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Beginners Guide to SEO

Written by Mike Hepburn
October 22, 2020

The following post is an informative and comprehensive “Beginners Guide to SEO,” designed to provide beginners with a solid understanding of the fundamentals and best practices in search engine optimization.

The world of SEO (search engine optimization) is complex and constantly evolving. But the basics aren’t tough to understand and having some starter knowledge of it can go a long way in making a difference in how you plan your online presence and digital marketing strategy.

There is no magic formula that will suddenly catapult you to the first position on the search engine results pages (SERPS). But if you through our Beginners Guide for SEO, it will help in better indexing of the content on your website. SEO is typically about making minor modifications to parts of your website.

Things To Focus On With SEO

SEO is far more involved than ever in 2020. It’s more than merely building links, posting rehashed content interspersed with keywords to increase your business’ visibility and boost search rankings. There are many different things you need to understand and keep track of such as:

  • Algorithmic changes
  • Emerging trends such as voice search
  • Technological advancements
  • Your audiences- what they want and how they behave

What is SEO?

Ultimately, Search Engine Optimization is more than just being on visible on search engines and attracting more website traffic. It’s about ensuring that you provide readers and audiences an excellent experience while generating leads and increasing revenue.

When viewed individually, all these alterations may appear to be incremental improvements. However, when used in conjunction with various other optimizations, they can have a significant impact on site performance, organic search results, and user experience.

Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization Basics

Here are some relevant points that will take you through the basics of SEO:

  • When it comes to search engine optimization it’s all about your site, search engines, and online users. If you have some information to share about a particular topic, product or service, you want it to show up at the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs) when someone searches with keywords related to it.
  • A large percentage of online experiences start with a search engine and almost 75% of online searchers begin their searches via Google.
  • Combine this with the fact that the first 5 results on Google attract 67% of all clicks. This stat itself tells you why SEO is so important.

Why SEO Is So Important

While social media, paid advertising, and various other online platforms can generate website traffic, search engines drive most of the online traffic. Organic search results always cover far more digital real estate and appear more credible to knowledgeable searchers.

These results receive more clicks than any paid ads. In simple words, SEO has 20 times more traffic opportunity compared to Pay Per Click, on desktop and mobile.

  • When set up properly, SEO is the sole online marketing option that continues to pay rich dividends over time.
  • If you post an engaging piece of content that deserves a high ranking for the right keywords, you will find a huge amount of traffic coming your way.
  • In comparison, advertising needs constant funding to direct traffic to your website.

Search engines are evolving at a rapid pace and getting smarter, however, they continue to need our help. Optimizing your website will help in better information delivery to search engines so that all your content can be indexed well and will show up within search results.

What’s The Difference Between White Hat And Black Hat SEO

White hat SEO is an amalgamation of best practices, SEO strategies and techniques that are in line with search engine norms. The primary focus being to provide excellent value to searchers.

Black Hat SEO techniques, on the other hand are the strategies & techniques that are designed to fool/spam search engines. While black hat SEO works, it can put your website at high risk of being penalized and/or removed from search results (de-indexed) and it has ethical implications. A penalized website can bankrupt a business and that means you need to choose the right SEO experts for your needs.

Search Engine Optimization

Some Things to Keep In View While Planning SEO for your Site

The basic principles you must follow include:

  • Make webpages primarily for users, and not for search engines.
  • Don’t deceive users.
  • Avoid any tricks intended to boost search engine rankings.
  • Consider what makes your site engaging, valuable or unique

While there are certain basic things to follow, some things to avoid include:

  • Participating in various link schemes
  • Using automatically generated content
  • Creating webpages with little/no original content
  • Having hidden text and links
  • Showing search engines’ crawlers different content than what you show visitors (it’s called cloaking)
  • Doorway pages- webpages created to rank high for specific searches to direct traffic to your site.

Who To Hire for SEO?

Depending on the complexity of your website, your willingness to learn, and your bandwidth you could manage some basic SEO yourself. But this process needs constant monitoring, tweaking, and knowledge of the latest algorithms and trends which means hiring a professional is the best option.

It isn’t difficult to find companies offering SEO services, but you need one that understands your industry and business and can provide customized services. The incorrect SEO strategies and methods will only end up affecting your site and business. We at Your Social Strategy have the expertise to manage your SEO requirements in line with your specific needs.

Our team is here to help you every step of the way- from planning to implementation, analysis and management of your SEO strategy. This consistent and expert approach will help ensure that you are able to boost the visibility of your business on the Internet and maintain a high ranking.

To learn more about our SEO Services, please follow this link.

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Beginners Guide to SEO