A beginners, beginner guide to SEO

I have a wide range of digital marketing skills, but the one thing I never got good at was SEO. To me, SEO has always been tedious, hence why I never developed the skills on purpose. 

But this week I had an essay due, so I decided to combine these two tedious tasks and double the pain for myself.
So, I present to you: A beginner’s guide to SEO optimisation made by a beginner. 

Note: This essay will be split into two separate essays. This first essay will focus more on explanation and the second one will focus on practice.

What is SEO

Search Engine Optimisation is a practice, in which a website is optimised using keywords and links to make it rank higher on search engines. 

History of search engines

This section is paraphrased from Austen Allredss’s article “SEO is Not Hard — A step-by-step SEO Tutorial for beginners that will get you ranked every single time”.

The search engines we know today (excluding AI), are based on Googles early ranking algorithm PageRank. 

PageRank originated from two Stanford students Larry Page and Sergey Brin. While in school, they noticed how often scientific studies referred to famous papers. These referrals acted like a vote, the more times that paper was referred to, the more significant it was. What Larry and Sergey realised, was that if you could compile all of the papers and referrals, and then rank them in order of most referrals, you could discover the most significant paper.

This realisation led to another realisation, the internet can be ranked using the same methodology thanks to links. They then set out on a quest to “download” (crawl) the entire internet and rank the results using the number of links.

What SEO consists of

Website ranking consists of two main parts, the match factor for the keyword searched(on-page SEO), and the authority of the website(off-page SEO). 

The keyword match factor is pretty self-explanatory. The more that keyword, or a deviation of it appears on the site, the more likely it will show up in the results. Note that the keyword has to appear in the correct places, so no, you can’t just spam the keyword into the body section of the website and make it rank.

From the small unprofessional history lesson, you might already know what a website’s authority mostly consists of. That’s right, links. The more backlinks (links that lead to that specific site) there are, the more authority the site has. One thing to note is that not all backlinks are equal. Some backlinks carry less weight than others, it all depends on the authority of the site from which the link originates form. So for example, a link from the Wall Street Journal can be a hundred times more effective than a link from your personal CV website. 

On-page SEO

On-page SEO is straightforward, you pick a keyword you want to rank for and then make it clear to the search engine that your website is about this specific keyword. 

It’s easier to expand when you already have a keyword you rank for. So when starting with On-page SEO, you should pick one keyword for one page. It is important to note that On-page SEO is page-specific. This means, for example, that the SEO done for the homepage doesn’t automatically transfer to product pages.

Picking the right keywords

There are a few things you should consider when searching for the keyword to rank for, I will list them here:

Competition

How much competition does the keyword have? You should aim for keywords with little competition since beating a large company with good SEO is extremely difficult. Luckily we can use keywords called Longtail keywords, I will go into those later. 

Traffic/Seach volume

To get traffic to the site, you need keywords that have search volume. There is no point in ranking for a keyword that gets no searches. The exact search volume is hard to get a number on, the best you can get is an estimate. 

Relevance

Is the keyword relevant to your page? When the person goes on your site, do they find what they searched for?

Intent

Is an important factor. When picking a keyword, you have to think what is the intent of the person searching with this keyword. Is their intent to find a product, service, information or something else?

Commercial intent

This means that the person searching is looking to buy. Some indicators of this are “on-sale”, “best price”, “buy” etc.

The long tail

The “long tail” is a marketing and economics concept popularised by Chris Anderson. The “long tail” comes from a pattern depicting products along a spectrum of popularity and demand.

The idea of the long tail is to promote profitability by aiming for niche products instead of competing for sales over the best-selling products.

Long tail keywords

The term “long tail keywords” is often used in SEO. The idea is to aim for niche and less competitive keywords. 

This idea works because appearing in the top 4 searches for a keyword is crucial. The amount of traffic the first few results get compared to the later ones is multiple times more. 

This is why there is no point in going for high-competition keywords in the beginning. You will get way better results by ranking for niche keywords. 

In a nutshell, long tail keywords are specific, intention-driven keywords with less competition.

Off-Page SEO

As I already mentioned, off-page SEO just means backlinks. In the SEO world, it’s often referred to as “link juice”. Links provide the site with authority, which is crucial to appearing in search results. 

Now, I have to admit, that this is where SEO gets complex. Building links happens naturally and it is very difficult to force. Google is good at detecting spammy links and punishing these sites frequently. Austen Allred says this about link building in his article: “The best way to build links is to not build links.” 

Even though most of the links come naturally, there are a few methods you can use to boost the process:

Have links to the site in your bios

You should link the website appropriately to your social media profiles. Even though the difference isn’t huge, it still helps. Examples are LinkedIn bio, Twitter bio, Instagram Bio, YouTube video descriptions etc.

Build relationships

Networking with industry professionals, bloggers and influencers is a good idea. Over time these relationships might lead to valuable organic links (+ free traffic) in the form of reviews or product promotions. 

Create valuable content

Creating good, valuable content in your industry is good in many ways. It can provide links and organic traffic leading to more sales. An easy way to do this is to find what kind of content your competitors are making and make it better.

Use marketing methods that provide links

Doing affiliate marketing is a good way to get links and more sales. This way influencers will put links to your website in their social bios. 

Other things to note

URL structure

Keeping URL structures simple and logical is crucial since Google is known to punish sites with bad URL structures. Having a constant structure across the board is best for SEO and for the people viewing your site.

For example, if you have products on a product page a good structure for it could look something like this:

Shop page: examplestore.com/shop

Product page: examplestore.com/shop/leather-wallet

Also as a rule of thumb, stick to lowercase letters, numbers, hyphens and slashes when it comes to URLs.

Page speed

Having a slow website can lead to a higher bounce rate. Bounce rate is the percentage of people who click off the site before looking further, having a high bounce rate affects SEO negatively since Google also analyses time spent on the page when deciding search result rankings.

The optimal load time for a website is under 2 seconds, this is what you should aim for. This could be a whole essay on its own, but some simple tips are to compress images to smaller sizes and combine or minify files. As a rule of thumb, the bigger the site, the longer it loads.

Sources

Long Tail: Definition as a Business Strategy and How It Works by Adam Hayes 2020

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/long-tail.asp#:~:text=Key%20Takeaways-,The%20long%20tail%20is%20a%20business%20strategy%20that%20allows%20companies,2004%20by%20researcher%20Chris%20Anderson.

SEO is Not Hard — A step-by-step SEO Tutorial for beginners that will get you ranked every single time by Austin Allred 2016
https://medium.com/startup-grind/seo-is-not-hard-a-step-by-step-seo-tutorial-for-beginners-that-will-get-you-ranked-every-single-1b903b3ab6bb