Are you a beginner and have difficulty finding your content using search engines? Do you feel no one is ever visiting your blog? If so, the problem is SEO.
I can remember when I started my blog. The first 3 months were just as if I was writing articles for ghosts because my content wasn’t ranking on Google.
As a result, no one could find my content to read. It was discouraging, but not until I figured it out.
In this SEO for beginners guide, I will work you through how I improved my SEO process thus ranking my website.
Here are some tips to get your page on Google’s first page, because who looks at page 2? Do you know what’s there? Cos I don’t.
Thus, how do you convince people to know, visit, and read your page?
A simple Google search shows that over 7.5 million new blogs are
published every day.
If you also check the analytics of the total number of blogs present in 2021 and that of 2022 you will see that the numbers increase drastically.
So you see, the competition is high! How then can you rank your blogs and websites high so you can get more views and visitors?
Search Engine Optimization is all about how websites are ranked on the search engines.
It’s an important part of any individual or company’s digital marketing strategy and can make a big difference to the individual or company’s visibility and success online.
There are many reasons for this – such as the fact that it’s still one of the best ways to drive traffic to your website, it helps you take advantage of potential customers who are looking for your product or service and it makes you more visible to people who might be interested in what you offer.
WHAT IS SEO?
Now, go ahead and search for anything and you’ll see some pages rank higher than others. Are you wondering why? The answer is SEO.
SEO — which stands for search engine optimization is the process of improving the way a website appears on search engine result pages, thus increasing web traffic.
In other words, the idea behind SEO is to get a website or piece of content ranked higher on search engines, such as Google.
I’ll explain in more detail.
In order to optimize a site for search engines, you should think about three factors: You, the search engine, and the searcher.
When you publish a new blog post, you want it to rank on top so people can find it.
HOW DO SEARCH ENGINES WORK?
Despite the fact that many search engines keep their algorithms secret, we do know how they work.
Before discussing search engines and their algorithms I will start using the term Google and stop repeating search engines.
According to internet statistics, it’s a fact that 90% of all searches worldwide are conducted on Google.
Now let’s return to our main point. After you post a new article online, Google starts crawling the page for the keywords you used.
Through this process, Google recognizes what your article is about.
Google also checks how often someone visits your site. This is known as bounce rate. Your bounce rate is determined by the amount of time visitors spend on your page.
The longer time spent on your page, the lower your bounce rate and vice versa.
Google ranks your page higher in searches when the bounce rate is low. Hope you got that right?
Also, Google tracks the bounce rate for each page. As your bounce rate drops, Google will rank your page higher in search results. Hope you got that right?
Watch the video below to learn how you can get free traffic from Google.
TYPES OF SEO
SEO consists of two types: On-Page and Off-Page SEO.
Take a look at this simple mathematics:
ON-PAGE + OFF-PAGE SEO= HIGH RANKING
Now imagine you just started a local restaurant in your hometown. There are two important things you need to do to keep your business running.
First, you need to attract customers to your shop by making your restaurant attractive with beautiful designs.
Secondly, you will also need to provide them with good and tasty meals for them to remain loyal customers and always come back to your restaurant. Right?
Making your meals tasty is similar to optimizing the on-page SEO for your website.
What makes people stay on your page is the design of your content, its value, and its keywords.
While designing your restaurant in order to attract visitors, is the same when it comes to off-page SEO which is to make Google and order search engines rank your page higher.
I know you might be thinking, what the heck does a restaurant have to do with SEO? Just be patient, my friend.
What Is On-Page Optimization ?
On-page optimization is the process of optimizing a web page for various purposes. There are many purposes which include attracting visitors, conversion, and ranking.
These goals can be achieved through the use of keywords, meta tags, and titles.
When it comes to on-page optimization you need to pay attention to three main things. Firstly, the most important thing is your content!
#1. Your Content
Why is your content the most important? Simply because the content is the key. Let’s say you are making a search for a particular search term.
I’m sure you will prefer a page that has all the information you need.
The same applies to anyone making a search on the internet because it would be very convenient for researchers if they could find all the results they need in one article.
For example, if you search for “simple homemade tomato sauce”. Google will make every effort to deliver to you an article that talks all about the best recipe with minimal ingredients and little preparation time. That’s cool, right?
It doesn’t show you all the local tomato sauce places or stores, instead, it shows you exactly what you requested.
This is why you need to deliver quality content to make Google and your readers appreciate your work.
Additionally, there are two types of content. Which are Evergreen content and short-term content.
- Evergreen Content: Evergreen contents are content that does not lose relevance over time such as articles about how to make money online. They are not just about the latest trend, they are also about timeless topics. Examples can be given by “how to” or “why” articles, knowledge base articles, guides, tips and tricks, etc.
- Short-term Content: Short-term content is relevant and up-to-date. But, as its name implies, it doesn’t last forever. Usually, it is consumed and then discarded by the end user. There is little scope for recycling it later on.
#2. Keywords
Keywords are specific word phrases people use to search for information on search engines.
They help the search engine identify what a person is looking for and provide the right results.
When trying to rank higher, always use specific keywords. For example, “Best homemade tomato sauce” is better and more precise than “tomato sauce” It’s that simple, right?
A lot of tools are available for free that can help you choose good keywords.
Below is an example of finding good keywords when running a search about tomato sauce using a tool found on h-supertools.
Below is a list of tools you can use to find good keywords when doing your keyword research like “tomato sauce”. Tools like:
Using keywords is fine, but don’t go overboard. Make sure you use it in your titles, in your URL link, and in some of your body copy.
When including keywords in your content, you should keep them within a percent range of 0.5% to 3.0%. Exceeding this threshold will not trick search engines and will negatively affect your ranking.
Bounce Tip
These techniques will help you improve your on-page optimization:
1. Create a keyword list
2. Use keywords in meta tags
3. Use keywords in titles
4. Use keywords in the content
5. Optimize internal links
#3. Your Design
Here we are not talking about the design that gives your page a good search engine ranking, which will be discussed later. But now we are referring to the design of the content on the page.
To ensure your blog post is easy to understand by your readers, you should ensure that the title you used, the heading of your post, and all the structure of your content are all understandable and clear to your reader. This is very important.
In addition, it is also important to optimize the images used in your content.
Through images, you communicate your content visually. Now you may ask what is image optimization.
What is Image optimization?
Simply it involves creating high-quality images and delivering them in an optimized size, shape, and resolution to improve user engagement.
Using an accurate image description also makes it easy for search engine crawlers to understand page context and also understand what the image is all about.
Make sure each of your images has a caption and a description. When you describe the image with the appropriate keywords, the search engine will analyze it and display it for that specific keyword. This will boost the overall ranking of the article for that keyword.
How to Write the Perfect Title That Converts
A title is the first thing people see when they come across your article. It needs to be carefully crafted to interest readers in what you have to say, and it needs to be succinct.
We’ll start with exploring what makes a title work well, then look at some successful examples of titles, and finally see how you can craft your own perfect titles in seven steps.
What makes a title work well?
Describe a problem you hope to solve in your article title.
When someone faces a challenge, does the internet usually come in handy as a resource? It certainly does!
You need to make your title enticing to your target audience in order to help them find the answers you’re offering.
There’s almost always a desire for readers to have digestible information, even if they aren’t looking to solve a specific problem. An engaging blog title tells your readers that your content is educational.
Successful examples of titles
1. How-to Titles & Headlines
2. Problem-Solving Titles
3. The Make A Statement Headline
4. Make A Controversial Statement
5. Shorter Titles Are Great
6. Ask Questions
How you can craft your own perfect titles in seven steps.
1. Craft concise sentences that are catchy
2. Use numbers if appropriate
3. Use “How To” if appropriate
4. Include keywords if possible
5. Keep the length short – the shorter the better
6. Omit unnecessary words
7. Stay away from superlatives like “best” or any other words that sound like hyperbole or exaggeration
Off-Page Optimization
Off-page SEO: This is a strategy that is applied outside of your website to improve your position on the SERPs.
Recent research also shows that off-page SEO makes up 75% of a successful Digital Strategy.
This is the section where we attract Google to rank our page. A number of factors contribute to this. Among them are:
1. Page Speed And Bounce Rate
The bounce rate of a website measures how many visitors leave after visiting a single page.
A high bounce rate means that visitors are not engaging with your site and are leaving quickly after visiting it.
There are many reasons that can cause a high bounce rate on a site.
Make sure to take a close look at your page load time, content, design, and navigation to fix these issues and reduce the bounce rate.
Let’s face it and be honest. You probably don’t remember the last time you had to wait for a web page to load for a minute right? Or maybe 15 – 20 seconds? Yes, you likely don’t remember.
Time is undoubtedly the most precious resource. And Google knows that too.
If your pages load quickly, you’ll likely have more visitors viewing more pages and growing your advertising revenue and the likelihood of visitors returning to your website.
Bounce rate can be measured as a percentage of visitors who visit a site and leave after viewing only one page.
Boost Your Speed.
Website speed is an important factor in SEO. And it has become even more important in recent years with the emergence of mobile browsing.
Some webmasters are not aware that they can optimize their site themselves by following some simple steps, like compressing graphics and reducing server response time.
Others choose to use a professional service to help them with website speed optimization.
A recommended tool for improving website speed is Google PageSpeed Insights. It provides insights into the most problematic areas affecting your site’s performance and offers suggestions on how you can solve these problems using open-source tools, most of which are free or low-cost to use.
A slow-loading page will increase your bounce rate. When people click on your website they will leave your site within 10 seconds because it didn’t open fast.
As a result, there will be a high bounce rate and a lower ranking on Google.
2. Website Security
Website security is very important when it comes to SEO. Having a secure site improves your ranking in the search engines.
This is because the search engine crawlers are not able to access the site if they are not authenticated.
In recent years, SEOs have considered the security of your website to be a major ranking factor.
Moreover, when you open a NOT SECURE website on Google Chrome you’ll be prompted with a warning. When people read the warning they won’t continue to your website.
Your website should always start with (HTTPS) Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure.
What exactly does it mean? Simply, the data that is transferred from your website to your visitor is always encrypted. This is accomplished by installing an SSL certificate on your site.
3. Backlinks
Backlinks are links from other websites to a specific page on your website.
Backlinks are important for SEO because they help you rank higher on search engine results pages.
All the top search engine results have backlinks and it is an indication that their site is trusted and has authority.
For a website to rank higher on search engine result pages, it needs to have backlinks from other trusted and authoritative websites.
A search engine considers pages with many links leading to them to be very important. That’s what backlinks are all about.
Let’s be honest. If you’re not a well-known site like Reddit or Buzzfeed, it is unlikely that websites will link to you. This may seem sad, but it’s the truth.
If you want to build a powerful web presence with backlinks, you need to make the effort to obtain backlinks. You can do that by getting backlinks from news sites and forums.
Get in touch with other blog owners in order to exchange backlinks. Make sure to opt for quality over quantity when exchanging links.
Having a very reputable company known by many people to backlink to your blog is more important than having many not-read pages backlink to you.
According to SEOs, important blogs speak about important blogs. That is why having good quality backlinks makes Google rank your page higher.
Link Building Basics – What is it and Why Does it Matter?
As the Internet has evolved, link building has become a more significant aspect of modern SEO.
It is an essential practice for any company looking to get their brand seen and heard by the masses.
The goal of link building is to create powerful links from other websites to your site, which can increase your website’s search ranking and popularity.
There are many ways you can go about creating these links that we will be discussing below:
Utilizing social media: One way to build links for your website is by participating in conversations on popular social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.
By creating status updates or posts that other users engage with or respond to, you can potentially generate interested followers who will want to know more about the topic at hand and will be more than happy to click on a link
The intention of link building is to increase the number of links coming to a site from other sites. The more links your site has, the higher it appears in search engine ranking.
Tools for Good Ranking
Yoast SEO is one of the most popular plugins you need to add to your WordPress blog. It provides recommendations for how to improve your page’s ranking.
This tool will analyze your post and give you a detailed breakdown of how good or bad your post is. Check out the example below.
Yoast Analysis
You can also use SEMRUSH to improve your ranking.
SEMRUSH is the ultimate SEO tool that helps you get a deep understanding of your competitors, identifies your top organic keywords as well as paid keywords, and analyzes backlinks. And do so much more.
You should check it out.
In conclusion,
It doesn’t take a lot of time and effort to follow good SEO techniques, but if you don’t, your posts could suffer.
Writing a blog post may take you 5-6 hours, but it is up to you if it will live for years or if no one will read it.
Taking 10 to 15 minutes to make the necessary adjustments after you have published your post is all that is needed.
With these changes, you will increase your ranking in Google, reaching more people. Perhaps after implementing a great optimization technique, your article will stand out.
I look forward to reading your comments below. Thank you for reading