The Basics of SEO for Beginners in 2023 (Updated Guide)
E-Commerce (online shopping), blogging, copywriting, Digital Marketing are the new trends nowadays and it has become a common practice in today’s world. Traditional marketing had to put a lot of effort into selling their products or services and it was majorly done on-site
Building a brand and reaching the audience was an energy-draining task and it was also a time-consuming approach. Introduction to digitalization for marketing has made our life much easier and as we are spending more time online it has become an easy task to catch up with our interested crowd.
In this digitalizing world, SEO writing has become a challenge for new bloggers and copywriters. Writers not only should focus on their quality writing but also should make sure that it is appealing to the search engines. Hence optimization of the search engine turns out to be an important task.
What is Search Engine Optimization?
SEO is basically the optimization of search engines such as Google and Bing which helps to improve the quality of the website or a web page by getting high traffic and increasing the visibility for relevant searches and apparently attracting customers to your business. This also helps to ensure no duplicate content or pages. The main goal is to increase page rankings.
How is it done?
SEO uses crawlers to find pages for searched keywords. Pages that are indexed by other search engines are also found and included automatically. Crawlers consider several factors to index the page, including the number of similar keywords, title tags, and distance of the page from the root directory. Sometimes, if the page is embedded too deep in the website, crawlers might not include that page. It is also advised to consider technical aspects of SEO like, how fast the site loads, how often the site is linked to other online resources, and user experience.
Why do you need an Optimization of Search Engine?
The main and final objective behind optimizing the search engine is to build your brand and get more customers. But it all happens digitally and uses strategies to attract people towards your content or product.
Building a brand, selling products or services, and writing content online point to connect you to your audiences and require an optimized site for it to reach the interested viewers. To attain this, you need to create contents which are in favour of the audience’s needs and interests.
The most important aspect of search engine optimization is keyword search.
By choosing the right keyword which has a higher ranking can add to increasing the number of visitors to your site by making it seen on the front page. Hence SEO helps in improving your website ranking in the search results. By achieving a higher ranking finally leads to the generation of more traffic and intern help to get more clients.
Optimization also includes enhancement in readability, mobile-friendliness, site speed, and usability which also contributes to ranking your site better and also requires continuously providing improvement in features and upgrades for a better and easy experience for the user.
On the other hand, SEO helps to store all the data and virtually measured results and also makes it possible to see the returns to your investments.
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Types of SEO
1. On-page SEO
In the on-page search engine optimization, the optimization is done to an individual page on a website and it relates to the content on your website. On-page SEO helps the search engine to understand the content and rank better for more visibility to relevant searches.
This type of SEO includes:
- Keyword research: your website needs to rank better and be seen on the front page, hence finding better keywords helps to get more traffic to your site.
- High-quality content also plays a major role in getting traffic to your website websites.
- Using meta tags and using target keywords appropriately is important.
2. Technical SEO
Technical SEO is for the non-content aspect of optimizing the search engine. Technical SEO enhances the website readability and improves the backend structure of the website. Technical SEO helps the search engine to access, crawl, and index your site and goals for a better organic ranking. Technical SEO includes site maps, meta tags, Javascript indexing, linking, keyword research, and many other techniques that improve search visibility.
3. Off-page SEO
Here, it refers to tasks and steps taken outside of the site to improve the rankings of the website. This includes taking steps to improve the end-user perception of the website, its popularity, and trying to improve the trustworthiness of the website. All this can be accomplished by having people promote and support the content of the website. Backlinks are the heart of off-page SEO. Backlinks are the links that are provided to the website from another website, to show search engines that other sites trust the content on your site. Having these backlinks will have a positive impact on the site’s page rankings.
4. White-Hat SEO
White-hat SEO refers to the usage of techniques or strategies to provide better search results to the audience without breaking the rules of the search engine(Google approved). White mainly prioritizes the audience over the search engines. Using white hat SEO is the best way to accomplish a successful website ethically. White hat SEO also comes with advantages like mobile-friendliness, offers good quality service, and easy navigation to your site.
5. Black-Hat SEO
The Black-Hat SEO mainly focuses on finding the algorithmic loopholes and gets you the desired results. It uses strategies and tactics which do not really follow the guidelines of search engines like Google. This is basically getting good rankings in an unethical way by hacking into other websites or even getting backlinks in those loopholes.
Google Penguin is a filter used by Google to rule out the websites that have used the black-hat strategies for link building.
6. Negative SEO
This falls into the spammer category by building thousands of low-quality spammy links to your website. This falls under black-hat and unethical practice. This mainly involves hacking your website. Negative SEO is a threat to your website and difficult to fix once being attacked.
Tools like Google webmaster, monitor backlinks, trackball, Google alerts can be used to detect Negative SEO activities. These tools alert you when there are any unauthorized changes in mallard on your website.
7. Grey-Hat SEO
Grey-hat SEO is kind of a murky concept and it lies somewhere between the white-hat and the black-hat SEO. It could be stated as something like the Black-Hat pretends or disguised as white. A grey-Hat practice still falls under the exploitation of Google guidelines. It includes techniques or tactics like cloaking, purchasing old domains, generating duplicate content, buying links, and purchasing buyers. But to follow this form SEO is quite not recommended and one should be truly sure about what exactly they are doing with it.
Here are some of the tips and techniques to be implemented in your SEO writing-
Bring authenticity to your content
Fresh content and bringing about newness is an essential part of writing a piece of article. Leaving out all the technicalities and online strategies aside, the knowledge you put in the form of writings plays a significantly valuable role in attracting viewers and impacts them to stay on board for a longer period and can build a stronger relationship.
Write for your audience
This also falls under a non-technical part of content writing. First of all, know your readers, pick up a small survey in your mind about your targeted crowd, match the frequency between your niche, and make it up to their expectations. Make sure you are genuinely fulfilling and providing the necessary content your audience is looking for in their search. Make your content more informative and do it better than your competitors. Bring about a clear image of what your product and services are and how they can be useful for your customers.
Use catchy headlines
Highlighting important points and using catchy phrases in your heading attract the readers to visit your site. It helps to create an impression about your business and how promising your service is and ideally leads to more clients.
Meta description
Meta tags or meta description is a summary of your page content in an HTML format. Meta tags are the ones that are displayed by the search engines for the search results. It gives an idea to the visitors about the content before opening the page. Use interesting meta tags along with a neat snappy heading this is a plus point to increase the number of visitors to your site.
Construct your post in the right format
Writing good content is important but putting it in the right format is equally a salient aspect in online writing. Fancy headlines, bullet points, paragraphs, highlighting main points are to be taken into account. Organize each text and categorize it according to the context. Always maintain a neat framework for your article.
Appropriate images and videos
Human brains respond faster when it comes to visualization (images and pictures). Adding appropriate and mind-striking images and short videos along with your content allows your readers to stay on your page for a longer time and further inspires them to read your content. Conducting an interesting survey or quiz related to the searched topic can also do good.
Build links
Backlinks or inbound links are links that are given from one website to the other web page of a different site. Search engines like Google basically considered it as a promoting or a voting factor for your website. It can also be considered as building trust with the search engines.
Building links for your website is an important Seo factor to improve the domain authority for your website. Bloggers have to do this regularly to get more organic traffic. The higher the number of backlinks to your page, the higher is your domain authority which in turn reflects positively on getting high search engine rankings.
Things to keep in mind –
- Always focus on getting quality backlinks from trusted and authoritative sites.
- When you add backlinks to your website make sure it is related to your niche.
- Links should always be a do follow the link because the Nofollow links do not count the ranking algorithms of the search engine.
- Everything you use backlinks make sure it is from a different domain. Links from the same website give fading results.
- Make sure you have included your target keyword in the anchor text (visible text).
- Use link roundups around your niche.
- Monitor your work
The traditional methods of marketing are entirely associated with the link between sales and campaigns. But SEO makes it easy to track your progress and helps you gauge the returns for your investments. Google Analytics is the best tool that gives you complete information about the number of viewers and the time they spent on a particular page. This helps your monitor any activity on your website like comments, likes, shares and gives you an idea about visitors interact with your website
Apply Google Authorship
Google Authorship is linking your profile to Google along with your content. Authorship is giving authority and proving validity to the visitor and the search engine. It is an important aspect of search engine optimization and in improving the search results. Authorship also includes verification of ownership and your profile, it not only includes your profile image but also sees through your work.
- Attaching your name or the profile picture builds upon trust between your content and the search engine.
- An attached profile with your content likely increases the click-through rates to your webpage.
- Implementing Google authorship makes your content more credible and trustworthy.
- It protects your content from being copied and pirated.
- Authorship is qualified only when it carries a byline and new content written by the author.
Usage of keyword-rich phrases
Again, keyword-rich phrases are the most compulsory thing in optimizing the search engine. Using phrases mostly with the keyword makes it way easier for Google to know your content and provide better search results for the onlookers with a similar topic of search. Google keyword planner and ubersuggest are the best tools to find appropriate and high-ranking keywords that give you high search results. Using these tools with the google extension gives you better results.
Put all your work under your domain
Have your own domain name(www.example.com) and hosting with WordPress or bloggers. showcase all your works like original articles, infographics, videos, or posts all under one roof i.e. your own website, and then share it to all other places to reach the huge crowd. putting all your works under one domain can help you to access and track things better.
Make use of social media platforms
In this generation, social media has become a huge place for marketing anything. Having an infinitely large population scrolling online, it is a great platform for promoting your brand, product, or service and hope for many interested clients or customers in less or no time. Social media is all about likes, shares, and comments and when utilized properly it can also be the fastest way to your target customers.
Bloggers must always know about bounce rate
What is Bounce Rate? How does it impact your website?
Bounce rate is simply a percentage of visitors who enter and leave your website. A bounce occurs when a visitor comes and leaves the site without even opening an additional page on your site. This gives an impression to the search engines like google about the percentage of lack of interest of the visitors towards your content and it gives a bad impression to google towards your site and this affects your domain authority and ranking of your page.
Higher the percentage of bounce rate, high the risk of losing your ranks. So, always make sure to lower your bounce rate as much as you can.
Here are a few tips to follow to overcome this problem
- Write contents that are reader-friendly i.e., improve your content readability by standardizing your vocabulary which can be understandable and appreciable by a person who can understand higher English and a layman.
- Structure your writing format.
- Incorporate compelling call-to-action.
- Tell a story behind your brand. When you reach out to your customers through storytelling, it impacts them more than just selling your product with a description. Sometimes reaching emotionally can make a huge difference and it can also be a trust-building factor between the seller and the buyer.
- Be truthful in what you are providing and never over-promise.
- Try to use keywords with high traffic.
- Have a proper idea about targeting the right audience.
- The external links given on your website should one on a new window. When opened on the same tab it can lead to back bottom fatigue where the user has to click the back button to come back to your site. This could give a wrong message to your search engine and could be considered as a bounce.
- Optimize your site for mobiles, make sure it is easy to access on devices like iPhone, iPad, and tablets with different operating systems like android, windows, iOS, and Mac OS.
Conclusion
- Search Engine Optimization is an effective way to reach your goals when it comes to doing things online.
- Only optimizing and implementing techniques, strategies or tactics can gain you higher organic traffic and better ranking to your website.
- SEO helps you to build a trustworthy and long-span relationship with your clients.
- It helps you to graph the returns to your investments.
- It alerts you from those spammers out there and protects you from an unauthorized invasion of your website.
- SEO helps to avoid plagiarized content.
Considering and incorporating all these factors and tips on the basics of SEO, one can take a step ahead and move onto attain a successful blogging experience.
Read everything, keep writing, and add it to your routine because any knowledge is never wasted. But maintain quality.
