Quick Beginners Guide To Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Begin with the basic question “What is SEO”?
Quick beginners guide to search engine optimization (SEO), Learn search engine optimization and work as a “digital marketing” expert in the industry. The term SEO means Search Engine Optimization, SEO is nothing but is a set of skills through which you optimize your online business website for visitors, search engines, bots etc. SEO helps your business to gain a position in the digital world which means more customers for your service and good earnings. For starters, it is a little difficult to grab the essence of the SEO but with time and practice you will learn all the skills about On page and Off page SEO. New bloggers hear this term a lot and may wonder what actually does it mean or they might struggle with questions like how to go about doing SEO for my blog site.
I am also a new blogger like you all, and that gave me the motivation to write about SEO. Though there are already SEO gurus all around the globe and they rule the Google too. My idea about writing about SEO is to explain some crucial steps in the simplest words that even a day first blogger will gain knowledge about SEO.
SEO aren’t any mystery or rocket science though there might be things which you will learn in the times to come as a blogger, that will be your transition from an amateur to a pro. Just to start with the basic, the idea behind doing SEO is to boost the traffic in your website so that you can increase your earnings.
Starting with the most basic thing (How SEO Works)
To start with let us first forget about boosting traffic and change the paradigm. From a bird’s point of view you have a blog site and you want that the people looking for you should find you easily on the net and for that you need to do certain things that will assist those people to reach you. If you do these things you will automatically boost traffic on your website. See below some SEO tips.
- What is been searched should be your content. This means that if someone is looking for “Jogging 5 days a week” then this should be your content in your site.
- Next thing is to match the goal of the visitor, for example if you are selling raw bread and someone wants to order delicious cooked sandwich for home delivery then they might visit your site searching for sandwich but it will be useless for them as they need pre-cooked sandwich. This may bring visitors but not actual visitors that you need.
- To solve the above problem, optimize your keywords so that the goal of the visitors is fulfilled after reaching your site.
Develop skill for Keyword research
Key word research is the backbone of any good SEO, finding the right keywords will rank you up in the search. You do keyword research using tools like Google Adword or The Long Tail. Below are some quick tips on keyword research.
- Your search should be funneled to key words that have high search volumes. Large number of people should be searching the net on those keywords
- The competition of the keyword should be low. This means that the keyword is searched but the providers are less, this is your chance, so you face less competition.
- Finally the key word should support your content. The relevancy of the keyword should be what you have in your content.
- Strategizing your content according to the keyword research shall be smart.
Quick Beginners Guide To Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
About The Long Tail
The Long Tail is the premium service offered to do your keyword research. I guess in the long run the Long Tail is the most reliable tool which outweighs the other tools available in the market. It does what is it says. Having said that friends my personal experience since the Long tail software has become online and runs on real time internet it is difficult to say the efficacy of the software is still there. Honestly there is lot of hangups now faced by the users, although the team responds to the queries real quick but it is not now worth the investment.
Focusing on the content Strategy?
You have won the half battle by getting the right keywords, now start crafting your content based on those keywords. Grab on few tips on content strategy.
- Search engines are bots that crawl your website; they read it and rank your content pages. Strategically put keywords that come naturally in a flow inside your content.
- Use keywords in the title of the article; do not use the exact keywords at random in your articles. Instead u can use other synonymous or related words. This is known as latent semantic indexing. For example for a keyword “Car” you can use “Automobile”.
- Bots are not humans as they are programmed to read text but not audio or videos files. If your pages contain those please explain them, this would help the bots to get the idea what the audio or the video contains and rank the page accordingly.
- Keyword planning is a strategy to bring in visitors but who will convert into your customer will depend on your actual content. Your content should not be a graveyard of keywords but rather it should be interesting. Do not sacrifice the uniqueness, quality & and freshness of the content.
- Pay attention to the title of the article (Should be eye catching), compliment your site with linking it to quality sites; this will encourage other sites to link you as well.
Extend your understanding about SEO
Extend knowledge about SEO with learning about sitemaps, these are same like a road-map, a sitemap gives bots directions to all the content pages on your website, which make sure that find everything. You can also go through the site map of this website jobswithoutdegrees.in which i have created using a plugin Yoast SEO.
- You can use tools that automatically create a sitemap to for your website. If you are word press then you can install SEO plug-in that will help you in creating a site map. If your preference is XML then go for XML Sitemap Creator.
Selection of the right Domain Name is important
I would suggest that you go for an exact match domain name; this will create a unique identity for your website. You could get it if your niche is unique or someone has put it for sale as they don’t use the domain now. Having said that, it’s difficult to get the exact match domain as all are taken. Few things to look up while buying a domain name.
- If you can’t get exactly match domain name then go for a unique and catchy name. For example “zomato.com”, it is a sort of directory which tells about restaurants, cafes and bars around your location. This one can be easily memorized, using trendy and unique names you can easily build upon a brand.
- Add few words around the niche, for example it will be hard to buy a domain name “Movie” but adding words like “all about movie” will increase your chances to get the domain name.
Basics about the URL Structure
If you want to be searched by the search engine crawlers then keep these URL tips in mind.
- URLs should not contain extraneous characters ( $ @ ! * % = ? )
- Shorter URLS typically rank better than longer ones
- Numbers and letters should only be used in URLs.
- Do not use underscores.
- Sub-domains can rank better than sub directories.
Maintaining The Site Structure
Many SEOs talk about the importance of maintaining a site structure they say “the way you link pages together will make an enormous impact on your rankings”. Grab on some awesome tips that will help you maintain a healthy structure of your website.
- Inter-Links within your content tend to carry more weight than links within a sidebar or footer.
- Try to keep the number of links on each page under 100.
- To build links within the content do not try to overdo it, there should be relevancy of the content which are linked together otherwise it will be just a spider web with no sense at all.
Effective use of the Images in your post.
One should be able to effectively use the images in their blog posts, It has been discussed earlier that the bots are not so advanced that they could identify the images. So remember few things when using images with your content.
- For search engine bots to properly index images, alt tags are important to be added to all the images.
- For example you are using an image of bigben then the name of the image should be bidben.jpg rather than simple image.jpg. Now the bots could read the image and easily use it for indexing.
- Example:
<img src=”http://jobswithoutdegrees/images/bigben.jpg” alt=“bigben.jpg” />
- It will also create sense with the content as well as with the search crawler.
Quick Beginners Guide To Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Last But Not The Least, About “Backlinks”
The more backlinks that points back to your site, the more popular it will be. The crawlers will provide a higher ranking to your WebPages. Savor some tips on how to create backlinks.
- If you want to stay for longer haul in the blogging business then plan your backlinks with creativity and under white hat. The more trust worthy and non-spammy sites are linking to you, the more authority you will have on the niche.
- Increase your link count through social media and web2.0.
- Links from the related sites are better than non-relevant sites.
- Join forums relevant to your niche, this will help you build your network for links.
- Connect to other competitors in your niche by e-mailing them to create link in their websites.
Conclusion:
When you will start working on your blog site and with further experience yourself, learning search engine optimization will become more clearer to you. I still feel that there is so much more to share about Search Engine Optimization. It is an ocean that could not be wrapped in an article. But I have to stop at some point. Google and Youtube is all stuffed with so many useful resources. Here I would like to suggest few things, if you begin with the a WordPress site it will be lot easier for you to start off and you can really grab the basics of on page and off page SEO. There are also short time courses available on digital marketing which can give an apt boost for career advancement. A certificate course could land a 20k job in India easily. I personally see advertisements for job vacancies related to digital marketing experts who can do search engine optimization using On page & Off page SEO techniques, social media like facebook, twitter pinterest etc. My personal experience is, if you have just a little bit of common sense you can learn search engine optimization just like that. Its no rocket science, I am running this blog and applying all the optimization techniques I am learning on the go and also writing article about it.