SEO for Dummies: 8 Easy Steps You Can Use Today
SEO for Dummies: 8 Absolutely Easy Steps Everyone Can Use.
Here’s your quick SEO for dummies guide! To most people, SEO can feel like a complicated concept. You know your website needs it, but you feel it’s not your responsibility to handle it. Sounds familiar? Well, you’re not alone. When SEO is mentioned, most of us assume it’s the most difficult and time-consuming exercise. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
You can master SEO in the following eight easy steps. You simply need to listen and put to practice the information you get.
What is SEO?
SEO is the short form for search engine optimization. It refers to the process of matching information on your web pages with what people search for on the internet. For instance, once you type “SEO copywriting guide” in Google search, who tops the results on the first page?
How did Yoast.com and Neilpatel.com find themselves at the top spot of these search results?
It all boils down to this:
They have published relevant ad up-to-date posts that respond well to the queries of online users. That’s what SEO is all about. It has to do with responding to the customers’ questions and information needs rather than placing a paid advert to interrupt them. SEO makes it possible for you to create web pages and have them generate lots of leads and sales for many months or even years after publishing them.
1. Setup
In the initial SEO setup stage, be prepared for success. Just like any house needs a strong foundation before adding other frameworks, so is your SEO strategy. Speaking about the foundation, tools, such as Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools, and Google AdWords come in handy.
Google Analytics:
The tool plays an essential part in terms of tracking and analyzing the behavior of visitors to your website. The tool is free and intuitive, making it a necessity for an SEO campaign. Other than signing up for an account and adding connecting it with your website, you should be familiar with its features.
Google Webmaster Tools:
Google Search Console has important tools that let you get the most from your SEO strategy by allowing you to visualize your site the way Google sees it. The toolset provides you with insight into the performance of your pages, working keywords, errors that need fixing, and more. To understand how the tools work, start by checking out Google Webmaster Guidelines.
Google Adwords:
Google Adwords lets you carry out keyword research effectively. Using it, you can know what people are searching for in a bid to meet their needs.
2. Site Audit
You need to perform an SEO audit for your website when kicking off your SEO efforts. Every month, Google is rolling out updates along with penalties. So to avoid attracting penalties, you should carry out an in-depth site audit. You can check out this site audit checklist on Moz to know what you should address when auditing your website.
Using a tool like WooRank, you can check and analyze most of the items listed on the Moz checklist.
3. WWW or Without
Interestingly, a crucial part of SEO is dependent on the three W’s that you usually see before any website address. By not being keen, you can easily err regarding these letters. Most people usually think that it determines whether visitors can come to your site by typing yoursite.com or www.yoursite.com. However, that’s not usually the case.
Importantly, it’s all about the way search engines view a website and how links directed to your site are treated. You may decide to go use ‘www’ or not, but whichever your choice, just stick to one. If you go with both options, search engines may view your site as two different sites, and that can hurt your link quality as well as rankings.
4. Keyword Research
You can’t invest in SEO without working on keyword research. Over 100 billion searches are done every month, and for your website to stand a chance, you’ll need to optimize well. And that’s where keyword research comes in. Once you know what your target audience is searching for, everything else will fall into place.
To carry out proper keyword research, you can use the following tools:
Google AdWords Keyword Planner
When it comes to SEO, navigation is important in two ways. To begin with, it helps visitors to find what they want on your site quickly. Second, it helps search engines to establish a clear connection between pages and individual links.
To achieve the two goals at once, you should build a universal navigation by:
- Finding out why people come to your website, what the top pages are and the keywords used on the website.
- Dividing your products or services and key pages into various categories with relevant names
- Placing the categories into universal navigation and keeping things simple
If your site uses drop-down menus, they should be in HTML so that search engines can locate them. If your site has product pages with over 20 items per page, you may want to add a filter to help visitors to narrow down their search.
6. On-Page Content
While there’s a lot of work that goes on behind the scenes in terms of SEO, you still need to publish high-quality content so visitors can view and read. The latest Google algorithm emphasizes more on high-quality and valuable content rather than heavy keyword use. Instead of keyword stuffing, focus on placing your keywords correctly in the content. It’s recommended to use one target keyword per web page then add other LSI keywords naturally within the content.
When it comes to structure, ensure each page has a unique arrangement and headings. And if you want your content to attract traffic and convert the traffic to customers, you should take some time to learn useful copywriting hacks like those highlighted in the ClickBank copywriting guide.
7. Sitemap
You may run an attractive website, but unless people can visit it, it’s all in vain. To achieve maximum visibility and traffic, search engines must index the site. Otherwise, it’ll be difficult for major search engines to spot the most relevant pages on your website and show them in their search results.
Many tools claim to help your site get indexed by the search engines. But, by far, creating a sitemap is the most reliable and least time-consuming approach to lead visitors and search engines through your website’s content.
8. Off-page: Backlinks
Apart from investing efforts on your website, you should also spend time working off-site. Link building is a major off-page SEO strategy, and you can build links through guest posting, forum posting, broken link building, infographics, and other methods that let you leave footprints on the internet that lead back to your website. Think of it like a spiders web with your website in the middle, and the bits of the web are pointing back to it.
SEO for dummies final word
Whether you’ve tried working at SEO and failed or you’re pretty much new to the game, you can do it! Many useful tutorials are online, which you can use to enhance your site’s visibility in search engines. Start by implementing the tips discussed above, but please remember that patience is key!
Slow and steady wins the race here. Google loves great quality content, posted regularly, and which is highly relevant to your niche. However, it will take time to build up your rankings but if you have a good SEO plan from the outset, then your evergreen content will pay you back big time in the years ahead!
Here are some other articles you may like:
9 Brilliant Writing Techniques That Drive Traffic and Sales
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