As a beginner, SEO can seem somewhat like rocket science. However, with a can-do attitude and some time invested a beginner can easily pick up an understanding of SEO. A thorough understanding of the basics of SEO is a great place to start for beginners. What are the basics of SEO you might ask; here are six basics for any SEO.
Create an Easy Site URL – Foremost, it is important to make your site’s URL “human friendly”. Some people avoid long puzzling URLs, so a simple descriptive URL is better. A good rule to follow is keeping your URL short enough to fit in the URL bar. Additionally, making your URL descriptive by including your keywords is also a good idea. This allows people to better remember your URL and makes it easier for people to link to your site.
Make the Site Easy to Navigate – Once a person clicks to your site, you want to be sure that they can easily and quickly find what they want. Having a highly visible and clearly labeled navigation bar is critical to keeping people on your site. Good navigation is also important for search engines to crawl and index your site. Therefore, your navigation buttons should not be images or contained within Flash content, as crawlers cannot decipher either of these.
Keywords – Before you can rank for the words that your customers are searching for, you must do keyword research. This research will tell you what words people are using to find your products/services, as well as what keywords you are able to rank for given your budget. Once you pick your keywords, you need to include them in your site’s content, tags, and URL. Also note that over using keywords (keyword stuffing) will hurt not help, so you’ll need to find a happy balance.
Create Unique, Relevant Content – Creating a unique website that helps a person find what they are looking for is critical. It is important to include you keywords into your content to help search engines and users determine relevancy. If your content is very basic or duplicate content, people will likely not find satisfaction on your page.
Optimize Your Title Tags and Meta Tags – Title tags and Meta tags are your site’s “first impression” when a searcher sees you in a SERP – search engine results page. A Title tag is the title of that webpage displayed, and a Meta tag is the description of that page. Therefore, making sure that Title tags and Meta tags are descriptive and relevant will help searchers to know what your page is about and if it will help them find what they are looking for.
Increase Popularity with Link Building –Links pointing to your site help build your site’s popularity and trust factor. Therefore getting sites to link to your site is important for ranking. However, not all links are equal, and you will want to get high quality authority links. It is important to note that you will want to get links from many different domains, and not just from one domain. In addition, you will want to pay attention to the anchor text people use to link to your site. Engines use this anchor text to determine what your site is about, so it’s best if people use your keywords in their anchor text.
Although this is just a simple introduction to the basics of SEO, it is a good place to start for a beginner. Once you understand these basics, you will easily be able to increase your knowledge and move towards a higher level understanding of SEO. Remember it is important to start out small and build up from there. If you’re interested in working with a professional agency, contact us today!
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