SEO Essentials for Beginners

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO for short, is the process of creating and ‘optimizing’ a website/blog that attracts a large amount of traffic through various different sources – including search engines, social media, as well as other forms of referral traffic.

A SEO strategy involves many different aspects, all aimed at maximizing your website/blog’s ability to get traffic.

One of the most essential pieces in the SEO puzzle is search engine visibility, and the ability to rank as high up the Search Engine Results Page (or SERPs) for certain keywords that are relevant to your business, and then being able to drive traffic through the search engines. Similarly, the way that you create and structure your content, and of course, get backlinks from other sources to your blog are two important aspects of one’s SEO strategy.

Here is a list of tips, tricks and things that should be considered by anyone who is relatively new to the field, when devising an SEO strategy:

1. Commitment: Search engine optimization is far from being a ‘one-time-thing’. Search engine algorithms change on a frequent basis. For instance strategies that may be getting your website traffic right now might become completely redundant in a couple of months. Therefore SEO requires a certain amount of long-term commitment, as well as the ability to adapt.

2. Patience: Search Engine Optimization requires a certain amount of patience. The results of your SEO strategy might take weeks or months before they bear fruit. Don’t expect any tangible short-term results. Instead, concentrate your efforts on getting long-term gains – such as creating a website that generates a large amount of targeted traffic down the road. Targeted traffic is what you’re looking for, and in order to be able to get targeted traffic, you need to slowly build a faithful following of readers.

3. Niche: It is important to choose your website or blog’s niche carefully. It could be anything – from sports, to internet marketing, politics, celebrity gossip, music, cooking, computers, cell phones, career advice, etc. Identifying your website’s niche will allow you to optimize and promote it in a much more effective manner. It will also make it easier for you to compete. Make sure that the niche you choose is well-defined, and that you have a knowledge of the keywords, phrases and themes revenant to your niche.

4. Keywords: One of the most essential aspects of SEO and the ability to rank well on search engines, is keyword research. Basically, what you want to do is rank as high up as possible for certain keywords relevant to your niche – preferably as high-up the SERPS as possible. The difference between choosing the correct and incorrect keywords will essentially make or break your SEO. Choose keywords that are highly relevant to your niche, and that you can easily compete for them. I recommend using Google free Adwords Keyword Tool for this purpose, however if you’re in the market for something better, Market Samurai would be a great (albeit paid-for) alternative and an all-round excellent tool for keyword research. Use keywords, as well as long-tailed key-phrases.

5. Content: Content is king! Remember that the purpose of all your SEO efforts is maximizing visitors. What you want is as many people reading your content as possible. The best way to do that is actually giving your visitors content that they would love reading, share and link to. Do your research and create unique, high-quality, highly-valuable and informative content. Try (naturally) including keywords relevant to your blog – and this particular write-up – a few of times in your blog. Always avoid keyword stuffing, as not only will it put potential visitors off your blog, it will also put you at risk of getting penalized by search engines. Always remember that when it comes to content creation is to focus on developing content for human readers, not search engines.

6. Pages: A website or a blog consists of a certain number of pages. It is important to optimize these pages by adding meta information for each page. This includes adding meta titles (the title that shows up in the SERPs) and meta description (the few lines of text beneath the title in the SERP) for each page. Make sure that this information is relevant to the content of the page, and if possible, includes the keywords/phrases that the particular page (and your blog in general) might want to rank for. Keep in mind that all meta information needs to be completely unique.

7. Images: Optimizing any and all images on your website is just as important as optimizing your content, pages or any other aspect of your website. Include titles, description and most importantly, ‘ALT text’ for all your images. Make sure that the information provided here describes the image. Doing this will allow search engines to be able to ‘see’ and index your images, allowing you to get search engine traffic.

8. Navigation: Navigation remains one of the most essential aspects of search engine optimization. Here are the essentials: divide all contents of your website, specifically posts, into different main sections and make sure that all pages and sections of your website are interlinked, and easily accessible from any part of your website. Visitors should not have to click unnecessarily, click too many times or go back and forth to be able to visit a particular page on your blog.

9. Sitemap: A sitemap is essentially a single page which contains a list (and links) of all the pages on a website. Sitemaps are essential as they allow search engine crawlers to seamlessly crawl your website, and index all its pages and content. It is also useful for visitors, as it provides them with access to all parts of your website from a single page. Adding a sitemap is usually as simple as installing a plugin, which then creates a sitemap for your website and updates it as well as soon as new content is added.

10.  Link-building: Link building is perhaps the most important aspect of search engine optimization. What you are looking for is creating inbound links to your website from other websites and blogs. These links need to be relevant links (links from websites relevant to your niche), not from spam sources and should preferably be links from authority and high-PR sources. Some of the best link-building methods out there include guest posting on other blogs and websites (while giving a backlink to your own blog), press releases, posting comments on other blogs (constructive, informative, non-spam comments that take the conversation forward, and should be relevant), and sharing your posts, pages and content on social websites (Facebook, Twitter, StumpleUpon, Reddit, etc.). Above all, try creating content that is so unique, well-written and informative, that people (especially authority sources) are compelled to link to it!

11. Blackhat SEO: Avoid any and all ‘blackhat SEO’ practices at all cost – stuff that is likely to land you in hot water with search engines. This includes stuff like spam and buying links, among others. Avoid risking your long-term well-being for short-term gains. Blackhat SEO techniques put you at risk of getting de-indexed from search engine if (or rather when) caught. Instead, use the above-mentioned points to slowly and steadily grow your traffic instead. Think long-term instead of short-term.

12. Analytics: Use analytics and stats to monitor how your SEO is doing. Google Analytics is one of the best, most powerful analytics suite out there right now – it lets you keep a track of your optimization efforts, and provides tons of data, statistics and in-depth insight into thousands of different aspect of your blog. Above all, it lets you measure how well you’re doing in comparison to your goals. You can then fix and tweak stuff that isn’t working, for instance if you’re not being found on search engine for your keywords.

13. Social: Leverage the power of social media as much as you can. Having a presence on the likes of Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus is essential; however it is also important to build a strong following and send regular updates out to your followers on social mediums (avoid spamming!). In addition, use other mediums such as Flickr, Reddit, StumbleUpon, and if applicable to your niche, Quora or Yahoo Answers as well. Google, in particular, places strong emphasis on social signals. Integrate social sharing buttons on your website, make it easy and simple for your visitors to like and share your posts.

14. Diversify: As the old saying goes, never put all your eggs in one basket. Diversify your sources of traffic, and avoid becoming over-reliant on a single source of traffic. Remember, the world of SEO is ever-changing; and while Google may very well be the biggest source of referral traffic right now, the next update to its search algorithm might hit you hard. It is important to be able to get traffic from other sources, and one of the best ways to do that is building email lists, and allowing and encouraging people to subscribe to your content.

5 Solid Ways of Strengthening Your On-Page SEO

One of the most essential things when it comes to good on-page SEO is content. Content is what makes or breaks all your search engine optimization. Often times, people tend to underestimate the importance of quality content, while placing more emphasis on link-building. And while link-building is an important, essential element of strong SEO, on-page SEO and quality content is just as important for search engine visibility and traffic, if not more.

However on-page optimization isn’t just limited to producing high-quality, highly-valuable content. Producing quality content on a regular basis can be a difficult task; there are only so many hours in a day, and writing quality isn’t something that can be done quickly.

Here are 10 other elements of on-page SEO – apart from producing quality content – that should also be an important part of one’s on-page SEO strategy:

1.  Email Subscriptions: One of the most important aspects of on-page SEO is investing time, energy and resources into building an email list – a list of subscribers who receive your updates (announcements, new posts, etc.) via email. Every time you put something up on your blog, such as publish a new post, all your subscribers instantly receive an email, with a backlink to the new article.

It is essential to note a few important aspects of an email subscription list: (a) the people on your list have willingly provided you with their email ID because they want to hear from you. These are hence your most valuable customers. (b) Email traffic is one of the most consistent sources of traffic – something that probably already brings a good number of regular, targeted traffic to your blog, and (c) it is one of the biggest sources of traffic for some of the biggest blogs out there.

If you’ve not worked on building an email list, now would be the perfect time to do so. If you already have a list, consider coming up with ways though which you could increase your subscribers. Trust me, with the passage of time, it will become one of the most important assets in your blogging arsenal!

2. CTAs: Everyone out there blogs for a purpose. Whether you know it or not, there’s an underlying reason as to why you’re blogging. One of the main purpose of blogging – going through the process of writing excellent posts and all that – is because you want a large group of people to read what you have to say (or write) and take an action. In short, you need as much traffic as possible, which you can then ‘convert’ into leads.

To convert your traffic, you need certain ‘Calls To Action’ or CTAs, placed on various places on your websites. These CTA’s will urge your readers to take any action of your choosing – whether it’s visiting another website, ‘liking’ your Facebook page, signing up for your email list, or purchasing a plugin off your blog.

A strong, highly-optimized CTA will allow you to convert a high percentage of visitors into leads, which means you have a high CTA. Multiple CTAs can be beneficial as well – one on your header or sidebar, and another after every post, for instance, would maximize exposure. Essentially, your aim here is to maximize conversions. You could try doing A/B testing to check which combinations of placement, layout, color-styles, etc. work the best.

3. Update Old Posts: If your blog is relatively old – let’s say more than an year old – chances are that you have hundreds of posts on it already, if not more. However important to remember that each post has been indexed by the search engines as a separate page, will show up as a separate result in the SERP and will continue to get organic traffic as long as they’re up, even if they get buried under new posts.

For me, it is essential to update your old posts after a while; chances are that a lot of the information in that post is probably dated and could probably use an update.

Start off by opening up your analytics suite and looking at old posts which continue to get a large volume of traffic (number of views per day/week/month). Check if any of those posts could use an update. Start off with the title, and move to the content. Maybe the information is outdated and needs to be updated, maybe it needs to be optimized better for search engines, maybe you haven’t added a CTA to the post, or maybe an update is in order owning to the developments in the industry since the post went up.

After the update, it is important that you send out an email to your list, with a link to your post. Chances are that you’ve gained new subscribers since the post originally went up, and a lot of those subscribers haven’t read your post; you’ll be providing them with a comprehensive, updated post. While at the same time giving your old readers an updated version of the same post.

Plus it gives you fresh content for your blog which is never a bad thing right.

4. Social: Social integration is essential. Traffic from social media is very important and is essential for your blog’s success as well. Make sure that you add social sharing buttons, follow/like/+1 buttons and the like on various places on your blog, as well as in your posts. Make it as easy, simple and straightforward as possible for people to share your posts on social mediums such as Google Plus, Facebook and Twitter.

You aim here is maximize your social reach, and try getting the word out to as many people as possible about your blog. Traffic from social mediums, like email subscriptions, is highly targeted (since the people who have ‘liked’ your page would want to hear from you), and hence more likely to convert.

Depending on the CMS platform you’re using, social integration shouldn’t be too hard. There are tons of plugins out there on Wordpress, for instance, that let you choose which part of your blog you would want to add social icons to.

5. Navigation and Pages: Navigation is one of the most important aspects of your on-page SEO, yet for some odd reason, remains one of the most overlooked ones.

Essentially, your aim here is to make it extremely simple for any visitor to land on your website, and be able to browse around the pages and find what they’re looking for after just a few mouse clicks. For instance wouldn’t it be great if an article that was published an year ago was just a couple of mouse-clicks away?

For starters, begin by improving your navigation bar in order to provide easy access to all parts of your website, no matter where or on which page/post a visitor might be. My suggestion: assign categories and sub-categories to your posts, and display all separate categories on your nav-bar (with sub-categories displayed as a drop-down menu).

Make use of your sidebar(s) and your footer in a similar manner as well.

Moreover, use your analytics suite to check which pages your visitors land on most frequently, as well as the pages they most frequently visit after they’ve landed on your website. Try optimizing those pages for visitors (most important), and search engine crawlers. Above all, cash in on the popularity of those pages by monetizing them – convert one of them into landing pages, and add multiple instances of your CTA to all of them.