Top 10 SEO Tips for Beginners
The term search engine optimization (SEO) refers to the process of affecting positively the visibility of a site (or Web page) in a search engine’s (or browser’s) ‘organic’ (or ‘natural’ or ‘unpaid’) search results. In other words, SEO is the process of making content for the Web appealing to search engines so that the former would rank high on the search engine results pages (SERPS). Moreover, SEO is not only a valuable service to businesses and their owners now but is also one of the most difficult factors of building an online presence. Search engines now are so sophisticated that a business owner who would like to create or build an online presence needs to have a solid SEO strategy. Without such a strategy, no such business owner would have any realistic chance at obtaining the coveted place on the SERPS—Google’s first page. Acquiring such a strategy requires capital for quality SEO services. If you’re a start-up owner with such a goal, the capital you have is most likely not enough for such services yet. To help you devise such a strategy by yourself in the meantime, here are the top 10 SEO tips for beginners.
Content is King
The content of your site will determine whether the visitors to it won’t just glance through and whether they will return. To make them interested enough in your site to explore, come back, and keep coming back it, the content should be written well, engaging, informative, useful, original, organized, readable, and regularly updated. The content should also contain all the keywords you would like to target. Otherwise, the visitors would be turned off by the content, won’t finish reading it, and would never return to your site. Your site would also rank low on the SERPS. If its content contains not all the keywords you would like to target, then your site won’t be as visible or searchable online as you would like it to be.
Make Use of Keywords Properly
Keywords are basically phrases or strings of words describing what a user wants to find online with a search engine. ‘Condo’ is an example of keywords. After a user types the keywords in the search box and then clicks on the search button, the search engine will generate several Web pages each listed with several links to the sites in which content related to the keywords can be found. The 2 kinds of keywords are short tail and long tail. Short tail keywords are broad in scope and target large groups as well as nonspecific search engine searches. ‘Car parts for sale’ is an example of short tail keywords. Long tail keywords are narrow in scope and target niche markets. ‘Homes for sale in California’ is an example of long tail keywords. You should not only know the keywords you would like to include or make use of in the content of your site before you writebut also carefully place them on it. The best places on a site for keywords include the URL; meta-tags; meta descriptions; the titles of your articles, blogs, or posts; and certain ‘sweet spots’ in the bodies of these pieces of writing. Examples of sweet spots in which to place short tail keywords are at the beginnings of sentences as well as paragraphs. An effective way to make use of a long tail keyword is by ending a sentence with part of it and then beginning the following sentence with the rest. Do not make use of keywords excessively, like mentioning them too many times in your articles, blogs, or posts. The best way to make use of keywords is by mentioning them a few times along with their synonyms.
Create Relevant and Concise Title Tags, Header Tags, ALT Tags, URLs, and Meta Description
Normally found within the < head>< /head> tags of the pages of your site, title tags play a critical role in letting search engines or browsers know what your site is all about. The Web crawlers, or so-called ‘bots’ that indexes the contents of a site as well as that of the entire Internet itself, give more relevance to your site the more its titles tags are concise and relevant to the rest of its content. You should not only give each page a title that is unique to its contentand that is relevant to any search queriesbut also make sure that each title is no more than 70 characters in length. Your meta description would be largely responsible for the way the result of the online search in which your site might be included would appear on the SERPS. For example, your meta description will dictate how the paragraph below your clickable title on a Google SERP will appear. To increase your site’s chances at ranking high on the SERPS, make your meta description unique, relevant to search queries, and no more than 156 characters in length. Search engines pay close attention tocontent that is encompassed by an < h1>< /h1> tag, so make sure that your header tags have keywords that are relevant to the rest of your site’s content and that the netizens make use of them regularly. Keep in mind that the words or phrases included incontent that are set in boldface are prioritized more than the words that are not. By making your ALT tags as accurate as you possibly can, you’re effectively making sure as well that the search engines would be able to index your site correctly. Making your URL not only contain an efficient set and number of keywords but also keeping the numbers and letters it contains to a minimum can also significantly affect your site’s ranking on the SERPS in a positive way.
Get Linked
To be precise, you should not only link your site to other sites that are similar to yoursbut also link to one another the pages of your site. Linking your site to other sites that are similar to yours is an effective way to drive traffic to your site. For example, if you’ve created or built a gaming site, you ought to link your site to others about gaming also, such as those that publish online news on video games. It would be unwise to compete for traffic with your competitors when you’ve just started as your site has no followers yet unlike theirs. Linking to one another the pages of your site is an effective way to increase your chances at ranking high on the SERPS. Doing so would make exploring your site easier for the visitors. A criterion for ranking high on the SERPS is how easily the visitors would be able to explore your site. The higher your site’s ranking on the SERPS would be the easier it would be for the visitors to explore your site.
Use Social Media to Make Your Site Visible or Easily Searchable Online
An example of using social media in such a way is making sure that you have most (if not all) of the most popular social media plugins or ‘share buttons’ on your site, such as that of Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and Linkedin. These plugins will enable the visitors to share easily your content with others, making your content more shareable online and thus more visible or searchable therein.
The More Features Your Site Has—The Better
The more features your site has, like plug-ins and a podcast, the more the visitors will enjoy it and thus the more traffic will be driven to it as more and more visitors will check it out.
Optimize the Images You Would Like to Include on Your Site
To do so, keep them small and rename them with descriptive text or the keywords before uploading them. Small images not only leave much space for publishing text content and including other features but also decreases the time it would take for your site to load, which would please both the visitors and the search engines.
Include a Site Map
A site map is basically a list of a site’s pages that is accessible to the Web crawlers, to the visitors,or both. A site map is designed basically to help them find and/or explore the pages easily. Since the speed and ease by which online content can be read is critical to its ranking on search engines, featuring a site map on your site can increase its chances of ranking high on the SERPS.
Write for a Niche Market
Doing so wouldn’t only help you avoid making excessive use of keywordsbut would also increase the chances that all the contents of your Web site would be interesting and useful to your target audience.
Don’t Believe Any One Who Offers to Drive Tons of Traffic to Your Site for an Incredibly Low Price
Keep in mind that there are numerous persons who make a living by scamming fledgling and inexperienced business owners like you by selling them ‘fake traffic’. An example of fake traffic is persons in third-world countries paid to sit at a computer and click on your site a hundred times a day. Search engines can detect who is receiving genuine organic traffic to their sites and who is making use of fake traffic. For example, in 2006 BMW Germany was receiving so much fake traffic to their site that Google removed it completely from their search engine.
