SEO For Beginners
What Is SEO?
Search engine optimisation is, in a nutshell, about how to make sure your website gets seen by the right people.
To get the right eyes on your site involves a twofold approach:
- Make it easy for search engines to find your website, pages, and content.
- Know your audience. What questions are they asking? How do they want to consume the answers? What words do they use?
In this article, we’ll help you understand some of the basics of SEO as well as easy-to-action hints and tips to help you give your SEO a boost.
How Do Search Engines Find Your Website?
Search engines use crawlers, sometimes called spiders, to find web content. They find new content by following links like a trail. New URLs ( the unique addresses of each of your pages) that they discover from following these link trails are put into an enormous database, called an index.
Sometimes your pages may not be easily found and indexed. You can check to see if your pages are indexed by typing in the search bar: search:(add your domain name here).
The following roadblocks can stop the crawlers from finding and therefore indexing all of the pages that you want them to. These include:
- No links to your site from external sites.
- Your site is difficult to navigate and/or does not contain internal links.
- The search engine thinks your website is spammy.
- You are locking out the crawlers with a login page to access your content.
Ways you can combat these issues are:
- Guest post on other sites, share your content on social media.
- Ensure you link back to your other pages on each page and that your menus are effective.
- Don’t overdo advertising on your site and ensure your content is of good quality. Research and use keywords but don’t stuff them in everywhere, use them effectively and ensure they make sense/are in context. . Make sure your content is not duplicated or plagiarised.
- Unless your site contains sensitive information and you only want certain people to see your content (in which case you won’t need to work on your SEO anyway) don’t use a log-in page.
Understanding Your Audience For SEO
First of all, it’s a good idea to get an idea of who you want to be looking at your website. There are two ways of thinking about your target audience.
- Demographics – age, gender, income level, education level, geographic location. It is about who you want to look at your site.
- Psychographics – values, goals, motivation, attitudes, beliefs. It is about why they might look at your site.
Once you’ve worked out who you want to see your site and why they might want to you can begin to make sure you are using the language they would use to try and find you.
How To Do Basic Keyword Research?
There are plenty of free keyword research tools out there. It’s worth having a look around to see which one works best for you.
It’s a good idea to start with what you would like your site to rank highly for. This is likely to be a service you provide or a product you sell. By popping these words into the research tool you will begin to see how often these words and similar are searched for.
This is called search volume. It is a good idea to pick out and use a mixture of high, low, and medium volumes keywords for your site. This is because with the very high volume words all the top-ranking sites will be big businesses but the low volume ones, although not searched for as much, are likely to be more relevant to your website, so will attract your ideal target audience.
It is also important to think about long-tailed keywords which are longer and more specific. For example, if you type in ‘freelance blogger’ you will get lots of agencies over the first few pages. However, if you type in ‘vegan freelance blogger’ individual freelancers pop right to the top of the first page.
We hope that this has given you a greater understanding of the basics of SEO. If you would like a free SEO report which details where your keywords are ranking on Google and to have a chat about how we could help improve your SEO please click on the Free SEO Report.
