By Jason McClain | May 15, 2016 | 1 Comment
If you are new to search engine optimization, you may find the very idea an overwhelming challenge. I’m here to tell you that it’s not and you can do it! If you’re in a highly competitive market then it might be necessary for you to hire a specialist. If you’re just running a blog or small website, you can probably handle most of it yourself. It’s my job to get you on the right track with few SEO tips for beginners, so I’ve sourced the web and have broken it down for you here.
- Focus on intent. Search engine optimization is currently going through a transition. Many of the requirements to rank high in the search engines these days have a lot to do with the user experience, so much so that some people are calling it search experience optimization. Focus on the intent of your readers. What are they searching for? Does your website provide them with the solution to the problems or answer to their questions?
- Write long articles. The days of 300 to 500-word articles have passed. Longer articles can help give your site authority. Break the content up with images and subheadings to really make it useful and easy to digest for your readers.
- Optimize for local SEO. Even if your business isn’t a brick and mortar shop, what business wouldn’t benefit from local SEO? It’s important for your community to know who you are and what you do.
- Make sure your site loads quickly. Search engines don’t favor sites that take more than a second or two to load. Google even offers a free tool that will check your speed for you on both your mobile and desktop sites and pin-point exactly what you need to fix.
- Have a mobile version. For the last year, having a mobile-friendly version of your website has been an additional ranking factor for Google. A site that complies with the most devices will rank among the best. This is so easy to do, there’s really no excuse for ignoring such an easy factor of your SEO.
- Link out to authority sites. Always include relevant source and additional information links in your copy or blog posts to authoritative website in your industry. Not only is this just a good practice in general, but it also aligns you as an authority.
- Use your keyword everywhere. When you’re putting together a page or a post for your website, include your keyword in your title, permalink, first paragraph, alt tag, and subheadings. This is search engine optimization 101. Do this with every post and every page on your site.
- Optimize your images. Compress and optimize your images for speed and extra SEO link juice from the search engines. Visual content is huge, and you want it to be searchable.
- Optimize for people, not search engines. Remember, you are building your website for people. After all, Google doesn’t really even look at your site. A piece of software they created called a bot does. That’s right, robots check your site for proper search engine optimization, so you might as well optimize for people and make sure you give them the best experience possible.
- Use a plug in. If you’re using WordPress, I highly recommend that you use one of the SEO plugins available for that platform. I recommend Yoast SEO for WordPress. It really takes the guess work out and keeps you up-to-date on practices without too much effort.
Wrap Up
If you start off with these simple SEO tips for beginners, you will be head and shoulders above many of your peers. The cool thing about having a basic understanding of search engine optimization yourself is that if you choose to hire an expert, they can enhance the work you’ve already put in. They also can’t rip you off because you have a basic understanding so if they charge you $800 to optimize your H1 tags, you know it’s a rip-off if you’re using WordPress because the titles of your posts and pages are automatically H1 tags. Right? Right!
Article writing is also a excitement, if you be familiar with afterward you can write
if not it is difficult to write.