SEO Guide: Everything a Beginner Needs to Know

Key Takeaways

• SEO improves your website visibility for people searching for your products or services, with 25% of users clicking the first organic result
• Search engines use bots to crawl, index, and rank pages based on over a hundred signals that cannot be paid or bribed
• Choose keywords wisely by balancing search volume and ranking difficulty, and avoid keyword stuffing which hurts rankings
• Build quality backlinks to authoritative sites and internal links to help users navigate your website
• Optimise images with ALT text containing keywords since images themselves are not crawlable by search engines
• Keep page load speed under one second and ensure your site is fully optimised for mobile devices

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SEO is a word you must have heard if you have ANYTHING to do with the online world. It is short of “Search Engine Optimization”. SEO is the process through which you improve your website/pages visibility for people who are searching for products/services related to your business.

As a thumb of rule, the better visibility your page has, the more chances you have to grab the attention of potential clients. According to research, almost 25% of people on Google click on the first organic search result that shows. This shows just how important it is to rank higher on search engines and that is possible only through SEO.

How Does SEO Work?

How does SEO even work? How do search engines rank pages? On what basis does it work? Bing, Google and other search engines make use of small bots that crawl all over the web looking for pages and indexing them. It works just like a library. When you ask a librarian about a book, she/he immediately provides you with one based on your requirements. The same is the case with internet bots.

There are more than a hundred ranking signals and factors that a single website is judged on. No one has any idea what all these are. But, over time and with experience, many factors have been shortlisted as playing a major impact on SEO ranking. The beauty of SEO is that you can’t pay or bribe search engines to increase your ranking. No sort of payment or sponsorships will make you rank higher.

5 Tactics For SEO Optimization

1. Primary and Secondary Keyword Optimization

Keywords play a big role in making your website rank higher. A keyword is a word or phrase that people type in the search engine while looking for something. For instance, “Hot interior design trends for the year 2026” or “interior design” are both keywords. One is long-tail and the other one is short-tail.

Usually, shorter keywords have a much higher search volume than longer ones. This can make it difficult to rank on but more relevant. If you know EXACTLY who your audience is, you can go for long-tail keywords.

Many tools allow you to get industry-specific keywords. Always check the keyword search volume and also the rank difficulty. If a keyword has a huge search volume but is VERY difficult to rank on, it is not going to be worth the effort and investment.

So, choose keywords wisely. Keep a check on the keyword density and don’t overstuff your content with keywords. That negatively impacts your website and makes you rank lower on search engines.

• Link Wisely

Backlinks and hyperlinks are excellent ways to increase SEO scores. You should have outbound links to authoritative websites. This will make your content more creditable. Also, add internal links. This will link your content to other parts of your website and help the users navigate and explore your website.

• Image Optimization

Images make content more readable and understandable. Not only this, they help in increasing SEO ranking. They make content stand out in search engines. The biggest mistake people make is just to add images and sit back and assume that their SEO ranking will increase.

Honestly, images are not crawlable. It is the image description that shows up in search engines. For that, you need to add ALT-Text. When you ALT and write a keyword, it shows search engines that your image SHOULD BE Indexed along with this keyword.

• Page Loading Speed

Adding too many images, videos and graphics to a webpage can significantly slow the load speed of the page. The webpage loading speed has been an important factor for SEO ranking since 2018. So, you need to keep it under a second. If it takes any longer than that, your user is going to switch to some other page.

• Mobile Use Optimization

The majority of people view websites on mobile phones and other smart devices. Therefore, it is important to optimize your webpage to be used on these devices. Google recently announced that mobile-first indexing is soon going to be a thing. Sometimes, functions that work well on bigger screens don’t do so well on smaller ones. All these things should be kept in mind before launching a mobile version of your webpage.

Wrapping Up

As you can see, SEO is not as simple as adding a few images and visuals to your content. A very important thing to realize it is an ongoing process that needs to be updated and monitored for best results. Get in touch with one of our team to learn more about SEO and how we can help optimise your website. Contact us!

References

https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2018/07/search-ads-speedhttps://developers.google.com/web/updates/2018/07/search-ads-speed