SEO Fundamentals

SEO Guide: Everything a Beginner Needs to Know for SEO Success

A lot of people think SEO is too hard, requires only experts, and is not really worth
the effort. I also once was that person, but the reality is, that is not true. SEO basics
are actually simple, and anyone can learn and understand with a bit of effort, especially
if you have a website, blog or are running one.

Most people running websites have a very limited understanding of SEO, so knowing the basics can certainly help
you succeed. There are a lot of free tools out there that can even help you get started.

1 – SEO Basic Fundamentals

To begin with, we need to understand the basics of SEO, including its importance and how it compares to other marketing channel.

Why is SEO important?

In today’s competitive market, SEO marketing is more important than ever.
Search engines serve millions of users per day looking for answers to their questions or for solutions to their problems.
If you have a website, blog, or online store, SEO can help you get free targeted traffic from search engines.

To name a few, SEO is important because :

• The majority of search engine users (70% plus) are more likely to click on one of the top 10 suggestions in the search engine results pages (SERPS). To take advantage of this and gain traffic to your website, your website needs to appear in one of the top positions.
• SEO is not only about search engines, but good SEO practices improve the user experience (UX) and usability of a website. This ensures that your website visitors are more likely to stay on your site or even revisit the site in the future.
• Users trust search engines and having a presence in the top positions for the keywords the user is searching, increases the website’s trust.
• SEO can help promote your web site on other platforms. ie. People who find your website by searching Google or Bing are more likely to promote it or share it on other channels, such as QA (Quora).
• SEO can put you ahead of the competition. If two websites are selling the same thing, the search engine optimized website is more likely to have more customers and make more sales.
• SEO leads to consistent traffic – Ranking in search engines usually leads to both consistent and passive traffic. That’s rarely the case for mediums like social media and email marketing that often result in traffic spikes that quickly fade to nothing.
• SEO leads to free traffic, unlike paying for expensive ad which also cause temporary traffic.

2 – Setting up for SEO success

SEO is an ongoing process that, if done correctly, increases your chances of ranking high on search engines over time. A lot of people think its a once off thing which if they attempted to do it correctly now, they will never have to touch it again unless they redo their website.

It’s much easier to do SEO correctly when your website is properly set up for SEO success.
This means:

• Getting your own good domain
• Using a website platform
• Getting a good web host
• Creating a good design and user experience for your website
• Creating site structure that makes logical sense
• Using a good SEO plugin

3 – How to do SEO

You should have a good foundation for SEO success by this point. But this is just the start.
SEO is a continuous process that may be separated into four categories:

• Keyword proper research
• Link building
• On-page SEO (or on-site SEO)
• Technical SEO
  

we’ll concentrate on the fundamentals and take a high-level look to help you grasp why each
aspect is so critical and how everything works together.

Keyword research
is the process of determining what your customers are looking for,
how much traffic those terms can generate, and how difficult it will be to rank for those terms.

Link building
Link building is the process of acquiring hyperlinks from other websites to your website.
The purpose of link building in search engine optimization is to increase the number of high-quality inbound links to a webpage in order to improve ranking.

On-page SEO (or on-site SEO)
This is simply the process of optimizing web pages for specific keywords in order to boost search visibility and traffic.
It entails aligning keywords with page-specific components such as title tags, headings, content, and internal links.
On-site SEO allows search engines to comprehend your content and rank the most relevant URLs for specific queries when done correctly. On-page optimization also provides organization and clarity, which users will appreciate.

Technical SEO refers to website and server enhancements that aid search engine spiders in more
effectively crawling and indexing your site (to help improve organic rankings).