your website.
Step 4: Optimize These Two Things First
Neil Patel, a prominent digital marketer, suggests optimizing the title and metadata of your website in the first place. After that, you optimize the other things involved.
a. Title Tag
The title is the headline of your website. When you open a website, you see text written on your tab. For example, if you visit Ahrefs (Seo and digital marketing tools website), you see the title saying ‘Ahrefs- SEO Tools and Resources To Grow Your Search Traffic.’ You see, it contains useful keywords that users can search for, such as growing search traffic, SEO tools, and SEO resources. Thus, you need to use keywords in the title people search for.
b. Meta Description
After that, you optimize your meta description. When you search for a query, it’s the text you see under the website name on the SERP (Search Engine Results Page). If your title and meta description have the keywords incorporated correctly, you increase your chances of getting ranked high in search engines.
Step 5: Optimize Your Website’s Landing Page
So, you successfully optimized the title and meta description. Now, it’s time to go further and optimize your website’s main page/landing page. Here, it is important to tell you that you need an excellent copy on your website’s main page. We suggest hiring a copywriter to get help writing an engaging copy that can drive users to take action. You need basically three things: SEO, Good Copy, and Excellent Content (Articles, products, Services). Use the keywords in your copy. Provide the copywriter with the keywords so that he crafts an engaging copy for you.
Step 6: Use Keywords in your Lengthy Blog Posts
Whether you own a blog website, an e-commerce website, or any website that sells some products/services, include keywords and LSI keywords in your articles/descriptions/h1, h2, h3. LSI keywords are relatable keywords of your focused keyword. For example, if your focused keyword is digital marketing, LSI keywords are seo, social media marketing, content marketing, etc.
Writing Long Articles/Description
Everything that you write on your website should be keyword rich. However, avoid keyword stuffing at all costs. Keyword stuffing is the overuse of keywords, and search engines can penalize your website if you do so. Moreover, when writing blog posts, ensure they’re long. That’s something critical and can annoy you. But search engines prefer those articles that are long over short articles. But you don’t want to include fluff in it or any filler content to increase word count. They should be of high quality and engaging, and only then will you serve the purpose.
Moreover, articles shouldn’t be long blocks of text. Include headings, subheadings, images, bullet points, and things like that. Doing this will make your article or product’s description and details easy to read and also good for SEO.
Step 7: Do Internal Linking
This is so simple. When you have written a couple of blog posts on your website, you mention in an article something that has already been defined in the other. You can link to that blog post on your website. It is called internal linking. All the blog posts you read online have good internal links that take you to the other pages to read detailed articles on the point you mentioned briefly.
Step 8: Guest Blogging
Above, we have discussed on-page SEO optimization. Guest posting is the process of off-page optimization. Guest blogging means writing articles on different websites and including the link to your main website. However, you only want to write articles on websites with high DA (Domain Authority). This signals to search engines that your website is highly qualified because established websites link to you. You can reach out to websites that have a similar niche as yours and pitch to them to give you a backlink.
Guest posting, if done properly, along with on-page optimization, can be very effective for a good ranking of your website.
Step 9: Maintain Good Website Structure for Better Seo
When you keep posting content on your website, whether it’s adding products, services, or articles, there comes a time when it can become cluttered. This is bad for SEO, and you need to avoid getting it happening. If you run a blog website, use the concept of pillar and cluster content.
Defining Pillar and Cluster Posts
Articles that are lengthy and have a word count of over 3000 belong to the pillar content. Articles with a word count of 1000-2500 belong to the cluster content. Pillar posts are detailed, and cluster posts are short but more specific. For example, the topic Importance of Digital Marketing and How to Do it is the pillar content. Its cluster post will have topics like How to Run Ads on Facebook in 2022 and Mistakes to Avoid When Setting Up PPC Campaign. This maintains a good structure of your website.
You can hire a developer and SEO expert from time to time and ask him to improve your website’s structure so that it runs fast and performs better for SEO.
Step 10: Post Content On Your Website Daily
Search engines’ algorithms favor websites with fresh content and a lot of it. Therefore, we suggest you write at least one article daily on your website and do it consistently. Moreover, e-commerce websites and websites that sell anything can also have a blog section. Other than that, they can post more content to their website, like posting new products more often so that they can achieve good rankings provided that they keep SEO in mind.
Final Words
Other than SEO and content production, you should also focus on content marketing. Social media marketing is also important to generate more business and make your website rank high in search engines.
Also Read: How to Find Keywords for SEO