Search Engine Optimization Basics (2017)

Basics SEO Tips For Beginners

If you want your website to rank higher in the search engines, then understanding the basics of Search Engine Optimization is an important start. This guide will help you understand what SEO is, and how it works to help your website to rank higher for your target audience.

What is SEO?

SEO is the practice of making small and large changes to a website to help it rank higher for queries that people search for on Google or other search engines.

If you are new to SEO and don’t have any idea where to start, here are some basic SEO tips for beginners.

Keywords

Keywords are sometimes used synonymously with key phrases. Simply put – if someone searches it on Google then it is a keyword, regardless of how long it is. If I were searching for the weather, I could search for “weather” but that would only bring up results for the weather near me. By searching “Weather in New York City”, you change the query and Google serves you different results.

Google runs on keywords, and understanding them is crucial to your progress. When you are producing a website or any content that is on a website, you will typically want to have keywords in mind. We believe in a rule of one keyword per page. Try and target a page towards one search result, and deliver the best result for that phrase.

High-Quality Backlinks

A Backlink is a tie from one website to another. If you are navigating site A, and find a link to site B, and follow that link, you have clicked on a Backlink for site B. It is an outbound link for site A, and an Inbound link for site B.

You have full control over outbound links, but producing backlinks is a challenging and important process to making your website have more authority in the eyes of Google’s algorithms.

Bad Backlinks exist, and you want to do your best at removing those. Bad Backlinks are when spammy and poor websites have thousands of links to other websites, without real content. There are many other ways for a website to produce bad backlinks.

Sitemap

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A sitemap is simply a map for your website. Having a Sitemap will help Google understand where all of the pages exist on your website.

Image Tag Alt Attribute

Images can be labeled in various ways. Imagine it as someone writing on the back of the picture.

Labeling your image tags provides information about the image you used and serves as a text alternative for search engines. Applying alt tags to images helps improve your SEO.

Social Media

Social media has a significant and growing impact on your SEO. Having multiple social media channels can be a very effective tool for your website. Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, and Pinterest are some of the important social media channels that you can promote your content or website. Customizing your shareable links can help in promoting your website and an effective way to attract and engage with your target audience.

Meta Keywords Attributes

The title tag is the text you see at the top of the web browser. It should contain keywords that are relevant to your website. Optimizing your title tags will help search engines understand what your website or page is about. It also helps in crawling and indexing your web pages.

A meta description is a short description of the page found under the URL when shown in the search results. This gives searchers preview of the page so it is important to write something that is relevant to your targeted keyword to get the user’s attention. Your meta description should not exceed 160 characters.

Mobile Friendly

Google recently released a separate search engine for mobile phones that looks and performs similarly to the original. However, this engine favors mobile-friendly website. Having a mobile-friendly or responsive website is critical to ranking in this modern day and age.

Google Analytics

This tool helps track where your visitors come from, how they found your site, what they are looking for and determine the keywords that worked to get visitors to your page. This tool runs real-time data that can help you see and analyze the results of your web pages. It also provides information about where the website traffic comes from.

The world of SEO is vast and complicated. Let us know if you have more questions, and we will try our best to answer them.