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SEO for Beginners Guide 2023
You have probably heard this buzzword, SEO. What is this? Even if you didn’t realize, SEO is utilized in businesses’ digital marketing strategies all the time. When implemented correctly, it can tremendously help boost brand visibility, and reach.
It doesn’t matter if it’s a small blog or an eCommerce, SEO plays a fundamental role for your website, mainly to receive organic visits. Ranking in the top search positions brings huge benefits.
Finding ways to climb positions in Google’s SERP and other search engines has become a constant objective for every webmaster. However, what exactly is SEO?
SEO Definition
Let’s start with the main point: SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which is the process of improving the organic traffic of one’s website or content. Through keywords, hashtags, and other indicators, you can achieve higher positions in search results, making it easier for clients and customer to find you.
You can find this concept expressed as “web positioning or organic positioning”. It’s main feature is precisely to help a webpage to improve their position with the main search engines, although the target search engine to improve the ranking is generally Google.
Although, more and more social media platforms are also becoming search engines, such as YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and Pinterest.
If we analyze this concept, we can say that there are two main types of SEO, Off-Page and On-Page.
- Off-Page SEO: This is everything that is not implemented directly on a page, such as backlinks, branded search efforts, and increase social media engagement.
- On-Page SEO: This refers to those SEO techniques that apply on a website, such as optimizing keywords that our content is based on and also the internal links used.
SEO is Not an Exact Science
Once the definition of SEO and what it offers have been clarified, we should explain that even though SEO is a discipline with a well-defined objective, it’s not an exact science.
In other words: There isn’t a rule that “if you do this you will get these results”.
For this reason, it’s normal that those who are starting with SEO make some mistakes that can lead them to have the wrong impression that “SEO is useless”.
Before you get started, you must understand that it’s a “trial and error” process and even when there are proven cases that certain techniques work, there are multiple factors involved that explain why results won’t be the same in all circumstances.
In fact, there are around 200 known (or suspected) factors that might explain why a specific web gets a better or worse organic position.
Still, professionals in the digital world think that Google’s algorithm has hundreds (or thousands) of additional factors, although they are obviously not shared publicly.
Advantages of Using SEO in a Digital Strategy
Using SEO strategies can bring you quick results and help better rank your content in the main search engines, to increase organic traffic to your website, blog, channel, etc.
High organic traffic can be translated into more people interested in your content, brand or business, and therefore, more conversions and sales. Plus, by creating quality content, you can gain more trust from users and boost brand loyalty,.
We should highlight that organic positioning brings higher chances to capture customers since organic traffic normally has more users interested in the content of your website. That is to say, users actively looked for that information as opposed to ads that appeared in front of users.
How to Use SEO + Best Practices
As I have just mentioned before, there are multiple factors that affect SEO. We can’t control some of them directly, but there are definitely main factors that help categorize content in search results.
Amongst the main SEO factors, both On-Page and Off-page, you need to take the following in consideration:
1. Keyword Optimization and Search Intent
Optimizing keywords correctly is crucial for organic positioning. This SEO On-Page factor lets you define the keywords that you want to position, as well as lets Google know relevant information about what your web is about or what you offer, for example.
Therefore, when researching keywords, you need to get specific about what your ideal audience is searching for. What are their pain points? What motivation do they have? Your brand or business helps address one of your clients pain points, so help those who are searching find the answers to their questions.
▶️ How to Do a Complete Keyword Research ◀️
2. Your Website’s User Experience
This is a bit more general. However, it’s perfect for covering some important SEO On-Page factors.
Google takes the webpage experience offered to your visitors very seriously, for this reason, it’s important that your website is optimized so users have a positive experience on your site.
This means that you need to work on some aspects such as the browsing on your web, the loading speed, the amount of ads that you show, errors in internal links, etc. as they have a direct impact on the website’s user experience.
3. Content Relevance
Apart from keywords, you must pay special attention to how relevant your content is. As I mentioned above, you must choose the right keywords but also users’ search intent is important.
With this in mind, you must know that the relevance of your content is vital and you must offer users exactly what they are looking for.
A quick example: If the keyword is “buying apartments in Barcelona”, you must make sure that you provide a direct answer to visitors and not get side-tracked with other topics.
Users will abandon your page immediately if it doesn’t include which information they are looking for, provoking the “pogo-sticking” effect. After searchers realize that they have landed on a page that is not what they are looking for, they will immediately bounce off and probably end up clicking one of the links from your competitors.
Within your articles or website pages, you can link other internal pages or resources from your brand, which allows users to continue staying engaged with your content.
4. CTR
The Click-through rate is quite important for SEO. It measures how well your keywords, ads, and free listing are performing. The higher the CTR, the more importance Google will give to your website as it will consider that it is interesting and relevant for their users.
đź’ˇCTR is calculated by dividing the number of clicks received by the number of times your content is shown (impressions).
5. Backlinks
A Backlink is basically a hyperlink that links from a website to your own page. It used to be the fundamental pillar of SEO. However, with time and the constant changes applied by Google, now the focus is on how useful the content is for users over the amount of links that your result has.
6. Meta Tags Optimization
This is an important point that you must consider. Meta tags are crucial for your site’s internal SEO optimization. They might not be relevant for your users but it is for Google. Thus, you must create them properly.
Meta tags refer to the meta-title, the meta-description and the URL. You must optimize them for each content created on your website and that you are planning to position better. This is vital for Google apart from being fundamental in order to be found by users in SERPs.
7. Quality Content
The relevance of the content is important but the quality of that content is too. They are both related, however, the focus of the quality is on how the content has been created in contrast to the importance that it has for users.
Quality content helps solve users answers, and contains accurate content. This also means no grammar or spelling errors. Include keywords throughout your content, and utilize secondary keywords. For longer-form content such as blog posts, adding secondary keywords for sub-paragraphs is a smart idea.
eep in mind that Google penalizes duplicate content and therefore, plagiarized content from another website. Besides, if you only focus on what you publish on your own blog or web, make sure that you avoid seo cannibalism, that is, multiple pages that are targeting the same search intent. You won’t rank in the first positions (even the TOP 1) because your pages are competing with each other.
8. Internal Links
Internal linking basically consists of links include within our content that redirect to other parts of our website with related information that complements it.
Some examples could be the typical “it might interest you” or “if you want to learn more about SEO On-Page click this link”. This internal linking will help the browsing experience, and encourage users to visit other content from your web, giving more visibility to old content.
It is also recommended to use a variety of anchor texts for internal links. This could be a separated factor within this list as well.
9. Posts on Other Web Pages (Guest Blogging)
Classic “guest posts” are an excellent help for SEO. Content that you create for other websites. The person in charge of that website normally allows you to add one or several backlinks to your own page.
It’s importance lies in how these help you give authority to your page (if they are “dofollow” links) and to your personal brand. Besides, they are an excellent option to put yourself on the spot on the Internet, especially if you are able to publish on a renowned website and with recurrent traffic.
Beware that if you have someone writing a guest blog for your site, that the backlinks are relevant to your brand and content. If not, this can seem more like SPAM than quality content.
10. Dwell Time
Dwell time is a SEO factor that determines the average amount of time that a searcher spends on a website. For Google, a high dwell time is a synonym of relevance and quality.
The time that users spend on your site is directly proportional to the interest that the content generates; with this in mind, it is normal that Google gives priority to those pages that have a higher dwell time.
There are many factors that have an impact in the average dwell time, but most of them are related to the user experience, the quality of the content and its relevance.
Conclusion
Now that you know what SEO is, the only thing I can say is that you must work towards improving it, it takes time.
Rest assured that 96% of cases, people start slowly, very slowly. You won’t get results overnight.
Factors such as CTR, the creation of backlinks, the creation of content that understands users’ intent or getting guest blogs amongst others, require time, you must go little by little, trying to speed up things won’t help. Slow but steady, this is the best way to improve your SEO. Want to see how to use SEO on Instagram? Make sure to watch this video: