When it comes to SEO for beginners, there is one thing you need to know- the field of SEO is a promising yet slow process and there is no shortcut to getting your website ranking on top of the Search Engine Result Page of Google, Bing, or Yahoo.
However, there are a few strategies that you can apply on your website to let the search engines bots know about your business.
I am certain that you will find hundreds of blogs, articles, and more giving you SEO tips.
However, most of them only explain to you the theoretical aspect of SEO and not actual applicable tips that you must know.
That is why most website owners are perplexed about what is SEO, so they give up on it halfway.
To solve that conundrum, in this blog, I am actually going to give you quick and easy SEO tips and tricks that work.
So let’s get started with our list of free SEO tips for beginners.
Best SEO Tips for Beginners
Here are 15 simple SEO tips for beginners that will help you optimize your site and get more traffic:
- Write quality content
- Optimize content for user intent
- Use proper keywords
- Optimize your Meta titles and meta descriptions
- Create SEO friendly URLs
- Add internal links to your content
- Use proper headings and formatting options
- Optimize your images
- Improve your page speed
- Get backlinks from other websites
- Make sure that your website is mobile-friendly
- Create an XML sitemap
- Check for broken links
- Use Google Search Console and find the opportunity to rank
- Update your website content regularly
Write quality content
It is proven time and again that content rules the online marketing world.
So much so that your website can be successful even without extensive SEO efforts if you create high quality. And there is a high possibility that your SEO will not give you any result without quality content.
How do you know what is good content?
As people are generally asking questions to search engines, high-quality content essentially answers these queries.
One way to find if your content is good or not is by checking your website’s analytics, especially the amount of time a user spends on your page.
The longer they stay, the more they are engaged. The other metric to measure the quality of your content is the number of social media shares (Facebook likes, tweets, etc.).
The better your content, the more people will share it with other people
Some criteria of high-quality content include
- Ensuring that your content is relevant to the title of the page. There is nothing more annoying for a reader than a click-bait title which ends being about something else entirely. For example, if the title of my blog is SEO tips for beginners, you would be pretty annoyed if the blog post is actually a clickbait article just aiming to get some ad revenue.
- Making sure that your content has no typos, spelling errors, and is free of grammar mistakes
- The format of your content is crisp and neat with all the headers and body text separate from each other
- You should make sure that you are proving appropriate hyperlinks to other pages on your site
- Especially, as someone new, you must provide backlinks to the source of content which should be well-established research or studies to prove that you know what you are talking about.
Optimize content for user intent
User intent is a major factor in search engine optimization and conversion optimization.
There is no running away from the fact that User Intent is now the driving force of SEO.
It is the most important factor that results in the successful conversion of a visit to a customer wherein if your content is able to address the user intent then your chances of conversion are much higher.
In simple terms, user intent is nothing but answering what the user is inquiring about in their search query.
Optimizing content around user intent is more than just integrating relevant keywords. Customer intent is what those keywords or queries are really all about.
To optimize your content for user intent, you need to understand the three types of search intent:
- Navigational – This type of search is usually when the user is trying to get to a certain site.
- Informational – This type of search query is when a user is looking for information about your product/ service or business. You need to optimize your content in a way that answers the user’s questions.
- Transactional – This type of search query is what marketers dream about, where the target audience is prepared to make the purchase.
The underlying idea behind optimizing your content for user intent is that when your target audience is performing an Intent search on Google, they have a specific goal in mind.
Your content should fulfill their goal and give them what they want whether it is information, or directly your product or service.
Use proper keywords
Using the right keywords that your audience is searching for is how you can put your website on the Google Search Engine map.
You must use keywords that are connected to your content’s topic, which will help search engines index your website accurately.
Make sure that your focus keyword is something that your audience is actually searching for, there is no pointing on ranking #1 for a keyword that nobody is searching.
While selecting your focus keyword, you need to select something with high search volume (average monthly searches) but has lower competition by checking how easy or difficult it is to rank for that keyword.
To find your keywords, you can use tools like SEMRush, Ubersuggest, and Kwfinder.
For more information on, check out step by step detailed guide on How to Do Keyword Research for SEO
Optimize your Meta titles and meta descriptions
Optimizing your page Title and Meta Description for SEO is one of the best and most important SEO tips for beginners. They are especially essential for Google SEO, as it a major ranking factor.
While creating/ optimizing your page titles, you need to keep in mind that:
- All your website pages need a unique page title describing the content of the page
- It needs to short and comprehensible not more than 60 characters including space
- it must contain your target keyword
Your page title must contain your target keyword because this is what tells the search engines bots what your page is about and thus it can index your website properly according to those keywords.
Just like the title, your meta description is equally important. Here is how you write/ optimize your meta description to make it more SEO friendly
- Each page/ post on your website must have a unique meta description that gives a brief about the content of the page.
- Your metadata should be between 150- 200 characters only.
- You must not repeat your title in the description
- Don’t stuff your keywords in the description
- Write the meta description in a way that persuades your audience to click on your title and visit your webpage.
Create SEO friendly URLs
Another easy SEO tips for beginners include optimizing your website’s permalink structure also known as URLs. Your website URL is visible in the browser’s address bar and right below the page title in the search results.
You can make your URLs SEO friendly by:
- Creating simple and straightforward URLs that are easily understood by users and search engines
- Adding a hyphen (-) to classify different works in the URL
- Keeping your URLs short is necessary, as long URLs are truncated in the SERP and not SEO friendly
- Adding relevant keywords in the URL but not overstuffing it
Add internal links to your content
Internal links are the hyperlinks on a page that connect with other pages on the same website. This is one of the basic SEO tips for beginners as Internal linking is a very strong SEO ranking factor.
Below are some must-know tips about internal linking
- You can link relevant blogs either by hyperlinking keyword anchor text or hyperlinking the entire blog title.
- Internal links you add must be related and useful for the user as well as comprehensible by search engines.
- Your internal links should add value to the user experience with enhanced navigations
- Avoid using terms like ‘click here’ for internal linking
Use proper headings and formatting options
Out of all the SEO tips in this blog, this one is the most important for User Experience.
Before publishing any blog on your website, you must add some basic formatting elements. Formatting your blog post will not only help you with user experience but also is an essential addition in basic SEO tips for beginners.
While formatting your blog or a web page for SEO, use the below guidelines.
- The title of your page must have the H1 tag
- The headings of your page should be marked with the H2 tag and H3 for subheading
- To add focus to certain parts on your page, you make use of Bold and Italics formats as well
- Keep your content in smaller easily consumable paragraphs
- Keep your font size that is easy to read and pleasing the eye
- Make sure that at the end of the day, your blog should not only look good but should be easy to read as well
- The text on your webpage should be easily readable on all devices be it desktop, laptop, tablet, or smartphones.
Optimize your images
Adding images on your website or blog post is a sure way to keep your readers engaged with your content.
Additionally, an important SEO tip for beginners, you can optimize web page images to rank for SEO as well by following the below tips:
- Add Alt Text for all images. Pro tip: you can integrate your focus keyword in the alt text but keep it to a minimum. Adding too many keywords can hurt your SEO efforts.
- You can also add keywords to the image filename instead of random image names such as “final.SEOblog.jpg” and “SEOblogV22.jpg”
- Sometimes adding images to your blog also makes your website load slower. To avoid that, optimize the size of your images with tools like TinyPNG.
Learn more about How to perform Image SEO and get more traffic on your website.
Improve your page speed
While talking about the best SEO tips for beginners, it is impossible not to talk about the impact of site speed on SEO.
It is an unavoidable factor that Google uses to determine if your website is Page One material or not. You can use free tools such as Google’s PageSpeed Insights or GTMetrix to check your website’s loading speed.
Websites that take longer than 4 seconds to load, usually end up losing most of their website visitors as it hampers their user experience increasing their bounce rate.
As a result, Google dumps your website further down the SERP which in turn leads to lesser page visits and lower conversion as well.
However, there are several ways that you can improve your website’s speed such as removing any useless plug-ins or javascript from your website, optimizing your images, and more.
You can get more performance recommendations from Google’s PageSpeed Insights as well.
You can also check out my simple guide on how to increase page speed for more details
Get backlinks from other websites
Another important search engine optimization tip is to get backlinks to your websites. A backlink is a hyperlink with anchor text that connects two websites.
Having backlinks from high-quality and relevant websites is a major ranking factor that helps your website move up in the SERP.
By high-quality website, I mean websites with high domain authority, and when a website with high domain authority is giving you a backlink, it is telling the search engines that you have high quality content and must be relevant to users.
As a result, your ranking is boosted.
Pro SEO Tip: Acquiring high-quality backlinks for your website should be on high priority when it comes to your SEO efforts. Learn more about how to get more backlinks for SEO in my details guide.
Make sure that your website is mobile-friendly
You can’t do SEO without making sure that your website is mobile-friendly. What I mean by mobile-friendly is that your website is responsive and adapts to all mobile devices.
An unresponsive website badly affects the user experience of your mobile users.
According to studies, more than 52% of global search traffic is coming from mobile devices.
That is why Google introduced its Mobile-First Index which basically means that Google search engines mostly index and rank the content from the mobile version of your website first.
At this point, not having a mobile site is simply you losing money.
You can use Google’s Mobile-friendly Test tool to check if your website is responsive and mobile-friendly or not.
Create an XML sitemap
In this SEO tips and tricks guide, the twelfth point is about the impact of XML sitemap on SEO. Firstly, a site map is nothing but a list of all the pages and posts that are there on your website.
For effective SEO you need to create two sitemaps, one is the XML site map that you will submit to search engines like Google through Google Search Console and the other is an HTML site map that is for your users to easily navigate through your content.
You can use plugins such as Google XML Sitemaps and XML sitemap generator to automatically create and submit sitemaps to your Google Search Console
Check for broken links
One more in the bucket of easy SEO Tips For Beginners is the importance of external links.
Just the opposite of backlinks, external links are the other website that you will be linking your website. They play a huge role in enhancing your SEO efforts.
Thus, it is important to check that none of your external links are broken wherein the page linked is either deleted or moved.
You also need to ensure that your external links are not connected to any spam sites or any unseemly content.
You can use free tools like Free Broken Link Checker to examine and remove all the dead links on your website.
Use Google Search Console and find opportunity to rank
One of the most important SEO tips for beginners is that you can find multiple ways to rank your website through webmasters tools such as Google Search Console.
Using GSC, you can submit your website to Google bots which will jumpstart the process of Google spider bots crawling and indexing your website faster.
Additionally, you can get feedback on how different pages of your website are performing and get notified in case of any issue that might affect your website.
Moreover, GSC also gives your insights about all the incoming and internal links on your website.
Learn how to increase traffic using Google Search Console
Update your website content regularly
The last SEO trick in this guide I would like to share is to update your website with fresh content regularly. Updating your content routinely means that your website visitors will always keep coming back for new content and it will invite search engine bots to crawl your website more as well.
However, this doesn’t mean that you keep publishing low-quality content for the sake of publishing. Your content should always add value to your user only then it will increase your conversion as well.
Conclusion
These are some of the many SEO tips and tricks that can help any beginner to get started with their SEO for business.
The first thing you need to do is to implement all the On-page and Off-page SEO elements and compare the before and after results.
Remember, no two websites are the same and different industries will have a different response to SEO, you need to find what works best for your business and build on that,
Always remember, that your goal with SEO is to provide the best user-experience to your target audience because that is what Google will reward as well.
Your content needs to be relevant, SEO friendly and created with user-intent in mind. And, pay attention to the latest SEO Trends for 2021.
So, are you ready to get started with these SEO tips for beginners? Let me know what your results were.
If you have any, please feel free to share any of your own secret SEO tips for beginners in the comments.
your SEO tips help me a lot. please keep sharing