SEO GUIDE FOR BEGINNERS
In this guide, we will introduce the basic SEO concepts, and we will help you understand what SEO really is. After reading, you should understand what’s important for SEO and what kind of optimizations you can do by yourself.
We will also deal with some SEO myths and misconceptions that are common.
Before we start, there are a few things to mention.
In the SEO world, everything is connected, so not all we teach is a ranking factor per se. For example, user experience isn’t a direct Google Ranking Factor. Still, by improving it, you are increasing your chances to get, for instance, more shares on Facebook.
More shares can increase your traffic. More traffic means that more people are reading your content which can lead to more backlinks.
So, just like with a butterfly effect, anything you do, even a small change, can lead to better SEO.
SEO is not set it and forget it thing. Google makes hundreds of changes to search every year. Only last year, Google search was adjusted 3 234 times. That’s why SEO is more like a process, a constant struggle to make your website as good as possible.
We want you to understand that the days when you could “cheat” Google are over. In this guide, we promote great content, planning, and hard work.
SEO BASICS
What is SEO?
The standard definition of SEO is easy.
SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” It is the process of optimizing your website to get free traffic from the search results on search engines.
What most people understand by SEO comes from the early 2000s. Back then, a person with knowledge of how Google works could bring even the worst page to the top of search results.
<pic of some random search results>
We are not saying that SEO technical aspects are unnecessary, but SEO is all about two things – content and backlinks.
You need to have a website filled with high-quality content that resonates with your audience and is so good that other websites link to you. Without content, no number of keywords or metatags will help you.
That’s why we say that SEO means running the website with high-quality content for the right people.
Basic terms vocabulary
Before we jump in into more technical stuff, let’s explain some basic technical SEO terms.
What we do here is just a basic explanation, but as a beginner, that’s all you need to know:
Meta tags are the words hidden in your code that let search engines know what your website is about. Average users won’t see them, but search engines can scan through them to better understand your page.
Headings are more critical than metatags both for readers and search engines. They help them to read and understand what your page or blog post is about. Remember, though headings are not as crucial for SEO as they used to be.
URL Structure – without going into technical details, URL structure is simply how your page’s addresses look. The most critical part from an SEO perspective is to keep your links user-friendly. We will get back to it later.
Image Optimization is reducing the size of your images to make them load faster. In turn, this makes your website speed better.
Website speed is the speed at which your web page is downloaded and displayed on the user’s web browser. The faster your website, the better.
Content – every time we talk about content, we mean any kind of writing that can be found on your website. It can be your blog but also copy that you have on your landing page.
Backlinks – another website pointing to your website. Backlinks are the modern version of citations.
SERP stands for Search Engine Results Pages, and those are the pages displayed by search engines in response to a query. The main goal of SEO is to get your website to be on top of SERP.
How do search engines work?
The science behind how search engines work looks relatively simple.
First, bots crawl the Internet looking for everything they can find. Bots crawl every single website and scan through content, links, headings, images, and other things they can find. They do this nonstop, so as soon as you update your website or part of it, bots will find it.
Once your website is crawled, it’s time for indexing. Imagine indexing as keeping an index in a library or as having a map. Imagine that search engines have a detailed map of the entire Internet, with all the websites, images, and links.
They know where each website “lies” and what each website has. This lets search engines point the right person to your website and rank your website against queries and other websites.
This brings us to the most complicated part of SEO – ranking. In other words, how high your website is showing up for a query.
Ranking Factors
There are search engines besides Google (Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, Yandex, and DuckDuckGo). Still, for the sake of this guide, we will concentrate on the biggest one, Google.
Neither Google nor other search engines tell us how they rank websites, but some facts are well known and confirmed by Google itself. Keep in mind that Google has over 200 ranking factors. We only know a few relatively most essential factors that affect SERP.
For sure, we know what the top 3 search ranking factors that Google considers are.
In a Q&A with Google, Andrey Lipattsev, a Search Quality Senior Strategist at Google, said that the two most important factors are links and content.
“I can tell you what they are. It is content. And it’s links pointing to your site.”
We also know that RankBrain is the number 3 most important factor.
So, the list looks like this
1: Content & Links
2: RankBrain
3: The rest
Since you can’t affect RankBrain directly, your first SEO efforts should concentrate on content and links. And since to get links, you need great content; you should always consider content to be your top priority. That’s why we always say, “Content is king.”
To explain how important content is, let’s use an example.
Your website speed is an important SEO factor. This is a well-known fact. But slow website with great content will rank higher than even the fastest website with poor content.
On the other hand, all things equal, a faster website should theoretically rank higher.
What are other factors important?
In no particular order, here are other crucial SEO factors:
- Crawlable website
- CTR (Click Through Rate)
- Website Speed
- Mobile-friendliness
- Domain Age
- Layout & Design
- Social Sharing
- HTTPS
- Topical Authority
- EAT (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness)
If some of those terms sound like black magic to you, don’t worry. I will briefly explain what they mean.
Crawlable website is a website that search engines can discover with content that is readable by search engines. It means that Google bots can crawl your web with all important URLs. Apart from content, links, and RankBrain, having a crawlable website is the most important part of SEO.
CTR means how many people, after searching on Google, click on your link and go to your website.
Website Speed – in short, the faster your website (i.e., the faster it loads and works), the better. Speed is a confirmed ranking factor. Moreover, it’s crucial on mobile devices.
Mobile-friendliness – more and more people are using smartphones to browse the Internet (60% of Google searches are from mobile devices), so your page must work and look good on mobile devices. Plus, mobile-friendliness is another confirmed Google ranking factor.
Domain Age – Almost all SEO correlation studies find a relationship between older domains and higher rankings. It’s not like Google is punishing newer websites. Still, the website that has been around for a while will rank easier mainly because of many links and authority.
Page layout and design are other confirmed factors. In short, your page must not only be fast, work on mobile devices but also “look good,” and be free of SPAM and annoying ads. It also needs to be user-friendly.
Social Sharing – the number of shares and likes your content gets on social media.
HTTPS itself won’t bring your page to the number 1 position on Google, but its lack may negatively affect your website.
Topical authority – if your website is about baking and suddenly writing about cars, don’t even think that the article will do well. All successful sites regularly publish in specific areas of expertise, and over time they build content, links, and authority.
EAT (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness). According to Google’s Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines, a high-quality page is a page that shows Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. What does it mean? In short, it’s again all about content. A page that satisfies EAT requirements must have a high amount of high-quality content.
Time as a ranking factor
Time is not an official Google Ranking Factor, but I mentioned time a few times, as you have seen so far. The truth is that building a high-quality page that has excellent content takes time. A lot of time.
In SEO, everything is connected, and time is something that is behind every successful website.
For example, domain age is an important SEO factor. It’s not like the older domain is better just because it’s older. The older the website, the more content it usually has. Also, the older the website, the more links will point to it. With the great amount of content and links, the website has better topical authority and EAT.
All those things make older domains more trustworthy in both users and Google eyes. Think about it. Which website is more reliable? One that has been around for a while has many backlinks, comments from users, etc. Or a website that has been created last week, and all it has is just 2-3 good articles?
It doesn’t mean that a new website can’t rank. All that it means is that if your competitors have been around for a while, you will have a hard time getting traffic for some keywords unless your content is way better, of course.
There are numerous studies that prove that time is one of the most important aspects of SERP. Still, all you need to remember is that almost 95% of newly published pages don’t get to the Top10 within a year.
A study by ahrefs that shows most of the pages on top of google search are around 950 days old.
Black Hat vs. White Hat SEO
Black hat SEO are all practices that go again Google guidelines. For example, spam, keyword stuffing, irrelevant or paid backlinks, PBN, content farming. Using black hat SEO will get your website penalized and banned.
Remember. Google hires thousands of engineers with Ph.D. Neither you nor any SEO agency can outsmart them. Google is also one of the wealthiest companies in the world. Again, neither you nor any SEO agency that promises you to rank first on Google in a month has enough resources to beat Google. The only way to organize is White SEO.
So, what is white SEO? In short, white hat SEO is making your website great by having quality content that other websites link to and by website optimization.
White hat SEO is a long-term strategy that focuses on quality, branding, and user experience backed by keyword research and content strategy. It takes time, but that’s the only way.
Most common SEO mistakes
As I mentioned before, the holy trinity of SEO is Content, Links, and RankBrain.
I call it this way because, just like the holy trinity, they are three separate things and are the same thing. They are all related to content.
And the poor content is the main problem in most situations. So often, too much emphasis is put on technical SEO while forgetting that you should build your website for people.
Remember, no keywords and tags will help you when you have thin content that no one wants to read.
In no order here are the most common mistakes:
- Thin content
- Non-unique content
- Keyword Stuffing
- Poor design & User Experience
- Slow speed
- Spam
- Lack of high-quality backlinks
- Other Black Hat SEO Practices
How to Improve your SEO
Now when we have some basic understanding of SEO, let’s dig deeper and see how you can improve your website ranking.
There is no one magic recipe to increase your traffic, but you should see more traffic in no time if you follow the steps below.
Step by step it looks like this: Keyword research -> Content -> Getting Links -> Website Optimization.
I said there is no recipe. After all, you might already have some great content but no traffic because your website is so slow that it won’t even load in 10 seconds. Or it’s so unfriendly that navigating through it is hell, and that’s why no one wants to read your blog.
If that’s the case, drop everything you are doing and fix the website first.
On-page vs. off-page SEO
There are two categories of ways of improving your SEO.
On-page SEO is everything you do to or on your website to improve rankings.
Content and technical SEO fall into this category:
- Content
- Website speed
- Image Optimization
- meta tags
- headings
- URL structure
- Other technical efforts
Off-page SEO is all the efforts that you make to get more backlinks and build your page’s authority:
- Building backlinks
- Social media marketing
- Guest blogging
- Brand Mentions
- Influencer marketing
Keyword Research
The days when keywords were important are long gone, but many people still start every blog post with keyword research. Unfortunately, it’s not only utterly pointless, but it’s very time-consuming.
If keywords are dead, what are we left with?
Topics and context.
Even though I use the word “keyword” throughout this guide, I mean having a topic or a context to write about. I don’t even suggest long-tail keywords. What you need to look for is a topic, a context.
You need to write with people in mind because Google understands how people think, look for things and what they are looking for. Google scans your page looking for content and, based on that, finds out if the topic is relevant to a search.
Yes, a topic. Not a keyword.
Google is not looking for keywords in your text. This is also why keyword stuffing doesn’t work anymore.
What you need is a topic and great content written around that topic.
Many tools can help you to find topics, both paid and free.
Best Free SEO Tools
- Google Trends
One of my favorite tools is Google Trends.
Using Google Trends, you can search any topic and see how popular it is. You can also make country-specific as well as sector-specific searches to make the results more targeted.
You can dig deeper by clicking on the country name and then the state names to get completely localized details which will help you to find highly targeted keywords for your focus market.
Google Trends shows me that SEO is a popular topic in Taiwan. In most cases, that’s all you need to know. The issue is popular, and people are searching for it, so all you need to do is create great SEO content.
Finally, you have the option to see “Related queries.” That’s how I came up with the idea to include “What is SEO” in this guide. This way, people looking for what SEO is should be able to find the article.
- Google Keyword Planner
Google Keyword Planner is a pain to use. It’s more complicated and more fundamental at the same time than other paid tools, but it has two advantages.
First, it’s free. Second, all the data comes straight from Google.
Keyword Planner gives you two tools. You can either take a look at historical data or use it to discover new keywords.
I always use the keyword discovery tool. Here, again you have two options. You can either type your keyword ideas and get some suggestions or type in your competitor’s website to get keyword ideas based on his content.
For this guide, I looked at how popular “SEO” is in Taiwan, and Google tells me that 10K – 100K people are looking for SEO each month. I don’t need an exact number. I need to see some demand. That’s all I need to know.
Best Paid SEO Tools
If you need something more, there are dozens of paid tools out there.
When it comes to paid tools, I recommend two options
They are both tremendous and offer way more than free tools. Still, you may not need all the additional functionality unless you are an SEO agency.
Still, it’s way easier to find related topics or see how difficult a keyword is by using paid tools especially made for that purpose.
Content
Creating great content is the hardest part of SEO.
You already know that content is king. You know that you need high-quality, relevant content that is link-worthy.
But what makes content great?
Great content is:
- Based on keyword research
- Better than competition
- Right length
- Helpful
- Full of screenshots, videos, and graphics
- Professionally written with good grammar
- Promoted
First, you need to start with keyword research. Second, you need to know that people are looking for the topic you are about to write about.
Or, what’s even better, you need to find a topic that people are already looking for.
Then, you need to see what your competitors are doing and find a way to write something better. Not just longer or different. It must be better.
It may be more throughout. For example, maybe you have some new research to share. Or you can create some exciting infographics that add value. Or you can offer a unique point of view.
Look at Dr. Axe’s essential oils guide. How could you improve it?
It has not only basic information on essential oils. It also includes some recipes, top oils. It even has a video. If you want to compete in this niche, your content must be better. Way better.
You’d need something as good, including a video, plus more.
Your content must also be the right length, which usually means it can’t be too short.
Ahrefs team has analyzed rankings across 2 million keywords and found a strong correlation between the content length and ranking positions.
Another study by HubSpot found that longer content gets more links.
As you can see yourself, you’ll find that the top few results are almost always lengthy articles for nearly any competitive keyword.
But remember, writing for the sake of word count isn’t a ranking factor. If you can write a helpful article that has 500 words, go for it. You can’t write nonsense that’s 10000 words long and expect it to rank well. It’s all about the value of your content.
If you have great content that is helpful and well-written and better than the competition, then…
You still won’t succeed.
Ranking on Google takes time, and if you publish your blog post and do nothing about it, no one will find it. That’s why you need a social media presence, email list, and other ways of promoting your content.
Backlinks
Another thing that you need for your content, and SEO, are backlinks. Without backlinks, your page is invisible to Google.
It would help if you had links to show your authority. Unfortunately, Google is not analyzing who is right or wrong.
Your blog post might be the only one out there that describes how to use garlic press correctly but if your competitor has more links pointing to him, guess which blog post will do better?
But be careful. What Google is analyzing is the quality of the backlinks. Having links from random websites will only hurt your SEO. It would be best if you had related backlinks from high-quality sources from your niche.
Suppose your blog about cars; a backlink from Autoblog is like winning a lottery. On the other hand, a backlink from a cooking blog would be useless.
How to get backlinks?
- Create the best content possible that other websites want a link to
- Promote your content through all possible ways to reach as many people as possible
- Find people who love your content and might be interested in linking to you
- Persuade those people to link to you
Overall, it gets back to our mantra. Content is king. Without content, you will never get backlinks.
Technical SEO & Website Optimization
When you have great content that people love and share and other websites link to, it’s time to optimize your page for speed, SEO, and user experience.
We recommend using WordPress. We use WordPress for our website, and we use WordPress for our clients, so all tips below will be related to WordPress.
WEBSITE SEO
On-page SEO is a bit complicated, but it’s easier than it was in the past. A few years ago, it was mostly about meta tags, keywords, and headlines. Nowadays, it’s all about the content and user experience.
One of the best things you can do to keep your SEO in check is to install Yoast for WordPress.
The plugin will not only lead you to through basic setup, making sure your website has all necessary SEO elements right, but also will help you by analyzing your content in terms of focus keyword usage in meta title, meta description, headings, overall keyword density, alt image attributes, and others.
If you are a newbie, that’s all you need.
Another thing you can do yourself to improve your website’s SEO is to make sure you have SEO-friendly links.
Avoid using auto-generated, strange URLs with figures and characters:
www.xyz.com/2019/post1337e7a349f6
Use user-friendly and straightforward URLs that describe your content
www.zyw.com/blog/how-to-bake-pizza
If you use WordPress, you can set permalinks in the standard settings.
The last thing you need is to get HTTPS for your website. It’s not a significant ranking factor, but probably most of your competitors already have it. It is a decisive psychological factor that influences user experience.
Google Chrome, for example, labels a website that is not encrypted with SSL as “not secure,” and no one wants to browse a website that is “not secure.”
WEBSITE SPEED
Website speed optimization is a topic for another guide, so that I will give you just the essential info.
It would help if you started with decent hosting.
I won’t recommend any hosting company, but you need decent hosting if you want a speedy website. As a rule, more expensive hosting offers better speed.
Even if you have the fastest hosting, you still need to optimize it. For example, you need to optimize images, enable GZIP compression, HTML compression, JS and CSS minification, and decrease server response time.
First, check your website’s speed.
There are many tools to check your website’s speed, but you should start with Google’s own PageSpeed Insights.
Also, check if your page is mobile-friendly in the Mobile-Friendly Test.
Now, remember to take the results with a grain of salt. Many of those terms will sound like magic to you. Plus, it’s impossible to get the perfect score.
It’s also impossible to follow all suggestions that Google provides. Still, you can browse through them and see what can be improved.
Maybe you have too many plugins, or you forgot to turn on caching.
Another thing you can do is compare yourself to competitors. For example, our website (on mobile) is faster than HubSpot, at least that’s what Google says.
How to make your website faster?
To start making your website faster, you should install some plugins on your WP.
Three crucial plugins are:
Jetpack simply enables site accelerator and lazy loading.
Next, install Autoptimize, go to settings -> autoptimize and make sure everything is checked just like on the screenshot:
Finally, you need to enable GZIP Compression.
If you don’t have GZIP compression enabled, there are a couple of ways you can go about promoting it on your web server.
One of the easiest ways is by using a caching plugin that supports enabling GZIP.
There are many plugins that can do it for you. I recommend either WP Rocket or W3 Total Cache, where you can enable this under its performance section.
Those three plugins should get your page a nice boost without spending any money.
Next, it’s time to optimize your images. For this, you will also need a plugin.
I recommend reSmush.it. As long as your images are less than 5MB (single image size), they’re free to use.