SEO for Beginners

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Do you assume how many Google gets searches daily? It's about 9 billion, and the top 10 search engine result pages (SERPs) get 88% clicks. This proper SEO guide seeks to cover each SEO approach; the tool stimulates the flow of free visitors to your site. Usually, your objective will be to rank your website at the top, and you have two options:

  • Paid advertising
  • Get free organic clicks

In paid advertising, advertiser bid on keywords by providing money to search engine companies. The average small to large-size business spends anywhere from $1,000 to $50,000 per month on paid search campaigns.

If you are a startup or a new entrepreneur, this cost may be high in the beginning.
By optimizing your website's search engine algorithm and user friendly, you can gain more than 90% of all website traffic from organic search.
Search engine optimization, or SEO, is an easy and free way to boost your web visibility and attract more visitors.

What is SEO?

SEO is the organic practice of optimizing your web pages to gain a high position in the search results when people search with their intent on the search bar of Google or any other search engine.
According to BrightEdge, Only SEO can drive 1,000%+ more visitors than social media. Because 68% of online experiences start with a search engine, Google is the top-visited website every month (Similarweb, 2022).
SEO needs keyword research, content creation, link building, and technical error optimization.

Three Hat Techniques

SEO is a strategy for improving the visibility and ranking of webpages on search engine results pages. There are three primary forms of SEO practices: white, black, and grey. Let's start with why you should avoid black-and-grey hat SEO practices.

Black Hat SEO Practices

Although it comes to search engine optimization (SEO), "black hat" plans go beyond the illegal principle. The aim of black hat SEO is to manipulate search engine algorithms and deceive users by providing low-quality content.
Noice to the Apr 25, how the penalties affect the traffics. It's a friendly suggestion to monitor the manual actions of the Google search console.
Here is a real-life example: the unethical technique can result in severe penalties from search engines such as Google. The search engine may choose to remove your site from its results.
So, to prevent your site from being punished by google searches, you should avoid using the mentioned black hat SEO tricks.

  • Keyword stuffing involves overusing keywords on a web page to manipulate search engine rankings.
  • From the perspective of search engines, "cloaking" exposes different content to robots than what users see.
  • Hidden text denotes hiding keywords on a webpage using background color and pictures.
  • Backlink farming involve artificially creating links to a website, such as buying links or linking to backlinks exchange websites.
  • Doorway pages involve creating pages designed solely to rank for specific keywords and redirect users to other pages.
  • Content scraping means stealing or duplicating content from other websites.

Grey Hat SEO Practices

These techniques fall into a middle area between white hat and black hat SEO. Grey hat SEO techniques may include practices that are not specifically prohibited by search engines but that may be considered unethical or manipulative.

Examples of grey-hat SEO techniques

  • Guest blogging.
  • Buying links.
  • Using expired domains.
  • Private blog network (PBN).

White Hat SEO Practices

Expanding a website's search engine placement and visibility is easier with all these ethical Seo techniques that are additionally free and everlasting. Most of the bad techniques need to pay and may provide short-term gains.
Search engine like Google gives basic website optimization guideline. Still, we dive down into search engine optimization's full direction in this blog so that any beginner can be a master.

Website Ranking Factors

Google's "medic update" promoted reliable sources (E-A-T).
Furthermore, various factors that search engines use determine the relevance, authority, and quality of a website in relation to a specific search query.
If you can master these three pillars of SEO, you can cope and stay up-to-date with the latest SEO trends.
Ensure that your website doesn't go out of the competition in search rankings.

  • On-page SEO.
  • Off-page SEO.
  • Technical SEO.

On-Page SEO

This is the primary consideration in uplifting an online performance by altering variables like the meta description, page title, header label, and alt text.
On-page SEO is the activity of decently a single internet page to elevate its proportion of natural search engine results. It would help if you had an effective on-page strategy involving various techniques and considerations.
Follow those core key checklists to get you the initial 100,000 organic visitors within a short period.

✅ Webmasters

Google and Microsoft offer free tools like the Google search console and Bing Webmaster that you can utilize to monitor and optimize their rankings in search results pages.

The key features of webmasters

  1. Sitemap Submission: A sitemap is a file containing an index of all pages on your website. To ensure efficient crawling and indexing by Google Search Console, you must submit an XML sitemap for review.
  2. Use the XML sitemap tool for free to generate an initial website (up to 500 pages).
  3. Performance: For each phrase and page on the site, you can view the number of clicks, engagements, click-through rate (CTR), and average position.
  4. Coverage: The Coverage Report offers data on any errors or issues Google has identified on your website, such as crawl errors and indexing problems.
  5. URL Inspection: You can see the index status of the page and any errors in indexing, crawling, or additional connected details.

✅ Analytics for Website Insights

Track and analyze user behaviors and traffic with a free online analytics platform like Google Analytics. Learn how Analytics tools can help you.

  • Audience Features:  You can view the number of users, sessions, pageviews, bounce rate, and average session duration. However, the age, gender, location, hobbies, and activities among your website's visitors.
  • Acquisition Features: You can notice organic search, paid search, social media, or referral traffic to your website.
  • Conversion Features: You can track users' actions on your website, according to your goal, such as filling out a contact form or purchasing.

✅ Robots.TXT File

The robots.txt file may significantly impact search engine optimization by instructing crawlers on how to interact with and bypass a website.
You can restrict bots from crawling certain pages or areas of your site and any duplicate or low-quality documents.
To safeguard that all high-quality, relevant material gets indexed and presented in search engine results, you should use the robots.txt instructions provided by Google.

✅ Keywords Research

Keyword research is a necessary segment of content writing strategy. It involves pinpointing your target audience's words to find products, services, or information internet.
You can generate a list of key terms to optimize your website content by conducting keyword research.
The research aims to understand the phases and terms your target audience uses when searching for information, so you can use that insight to optimize your website content accordingly.

  • Initiate with a clear understanding of your traffic intent.
  • Build an inventory of suitable keywords with keyword analysis applications like SEMrush.
  • To get an idea of your keywords Identify your topic's relevant competitors
  • Consider the number of search results, the competition, and how appropriate each keyword is.
  • Prioritize high-volume and low-competition keywords. You can follow the rules that most experts use.
  • Target specific niches while using different types of keywords: Long tail Keywords, Short tail Keywords, and Seed Keywords.  

Here are some popular keyword analysis tools to make it easy to specify the most relevant and effective keywords.

  • 👉 SeRanking (our recommendation)
  • 👉 Semrush Keyword Magic tool.
  • 👉 Ahrefs.
  • 👉 Google Ads Keywords Planner.
  • 👉 Search bar autosuggestions.
  • 👉 Related searches

✅  Content Optimization

Search engine loves fresh, original, and unique content that can not be found on any other pages of the search results.

To meet your audience, content should be written for users, not search engines, providing value and meeting the user's search intent.

It should be well-researched, informative, engaging, and relevant to your audience. Avoid keyword stuffing or creating content solely for search engines.

You should know that creating high-quality content is an ongoing process. Regularly creating and promoting new content can help improve your search engine rankings and attract more users to your website.

  • Write for humans but using Google algorithm rules.
  • Choose Longtail, LSI, and Related keywords.
  • Please write at least 1000 words of content to make it descriptive.
  • To make the content unique, inspect the content with plagiarism toolkits. (Paid - Quetext Pro,  Writet Zen, Copyscape, Plagiarism checkers)
  • Check your writing with a tool like Grammarly to make grammar error-free.

✅ Meta Title

A meta title cannot exceed more than 60 letters. Use your main keywords to title and power words to ensure it's more appealing and informative for potential visitors, increasing click-through rates and driving more website traffic.

✅ Meta Description

Google commonly displays 150 characters in its search results because this is the full length. Write a summary of the content of a web page to influence users to click on your website.

✅ SEO Friendly URL

To improve the crawl ability of your website, make it short, descriptive, and easy to read. It's a great way to make a website's information more digestible and make navigating the page a smaller task for the visitor.
Using your major keywords in the URL can support and enhance the relevance of a page and drive organic traffic.

✅ Canonical Tag in URL

You can avoid duplicate content concerns and provide search engines with ranking signals by designating a canonical URL for a page in its HTML code.

Using the canonical tag, an HTML element. As search engines crawl your website, they may get confused if they see many pages with the same or similar information.

Using the WordPress content management system, you may access these options using the Yoast SEO plugin's advanced settings. Just insert the copied links into the provided space.

✅ Headings

By learning from the headers of content, bots recognize the hierarchy and structure of a blog site. Please use keywords properly in the heading tags (H1, H2, H3, etc.)
Moreover, with clear and descriptive headings, you can help users quickly scan a page, decline bounce rate, and improve user understanding.

✅ Internal linking

To grow user experience, and navigation, you must use internal linking. Besides, internal linking is a noteworthy factor in SEO.
Link suitable pages within the website. Consequently, You can help search engine crawlers understand a website's content.
Internal linking can help spread link equity, pass along some of the authority and value of one page to another, and improve the SERP's visibility to the rank of all pages within the website.

✅ External linking

One method for raising a site's authority and importance is to link to sites viewed as authoritative and insightful.

That is how you can signal that the content is part of practical and relevant content to the search engines. We presented them properly to the main off-page part.

✅ Do-follow, No-follow Links

A do-follow link is more convenient for search engine optimization as it delivers page rank to the target site. When considering a website's relevancy to the search, search engine crawlers record outgoing links and calculate the referring page's authority.
A "no-follow" link will not "follow" the landing page to which it refers. A bot will not navigate on the web address.
You may implement paid advertisements such as articles and adverts or not swap advantages to the attached website. Meanwhile, a good mix between the 2 is necessary; many resources can assist you in generating no-follow hyperlinks.

✅ Image-Optimization

Large image file size can greatly slow down the loading speed of a website's performance, negatively impacting SEO and user experience.
Use size optimization tools to improve user engagement and avoid bounce rates.

✅ Alt-texts for images

Alt text, usually referred to as alternative text, is useful in SEO since this helps search engines figure out the meaning of an image, which can bring traffic from Google image features.
Using relevant keywords in alt text can also help improve a page's ranking.

  • 👉 SeRanking (our recommendation)
  • 👉 SEO Minion (free Chrome extension)
  • 👉 Ubersuggest (free Chrome extension)
  • 👉  Keywords Every Where (free Chrome extension)

Off-Page SEO

Backlinks guide search engines in defining a website's relevancy and authority, which can raise its rank in search engines.
Creating high-quality backlinks from relevant niche websites is one of the most crucial off-page SEO techniques.  

Below are some of the easiest link-building tactics:

✅ Competitor's Link Profile Research

Analyzing competitors' backlink profiles is a key aspect of an off-page SEO strategy.

  • Locating the Niche-Specific Website: Reviewing the link profile can help discover industry-specific listings and guest blogging chances for the target audience.
  • Identify the strategies: By researching the backlink profile, you can determine the kinds of writing they are making and the outreach efforts they are adopting.
  • Get the Content & Backlink Gaps: Semrush features content and backlink gap analysis tools to help users discover gaps in both keywords and links. By making high-quality content to fill these gaps, you can draw more backlinks and increase their overall position in search results.
✅  Target Competitors' Broken Backlinks

If the page you were trying to link to no longer exists or the URL has changed, It is the broken backlinks. You can spot broken links that lead to high-quality stuff related to your topic by monitoring the backlinks of others.
Whenever you discover a broken link, You can make better content for that, then outreach the website that is linking to the broken link and suggest replacing it with a link to your content.

✅  Start Taking Utilization Search Operators to Get Backlinks

You can use special search operators to find posts from a particular domain you are seeking a connection.

Utilize search operators in your query to find possible backlink chances. Search operators can provide special queries to identify potential backlink opportunities.

  • Find Niche Sites, like in this sample related: appseed.us
  • How to Earn Inbound Links from Niche-Related Content

Google Search Sample: site: appseed.us "app-generator"

  • Explore the URLs your competitors are posting links

Google Search Sample: link: appseed.us

  • Exact Phrase Matches like this search free dashboards

You can apply these terms to obtain the possibility of having your links backlinked.

  • "write for us"
  • "become a contributor"
  • "contribute to"
  • "write for me"
  • "guest post guidelines"

Local SEO

If you have a physical place for your business, Local SEO is vital to attracting customers from specific locations. Businesses may boost their presence and capture more potential consumers by optimizing for location-specific searches or keywords and building local links.

Additionally, to display your businesses and services, you can optimize the website with user intentions, uploading your business information to the Local SEO Tools. The following are vital ingredients of local SEO:  

✅ Google My Business

It's a free service that lets your business build and manage its digital presence on the Internet, including its name and address, images, and customer feedback.

Tips to optimize Google my business

  • If you claim and verify your listing, you can make changes and manage it.
  • Fill out every section completely, including your company name, phone number, website address, operating hours, and business description.
  • Using high-quality photographs and videos is an efficient approach to promoting your company and drawing in prospective customers.
  • Reacting to reviews indicates that you appreciate what your customers say and can help promote your reputation and reliability growth.
  • Share news, promotions, and events on your Google My Business.
  • Improve the performance of your Google My Business listing by having relevant keywords for your zone; it helps your business to be more prominent than your contest.
✅  Claim Your Website in Local Directories

Citations or directories like Yelp, Apple Maps, and MapQuest that link to your website help people find your business online. Add your business's name, website, address, phone number, website URL, hours, and SEO-friendly description. Photos and videos.

Technical SEO

You must ensure that your website is well-structured, works well on mobile devices, loads quickly, and is easy to crawl and index.
They tell search engines that your site gives visitors the best experience possible, so their algorithms will make your site more visible in search results; you'll get more organic traffic and sales.
Technical SEO uses many different techniques and methods to improve a website's structure, speed, and usability.

✅  Manual Action Feature of the Search Console

With "Manual Actions," a device in Google Search Console, you can fix penalties that Google gives to websites that don't follow its rules. This feature tells you what problems, like unnatural links, thin content, plagiarism content, auto-AI-generated content, or spam made by users, led to manual action.

You can take steps to fix the problem and ask them to visit their site again. Once you've taken all the steps to fix the problem, you can use the Manual Actions feature to ask Google to look at it again.

Then, Google will inspect the website to verify. The manual action will take off the site if it has been resolved.  You should follow Google's rules to appear in search results.

✅ Make Sure Your site is on HTTPS

A website's and its users' connection is safe and encrypted when HTTPS is used. When a website uses HTTPS, hackers can't steal or change the data sent back and forth between the website and its visitors.

Google declared that HTTPS might use to rank signals for its search algorithm. Websites that use HTTPS can receive a modest SEO boost. In addition, it helps keep your users' data safe and private.

✅  Redirections

When users click on a link and go to a page that no longer exists (a "404" page), they will likely get frustrated and leave the website. A 404 page is an error page that indicates a site if a user tries to visit a page that doesn't exist.

So, redirection makes sure that users navigate to the right page, even if the URL is no longer available.

Following is the most common way of redirection.

  • 301 Redirections: A 301 Redirect indicates that a URL is entirely redirected to another URL. A 301 redirect is meaningful for SEO because it instructs search engines that the content has permanently shifted to an alternate location and that all link juice values associated with the old page will transfer to the newly created page.
  • 302 Redirections: This is a temporary redirection from one URL to another. 302 Redirect applies if a page or website has moved temporarily to a different place. It's not suggested since 302 redirects never share the authority from the old URLs to the current.

✅  Loading Speed and Mobile-friendly updates

Mobile users are getting more and more daily. A survey by Statista has said that more than 60% of users come from mobile platforms. When browsing websites, all users wish for everything to work smoothly.

Mobile-friendly websites are easier to use, read, and interact with on smaller screens, enhancing the user experience and making individuals more likely to stay on the website longer.
In the mobile-friendly update, Google suggests that the speed of the page is a ranking factor. Use the page speed insights tool, and confirm that sites that are easy to use on mobile devices and desktop, run smoothly will rank more highly in search results.

✅  Add Schema Markup

Both structured data and schema markup are similar. What exactly does this mean for SEO?  

Schema markup helps search engine bots recognize the information and background of a site's pages. This makes it easier for the bots to crawl, index, and rank the pages in search results.
You may be aware that rich snippets can increase click-through rates. Implementing structured data can improve the appearance of search results by including rich snippets such as images, reviews, ratings, and other relevant information.
You can get the right code for the content using the schema markup generator and check the code with Google's authorized tool schema validator. The most common categories of structured data are:

  • Article- News article, Blog posting
  • Breadcrumb
  • Event
  • FAQ Page
  • How-to
  • Job Posting
  • Local Business
  • Organization - Logo, Social Profile
  • Person- Social Profile, Job Information
  • Product- Reviews, Offer
  • Recipe
  • Video
  • Website- Sitelink Searchbox

SEO Audit

Suppose your website isn't being properly indexed and ranked by search engines. In that case, an SEO audit can greatly aid in detecting the actual technical issues, such as crawl errors, broken links, and duplicate content.

Optimizing the title, meta descriptions, URLs, alt text, and headers are a few examples of where an audit might be useful.

Backlinks are the external elements that affect your website's position. An SEO audit can enable locating broken links and getting quality backlinks.

✅  Top SEO Auditing Tools
  • GTmetrix | Website Performance Testing and Monitoring
  • Screaming Frog SEO Spider Website Crawler
  • SEMrush Site Audit
  • Ahrefs Site Audit Tool

Conclusion

Overall, this practical SEO directory stresses a range of on-page, off-page, technical SEO, and SEO audit issues. By sticking to best practices, staying track of algorithm upgrades, and tracking market trends, you may have a lengthy performance with your SEO techniques.

🚀 SeRanking, all-in-one SEO Tool

Every SEO analysis and marketing tool you need: Keyword Tracking, Website Audit, Backlink Checker, Page Changes Monitoring, and more.

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