Here are 3 Things Any Beginner Must Know About SEO

Vaishak Menon

It’s 2018 and if you haven’t realised already, the SEO battle is as fierce as ever. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation, and one can’t emphasise enough on how important it is for your blog or website. This is a method that allows you to stand out and appear right at the top of the search results page, when someone searches for something that might belong to one of your webpages.

Say you run a blog on cooking. If you want a lot people to visit your page, it’s important that when someone searches on a search engine (Ex. Google, Bing, Yahoo! Etc.) for a recipe, your website’s link appears right at the top. Not buried away deeper in say, page 400. But there are over a thousand websites out there that might have the recipe.

So how do you get yours to be the one that someone lands on?

That’s exactly where Search Engine Optimization comes to play.

Now, SEO methods have changed slightly over the last couple of years, as a result of the change in the search algorithms that top search engines use to search for your query.

By the time you’re done with this article, you’ll have a better understanding of SEO and of various tools that can be used to help you with it.

DEPTH OF COVERAGE

Once upon a time, it was more or less enough to put in a bunch of frequently searched keywords into your articles to make sure that you had SEO covered. However, the present algorithms have the capacity to understand the text in your webpage and categorize various topics under a parent topic.

That’s how the search engine searches for queries. Thus it is important that your content is in-depth in nature, instead of just having hot keywords in your articles, you must try to incorporate every topic that comes under it. Make sure that your content is well structured with headings, and sub headings.

USING GOOGLE SEARCH CONSOLE

Google’s Google Search Console (GSC) is a free tool that anyone can use to help optimise their websites. Go ahead and log into this page. Now the usage of google console, although fairly simple, is a time taking process and instead of giving a written explanation, I recommend that you watch this video. It’s got an excellent explanation, and I’m sure you’ll find it to be of immense help.

Once you have a better understanding of the interface, head over to the analysis tab. Here you can view queries, impressions etc. This will help understand some of the key terms that people search for that they can find in your website. By using the words in the queries in your articles you’ll have way more views than before.

TIP: GSC is completely free of cost and can help boost your webpage by a great extent. Learning to use it is easy as well, thus making it a must learn.

PROMOTIONS

Now, this isn’t something new, promotions have always been an important method of getting word out on, well, just about anything. There are a lot of ways to promote yourself online via social media marketing. Checkout this link for more information. You could hand it over to professional social media marketing companies for a fee, or you could learn to do it yourself. You can find various courses online –  do check out websites like Udemy and Coursera.

Another really powerful way is through blogger outreach. Essentially, you have to put yourself out there in the scene. You can contact other bloggers and help each other by promoting each other’s blog by using links, and spreading word on social media. This might sound a little vague, but this article should give you and in-depth and much better understanding, including step by step instructions.

This was just a sneak-peak into the vast ocean of SEO. To make things simple, find a niche and stick to it, create unique quality content in an optimised manner and you’re bound to notice a boost in traffic in a couple of months. Keep reading up and make sure that you’re up to date with what’s happening in the SEO world.

PS: This article by Versha Trivedi is a compilation of a bunch of popular SEO tools. Some of the mentioned ones include:

1.       Wordstream

2.       Copyscape

3.       Robots.txt Generator

4.       XML Sitemap Generators

5.       GTmetrix

6.       Web Developer Toolbar

7.       SEO Quake Toolbar

8.       Hootsuite

So go on! Have a shot at SEO! Do let us know about your experiences with SEO in the comments section below and, as always, thanks for reading!