You may know it, but we need to start right with the definition of SEO. So SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization.
SEO is a broader term encompassing various methods and strategies with a common end goal.
This goal is to optimize a website to reach the top of search engine results against a particular set of search queries.
An interesting thing about SEO is that it is not limited to specific strategies and methods.
SEO keeps evolving to ensure that the optimized website sustains its position on SERPs (Search Engine Results).
Regular updates introduced by Google and other search engines urge SEO professionals to develop new strategies to achieve their goals.
Are you looking to make a career in the field of SEO? If you answer yes, you must know its essentials before starting your venture.
If you succeed in gripping the concepts of SEO, a promising career awaits you.
In the modern digital era, SEO has become highly important. People search for a business or brand before buying anything from it.
Therefore, brands and businesses spend a lot of budget on SEO of their websites to gain organic traffic from search results.
SEO has become so important that if a business's website that runs a brick-and-mortar outlet fails to appear on search results, its chances for generating outstanding revenue become limited.
Considering the importance of SEO and the interest of freshers and people who want to switch careers, we have put together some valuable details about the basic principles of SEO.
These details will serve as a guide for freshers and help them kickstart their career in SEO. Further details about the essentials of SEO are given below.
Keyword Research
The entire SEO revolves around a basic element, generally known as keywords. The term keyword refers to a term or phrase frequently used by the targeted audience to search for anything relevant to a particular industry, niche, or topic.
The practice named keyword research is the process of finding terms used by the targeted audience frequently to search products, services, or information related to the website of a business.
As an SEO expert, it is your job to think of some seed keywords that are related to the trade of the website.
For example, a website trading attire would focus on T-shirts, Polo Shirts, Denim, and other relevant keywords.
However, these words will only serve as seeds. You can't just focus on these and target them too much.
You only need to keep these seed keywords in your mind and perform keyword research to find valuable keywords capable of bringing traffic to a website. You should also run competitors' keyword analysis to identify opportunities and understand what keywords they are ranking for to stay competitive.
Here are some key factors you need to consider while performing keyword research, and you will be able to get more traffic for your website.
- Keywords used by competitors working in the same niche.
- Proper keyword research tools ensure you don’t miss out on valuable ones.
- Analysis of search volume for various keywords.
- Keeping an eye out for keyword difficulty and traffic potential.
- You must also consider the search intent for various keywords to prioritize a few over others.
- CPC (Cost-Per-Click) can be a helpful metric for deciding the importance of keywords.
Website Content
Now that you know keywords are an essential element of SEO, you must understand how to use them.
Keywords find their frequent use in the website content. Therefore, you must strategically adjust high-volume search keywords in your website content.
This practice will help you ensure that your web pages appear at the top of search results whenever the interested audience searches for a relevant topic.
You can also take the help of blog posts and product descriptions for this purpose.
However, while writing content, you must avoid a few things to adjust keywords and bring traffic to your website. Avoiding these factors will help you ensure
- No Keyword Stuffing
Keyword stuffing refers to the overuse of keywords in the content. Back in the old days, when search engines didn’t focus user experience on the web, many websites used to stay on the top of search results because of keyword stuffing.
This practice involved frequent use of keywords in website content that wasn’t valuable for the targeted audience.
However, you may face penalties because of this practice these days. Instead, make your content valuable and adjust keywords in content where they make sense.
- No Plagiarism
Another thing you need to avoid while publishing content on your website is the absence of plagiarism.
It is considered unethical, disliked by the targeted audience, and discouraged by search engines. It is also against the optimum user experience.
As a result, you may see a significant dip in website traffic after publishing plagiarized content.
The best way to avoid it is to check the plagiarism of the content using an online plagiarism detector.
Find a free plagiarism checker on the web for this purpose. Once you find plagiarized patches in content, eradicate them by paraphrasing sentences with the help of quillbot paraphrasing tool.
Building Inbound Links
Another basic factor that holds a key value in SEO is inbound links.
The term ‘backlinks’ is also used to refer to inbound links. These backlinks are responsible for bringing organic traffic to your website.
According to UppercutSEO.Com, The process of building inbound links is called link building. It is the hardest part of any SEO strategy.
The importance of link building can be reflected by a single phrase, “the more backlinks coming to your website, the more will be its probability to rank better”.
In addition to helping you rank your site better, these backlinks can also help you drive traffic from various sources to your website and make more conversions. You can collaborate with a reputable SaaS link building agency to ensure that your backlink strategy not only boosts your site's ranking but also effectively drives traffic.
Link builders must put time, thought, and energy into building sustainable link-building strategies to help rank their websites in the SERPs.
You can build backlinks through various strategies. We will discuss a few here.
- Guest Blogging
Guest blogging refers to publishing content created by your marketing team on another website.
The website used for guest blogging should be authoritative, working in the relevant niche to your trade.
For example, if your website offers household products for sale on the web. You can take the help of a blogging website with a strong ranking in the household niche to create a backlink that points to your website.
The search engines will weigh the rank of the web page and website pointing to your website and rank your website accordingly.
Lastly, you should work with an SEO outsourcing company to maximize your link-building efforts and improve your website’s overall search engine performance.
- Social Media
Social media has become a hub of information related to almost everything.
It has become much more than just a source for people to interact with each other.
Now, most internet users access various social media platforms to gain information.
Some social media platforms even allow users to post blogs. Search engines also consider the social media interaction of websites as a ranking factor.
Hence, SEO professionals can use social media to generate backlinks pointing to the website and use it as a source of organic traffic.
Search engines also value the traffic coming from social media to websites and rank accordingly.
Technical SEO
As a beginner stepping into the field of SEO, you can’t overlook the importance of technical SEO.
It also plays a key role in improving a website's SERP (Search Engine Result Page) rankings.
Search engines use crawl bots to index web pages.
Therefore, there is no chance for the appearance of web pages that go unindexed.
If you want all the important pages of your website to be indexed, then focusing on technical SEO is a must.
Here are some important things you need to know about Technical SEO.
- Crawling and Indexing
The crawlers that crawl the web grab content from various pages to help search engines determine the relevancy of content featured on a particular page.
Therefore, you need to use a robots.txt file to direct crawlers used for indexation purposes regarding which page is available for the visit.
Additionally, a meta tag named robots tells crawlers about a page's index or no index.
Technical SEO also helps you determine the crawl rate (which refers to the crawl delay) in the robots.txt file.
This crawl rate helps you adjust the crawling frequency of bots on different website pages.
Additionally, it is also seen as a key factor in the determination of the crawl budget of a website.
- Schema Markup
Another essential element in technical SEO is the schema markup of a website.
This markup helps search engines understand the content of a website better.
It also helps you showcase various features of your website to search engines that will ultimately make it stand out from the rest of the competition.
This markup is written in XML (Extensible Markup Language).
Conclusion
SEO keeps on evaluating over time. However, as a beginner just stepping into the field of SEO, you must understand its basics and start working on them. You can’t move on to advanced concepts and methodologies of SEO until or unless you have a substantial grip on the basics of the SEO strategy.
We have discussed the basics of SEO in detail to make this article a helpful guide for beginners who want to kickstart their careers in this field.
This article will help you determine the right direction and lead you to success. We wish you luck with your career in the amazing field of SEO.
