Beginner SEO Tips

There are a lot of words that get thrown around with SEO professionals that focus on the question,”what are the most important SEO activities to engage in?”  This is also a common question many business owners or webmasters ask when they are first figuring out how to apply SEO techniques to their website.

The answer is… there isn’t a straight answer. There is a general consensus on what the most important factors of SEO might be and this includes both on-site and off-site SEO activities to engage in, in order to build traffic and ranking for your website in the search engines.

Below, we’ve included some beginner SEO tips. These tips will help guide you on the right path so you can start creating a nicely optimized website.

Choosing Keywords – Choosing keywords is the first step when starting out with SEO. Keywords lay the foundation for the rest of your SEO efforts. If you are targeting the wrong keywords, the rest of your SEO activities are going to be just as ineffective. Start with a keyword tool to help you narrow down your targeted keywords. It’s also a good idea to ask your customers how they would describe your business or ways they found you online (if they did).

Creating Titles Tags – Title tags tell Google and other search engines what each of your pages are about. They should include your targeted keywords and should be unique to each page of your website.

Writing Meta Descriptions – Meta descriptions are short excerpts that describe the information on your page. Meta descriptions are right under the title tags. You can see what each of these are as soon as you see a search result in the search engine results pages.

Understanding Website Architecture – Your website structure plays  a role in SEO as well. Website architecture involves the overall design of your website and how your content is stored and arranged. This includes things such as your website navigation, menus, the amount of pages you have and how they are organized on your site.

When beginning SEO, you need to make sure that your website architecture is SEO-friendly in order for your efforts to be as effective as possible.

Content Creation – Content creation is arguably one of the most important factors in doing SEO successfully. You will often hear the phrase, “content is king” from those who believe content is the most important factor in SEO. It does play a large role in a number of ways. Great content is favored by both the search engines and the readers of a website.

Search engines favor high quality content and boost websites in the results pages that have good, relevant content.

Readers favor high quality content over lower quality because – who wants to read something that isn’t that great?! Website visitors are more likely to share quality content via social media and email, which builds popularity and web traffic.

Overall, content is important for relevancy and the chance to build a reputable online presence that will hopefully have the chance to go viral.

Link Building Activities – Link building is the another important factor in SEO success. When you have a large number of links that point to your website, it tells search engines, “hey, they must know what they’re talkin’ about… maybe I should boost them up in the search results!” It’s even better when you have high quality links to your site because they are seen as more authoritative and help your rankings more than lower quality links. Highly sought after links are from .edu and .gov websites because of course, these are higher quality websites with important information.

Website Directory Submissions – Submitting your site to web directories is good for SEO as well. It builds a link to your site and also has the potential to bring traffic to your site. Local search directories are also great places to submit information about your business to bring in local customers. Local SEO has the potential to really boost the visibility of your local business.

In summary, remember that SEO isn’t something to take lightly. You have the potential to really shine and produce some great results, but you can also really mess things up or make things even worse than they were before you applied any SEO techniques. Make sure to speak with an SEO consultant or someone who can help you make sure you are following SEO best practices when applying these techniques to your overall Internet marketing strategy.