Do you feel overwhelmed about SEO? The good news is that if you don’t want to look at the technical side of it you can still implement basic SEO and get results. This post is SEO tips for beginners.
I have put together all of the best SEO tips in the easiest way possible to help beginners use them effectively on their sites.
So, if you struggle with SEO I’m sure these easy fixes will produce the results you want.
Without further ado, Let’s start it.
Here’s a quick overview of SEO, skip it if you already know the basics.
Table of Contents
What Is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is a process of optimizing a website in such a way that it shows up on the search results for specific terms.
In a simpler language, making your site ready for appearing on search results when a user makes a search using a keyword.
For example, when you search for the “best ice cream flavors to try” a screen with links comes up.
The websites that show up for the search term “best ice cream flavors to try” are all optimized using SEO.
Why Is SEO Important?
For your online success, SEO is important.
There are many facts to prove this.
- Google is the most popular search engine. Youtube (also owned by Google) comes second. And people go to Google for any query. If you want traffic you can’t be missing on this.
- The social media traffic is not reliable. It is solely based on your efforts. Once you stop showing up your traffic dies.
- The traffic that you will get from search results is purpose-oriented. You can always know the user’s intent.
For example, if a person searched “best perfumes for men” that means the user is looking to buy perfumes.
He will go through to results one by one and once he finds what he was looking for he will make a purchase.
Now, suppose it was your website that showed up on search results, and the person purchased the product from your site.
Ain’t that sweet? This time you didn’t have to do all of that social media promotion. It was all automatic.
So this is why SEO is important for online success.
The best part is you can also improve your search engine rankings over time if you implement SEO correctly.
So, here are the basic SEO tips for beginners that you can learn easily.
9 Tips On SEO For Beginners To Get More Traffic
Follow these 9 best SEO practices to improve your online presence.
1- Avoid Keyword Stuffing – Write For Humans.
The first question is what is keyword stuffing?
Keyword stuffing is using a keyword many times in a blog post to rank for that search term.
For example,
“Chocolate ice cream flavor is one of the best ice cream flavors. If you ever visit Italy don’t forget to try this ice cream flavor.”
In this example, ice cream flavor is used 3 times.
Many bloggers believe that this is good for SEO to get higher rankings but it presents the worst user experience.
After the new updates, Google has made it clear that higher rankings are all about User Experience.
If your site delivers content that your readers like to read your site is going to rank better.
Sure, keyword stuffing worked before but not anymore. Now, search engines are smart.
How To Avoid Keyword Stuffing?
The best way to get your content loved by your readers is to write for them.
Google wants to deliver the best information to its readers and if you write for your readers then Google will prioritize your site over others.
Always write naturally. Don’t ever stuff keywords.
2- Build Backlinks.
Link building in SEO will always remain one of the top three factors that algorithms use to index sites.
A backlink is a link from the other site pointing to your site.
The algorithm uses these backlinks as approval from other websites that this information is correct.
Therefore, the importance of link building in SEO is just like building an authority site.
How To Build Backlinks For SEO?
Some ways to get backlinks that work for me are
- Guest Blogging.
- Email Outreach.
- Responding To HARO requests.
However, you will start building high-quality backlinks for free once you start publishing great content that everyone wants to link to.
3- Internal Linking For SEO.
An internal link is a link to one of your blog posts that you added to your other blog post.
Internal linking is a good practice to simplify your site structure for Google bots to crawl it easily.
Google bots are occasionally crawling on your site to understand what it is about and when you link your other similar pages together it helps bots understand different categories in your site.
When your site is new most people don’t link to your content very often.
Why not start linking to your other pages? However, you should always link a page only if you find it relevant to the content.
Meaning, a food recipe should never go to a makeup tutorial.
These links should be extremely relevant to the content.
A good practice is to add at least 5 relevant internal links to a blog post but I read on the Moz blog that more than 250 are “too many internal links”.
But you don’t have to add 250 links in a post, just add those that you think would help your readers provide more information on the topic.
Here is how to find internal links on a page.
4- External Link Building Strategy For SEO.
External links are outgoing links from a website to another website.
You should not always link to your blog posts only. External link building is equally important.
If you have installed the free Yoast SEOplugin, you will see that it asks you to add at least one outbound link to the blog post.
There are two ways outbound links help in SEO.
- When you link to other sources you are telling your readers another source to find more information from. (Better User Experience)
- When you link to other authority sources in your blog niche then it makes your site a more valuable source.
So whenever you feel that your reader should be informed about a topic and you have another blog post about it, go ahead and link to it otherwise link to an authority site.
So this is how you improve SEO using external links.
5- Fix Broken Links.
One of the worst signals your site can send to Google is a broken link.
Also, one of the worst user experiences would be a broken link.
So, you see, a broken link is bad for SEO in either case.
You should immediately fix all the broken links on your site. But, how to fix broken links?
With the free Chrome extension Google Broken Link Checker.
Install the extension and click on the icon to find all the broken links. Then fix them.
6- Conduct A Site Audit.
This is the first thing you should do to fix any minor issues on your site.
A site audit is a full analysis of all factors that affect its visibility on search rankings.
The issues like
- H1 Tags.
- Meta Descriptions.
- URL structure.
- Broken links.
- Image alt tags
- And etc.
When you do a site audit of your site a report is shown to you with all the necessary details and the areas that need fixings.
To do this, you can do an Ahrefs site audit. It is free and one of the best site audit tools present online.
Another great free option is Ubersuggest site audit.
Just enter your site, wait for a few minutes for the results to show up, and then start fixing the errors one by one.
7- Update Old Posts For SEO.
This might be one of the best SEO optimization tips you will read in 2021.
And there is a valid reason behind it.
Since last year a lot of information has changed and if your website contains old information then it is obsolete to your readers.
How Does Updating Old Posts Help In SEO?
After the recent updates, Google has made it clear it is all about user experience. So, if your posts are old then your reader won’t stay on your site.
This signals Google that your site is not giving valuable information and hence it decreases your rankings.
How To Refresh Old Posts?
Rewriting blog posts is a good option for once, as you will also update keywords.
However, updating some parts of a blog post is also good. Here are some things that you can do to update old blog posts.
- Add new images.
- Optimize for featured snippets.
- Update meta descriptions.
- Add new paragraphs.
- Delete old paragraphs.
- And more.
There are so many ways to update old posts.
Go through each blog post on your site and ask if you will buy the information?
You don’t have to do it all at once, make a plan and follow it.
8- Improve Page Speed.
An update just before the latest Google updates was the Core Web Vitals.
I won’t get deeper but it was indirectly related to page speed (it is more than that, please check the above article if you want to understand how it works).
Therefore, the faster your site loads the better your site ranks.
So, how to improve page speed?
Before that, you need to check what your current page speed is.
If your site is connected with Google analytics page speed can be checked from there.
However, you can also use GTMetrix(a free tool) to find out page speed and errors.
If it is bad, there is nothing wrong with putting in some work.
How to improve website performance? The best way to do this is to install a caching plugin.
9- Keep Your Readers Engaged (Longer On Your Site).
When a reader leaves your site without going to another page of your site then the reader is bounced off of your site.
And a numerical value to calculate this is called Bounce Rate.
You can check your blog bounce rate on Google Analytics. It is generally on the first screen when you sign in to your dashboard.
Ideally, a low bounce rate is preferable.
A higher number indicates that most of your readers leave your site because they didn’t find it valuable.
Again, signaling Google to decrease your rankings.
So, how to keep your readers engaged?
Your priority should be your readers. Provide them with extremely helpful information that they want to check out other articles on your site.
Also, you can check out this post by WordStream on how to reduce bounce rate to find out easy tips.
Conclusion
So these were some SEO tips that will help you get organic traffic.
One thing I want to mention is that SEO takes time so you should not expect quick results. I tried it on my site and started hating SEO because it didn’t get me “quicker results” that I was expecting.
Then I ignored SEO for the whole year until when I noticed that one of my blog posts is ranking on Google. True story. Of course, I started learning SEO.
Lesson learned. It takes time and SEO is worth learning.
I hope you found some helpful tricks from this post to try on your blog.
If you can’t find anything you can always ask us in the comments section.
In the end, it is all about the USER EXPERIENCE.
Do you have any ideas to keep your readers longer on your site?
I hope you enjoyed this post by my guest blogger Ekta Swarnkar!
Author Bio:
Ekta Swarnkar a content writer and blogger at Tia Says where she publishes basic blogging and writing tips.