Search engine optimization is vital to getting your website seen. But don’t worry – you don’t have to go back to school to learn the basics. Here’s how to get started.
Your Guide To Learning SEO
Before we dive into the first step on your path to becoming an SEO Jedi, let’s take a quick look at what exactly we mean by search engine optimization.
According to Google’s developer’s guide:
“Search engine optimization is the process of making your site better for search engines.”
In other words, it’s figuring out exactly what changes you need to make to your website to make it more relevant to search queries.
The elements of SEO fall under two main categories: on-page and off-page.
As you might expect, on-page SEO elements are the parts that are on your website. These include:
- Crawlability and indexability, i.e., how easy it is for search engines to find and map your content.
- Content quality and keyword usage.
- Usability factors such as loading time and responsiveness, known as Core Web Vitals.
- Mobile responsiveness.
- E-A-T: expertise, authority, and trustworthiness.
- Images.
- Tags.
Off-page SEO elements, on the other hand, are the ranking factors that come from outside your domain. This primarily focuses on link building and getting other high-quality websites to link to your content.
Now that we have that out of the way, let’s dive into the step-by-step process of mastering SEO.
Step 1: Master The Basics
One of the best things about Google is its extensive amount of available information. While they won’t give away the secret sauce of what exactly drives its algorithm, the search engine giant is surprisingly forthcoming about what does and doesn’t get factored into rankings.
And even better, they’ve provided an extremely helpful SEO starter guide for people just starting in the field. This is a high-level view of how search engine optimization works, including definitions of common terms and the basics of getting ranked.
If you’re starting your SEO education completely from scratch, this is the perfect place to start.
It will tell you how to get your site on Google, the best ways to control crawling so the search engine can find your content, and indexability, which will help it understand what your content is about – and what sort of queries it will be a good fit for.
Step 2: Dive Deeper Into The Technical Side
Once you feel confident that you have the fundamentals of SEO down, it’s time to move on to more technical concepts.
Once again, Google has provided several excellent resources for your educational purposes.
One good spot to further your education is the webmaster guidelines for maintaining your site’s SEO. It can help get you started with intermediate to advanced techniques for boosting your ranking or dealing with other SEO issues.
This includes information on how to deal with duplicate content and canonical pages, using robots.txt files to tell Google which pages to crawl and index, building and submitting sitemaps, and other ways you can help Google better understand your site.
Depending on what type of content you have on your site, you may need to use different strategies to maximize its exposure.
For example, videos are a popular form of content requiring extra SEO work to ensure they rank as highly as possible.
If you’re using anything outside of plain text (and you should be – no one wants to scroll through a wall of text), make sure you check Google’s content-specific guidelines.
Step 3: Create An SEO Process
By this point, you hopefully have a reasonably good understanding of what SEO is and how it works.
And now, it’s time to put that education into practice by developing and implementing your very own SEO process.
If you’re working on an existing site, the very first thing you need to do is perform an SEO audit. This is a fairly extensive undertaking, but once again, Search Engine Journal to the rescue!
Step 4: Optimize Your Content
It is impossible to overstate how important your website’s content is. Content is what drives people to your site, encourages them to take action, and is the entire reason for your site to exist in the first place.
So, after you’ve done the backend, technical and strategic work necessary to boost your ranking, it’s time to focus on your content.
Your content strategy should have been a big part of your overall strategy, as discussed in the last step, but this is where the rubber meets the road.
This is where you’ll create the keyword-rich (but not overstuffed) copy, build a solid structure that’s easy for bots and humans to read, and improve your overall content experience.
Step 5: Build Your Backlinks
This has been touched on already, but it warrants its own step.
Your incoming links tell Google a lot about how trustworthy your site is.
For example, if you fall for one of those link farms, pay-per-link scams (which, of course, you never would), Google will probably ignore those links.
On the other hand, if the Chicago Tribune is directing people to your page, Google may well view that endorsement in a good light and consider that link valuable.
Step 6: Don’t Forget About Humans
With all the technical parts to search engine optimization, it can be really easy to forget about the primary purpose of your website: to provide value for actual people.
And lest you think Google search is entirely comprised of a variety of computer programs, don’t forget actual humans are verifying the algorithm’s work.
These people are known as Search Quality Raters. They follow an extensive guide to determine how well Google search results meet the needs of the querier and evaluate your pages’ quality.
So, always keep that in the back of your mind – that even with all the title tag and image optimization and responsive design work you’ve put in, at the end of the day, SEO is all about people.
Step 7: Never Stop Learning
Whew, that was a lot. Now you can just sit back and relax, enjoying your new title of sixth-degree SEO black belt, right? Not even a little.
Search engine algorithms are constantly undergoing changes.
Some of these are so small you won’t notice, while others make a big change in the kind of returns queries generate. And this constant state of flux means the last thing you can do is rest on your laurels.
Stay Up To Date And Get Optimizing
As you can see, there’s quite a lot that goes into search engine optimization. And even experts are learning new things every day.
Hopefully, by this point, you’ve learned a bit about SEO basics and where to learn more about them.
And after you’ve perused some of the linked materials, then it’s time to put your new knowledge into action.
Don’t be discouraged if you don’t see results immediately – remember, search engine optimization is a marathon, not a sprint. Sometimes, it can take months for your changes to start showing up on search engine results pages (SERPs).
Just remember, this is a constantly shifting environment, and what worked yesterday may not work today. This is partly because of shady SEO specialists who gamed the algorithm through things like keyword stuffing and article spinning (i.e., recreating content with different words).
But the main reason you must stay on top of SEO is Google’s unending quest to provide better, more relevant results.
Currently, this means focusing more on search intent than keywords, but who knows what it will mean tomorrow?
The only way to stay on top is to keep working once you get there. Because if you kick your heels up, it won’t be long before your hard-earned ranking goes away to a harder-working, savvier optimizer.
Don’t ever stop learning, and now get out there and get to the top of search results!
Content Source: searchenginejournal.com
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