Understanding the Basics of SEO for Beginners

Get your website ranking and manage your traffics through search engine optimization.

In understanding what SEO is, it is a practice used to optimize your website. By optimizing, search engines will be able to judge the visibility of your website whether to appear in the top position of search results or not.

However, you must understand that SEO is an endless process and not a one time thing. Which means that you have to constantly optimize your website.

In this article, we will guide you through understanding the basics of SEO, and how to use SEO. Be guided that this article won’t provide any secrets that will boost your ranking to first in Google, but following the outlines below it will be easier for search engines to crawl, index and understand your content.

Understanding SEO traffic

It is absolutely meaningless to have a good content but minimal visitors to your website. That’s why you must ensure that your website is able to attract a number of visitors and be able to maintain them.

In order to bring in and manage traffic to your website, first you need to find out where your traffic is coming from.

If you are operating a business website, you will discover that the more visitors change their status to buyers, the better the quality of your traffic.

The quality of traffic itself depends on the type and purpose of the business you operating, meanwhile 5% can already be rated as a good conversion rate.

Secondly, just as the quality traffic is important, the quantity of traffic remains the most basic thing.

You need to know that the amount of traffic is calculated based on the number of visitors who enters and access your website.

However, there are other things that you need to consider and monitor such as: website visitors, page views, and duration of visits.

I recommend you using tools like Google Analytics to analyze website traffic.

Thirdly, try typing a specific keywords in the search bar, then click on the link displayed in the search results. Visit through these links are referred to as organic traffic.

Although it looks easy and besides being free, the competition for this type of traffic is very tight. So therefore, it is advisable to implement good SEO practices to get satisfying results.

Understanding how SEO works

Once again, SEO optimizes websites so people can find it using certain keywords.

But this does not look as simple as you might imagine. There are tasks that search engines undergo once you press that Enter key.

• Crawling: Search engines such as Google looks for new or updated web pages. They discover URLs by following links, reading sitemaps and other means.
• Indexing: All web pages that are fetched and read are saved in its index. Additionally, the index entry for each page describes the content and location (URL) of that page.
• Ranking: Google rank results sequentially, based on the most appropriate search.

However, search engines uses a set of rules or rules called algorithms, to guarantee the quality of search.

With this rules, people can easily get relevant information from resources or trusted sources.

Also, there is a scoring system called Page Authority, which predict the ranking of websites on search engines. This system guides you to understand what qualifications are used by search engines to determine the best search results.

Understanding how to use SEO

Search engines are always updating their algorithms to provide the best search results. For this reason it is better to use the latest approach so SEO optimization can work as much as possible.

Otherwise, this can adversely affect the ranking of your website in search engine search results.

We have two categories of SEO: On-page SEO and Off-page SEO

On-page SEO

Just as the name implies, it involves everything that are on the website to ensure the website ranks on a Search Engine Results Pages.

It involves both content and technical arrangement to improve the quality of a page. So if you need more traffic on your website, then you have to work more on your on-page SEO.

However, here are the few things that you need to work on when optimizing on-page SEO:

• Title tags: are HTML element used to specify the title of a webpage. Make sure your title tag are unique and describes what the page is about.
• Headings: are the titles you give your content. Headings should focus on descriptive words, and you can optimize them with keywords but don’t stuff them full.
• Alt text for images: provides more information about an image and are used to describe images to web visitors who can’t see them.
• Internal links: are important as the help visitors navigate easily. Also, they make it easier for search engines to understand your site and index your pages which will result in a higher rank. Make sure to your website links back to its category or subcategory page and to the homepage.
• URL structure: make sure to optimize your URLs with keywords. This will help search engines determine how relevant a page is compared to a query, and it should be descriptive of the page’s subject.
• Site speed: It is important to ensure that you page is fast loading. Slow-loading pages with lower ranking get penalized by search engines. This because people expect a site to load within two seconds, and 40 percent will leave after three.
• Meta descriptions: The meta description appears below the title and the URL in a Search Engine Results Pages. It summarize a page’s content and tell web visitor why they should read your content instead of somebody else’s.
• Responsiveness: These seems to be an important factor as more people around the world use mobile devices for online search. It is necessary that your page display properly on any device, both mobile devices and desktop.

Off-page SEO

Its about everything that doesn’t happen directly on your website. Link-building is an integral part of off-page SEO.

In a nutshell, off-page SEO is used to promote your website. This way, people will know that your website is worth visiting.

Search engines take into account both the number and quality of your backlinks in an effort to increase page rank.

Note: A single quality backlink from an authoritative website is worth more than 10 or even 100 low-quality links.

How do you get backlinks?

There are three(3) ways to get them:

1. Create them

Manually add links to your site on other websites. This can be done by adding your websites to directories, blog comments and social media profile.

Anyone can do these because it requires minimum effort and that effective from an SEO and ranking perspective.

2. Buy backlinks

This done by paying webmasters or authors for a backlink. However, these is against Google webmaster’s guidelines which could attract a potential penalty. So I would advice you not to do so.

3. Earn backlinks

This is usually done by emailing other website owners and editors, asking them to link to you. Its the hardest way of getting backlinks. The harder it is to get a link the more valuable that link will be.

Now you have a clear understanding of the basics of SEO and how its works and why it is necessary for the growth and development of your website. Stay tuned for more of my new updates.

Cheers on optimizing your website!