We’ve had Lily in the office for the last few weeks completing a PR & Marketing internship with us. Lily has just completed her English Language degree at the University of Birmingham, so she’s got an eye for detail and a strong knowledge of the power of words. She’s put these skills into action and turned her hand to writing a blog for us on the top things she thinks you need to know if you are an SEO Beginner. Check it out!
Building your brand and marketing your business online involves a lot of work. But what’s the point of dedicating time to how your business comes across online if it never actually makes it to your audience?
Search engines are used by people to locate information and services online, and they’re used a lot. How are you going to gain traction online if your website gets lost deep down on page 112 of the search results? The answer: SEO. This article will outline what SEO is and give you 5 top tips you’ll need if you’re an SEO Beginner.
The first thing to think about as an SEO beginner is ranking. You want your website to ‘rank’ highly, i.e. it appears on the first page of results when a customer uses a search engine. Why do you want to rank highly? Because the higher you rank, the more people will find your site, and the more people who find your site, the more business you will gain. It’s simple really.
SEO is the process that prevents your website from falling down to page 112 and makes your business visible in the big wide world of the internet, hence what it stands for: Search Engine Optimization.
The next question, then, is: how do I optimize for search engines?
Each search engine has its own algorithm for creating the ranking system. When a term is searched for, the algorithm will scan, or ‘crawl’, every webpage on the internet to find pages with information that is of high quality and relevant to the searcher’s query, and rank the pages based on that.
The judge of what is ‘of high-quality and relevant’ depends on a wide range of factors, and the key to higher rankings is making sure your website has considered these factors. Not only are there hundred of these factors, but they are constantly changing and updating.
Not to worry though; seeing as you are an SEO beginner, we’ll just cover the basics in our 5 top tips below:
SEO Beginner TOP TIP #1: KEYWORDS
When someone uses a search engine, the resulting crawl accounts for every word on the web, and then selects only pages with the words in the search term used. To allow your page to rank more highly, you need to pick a keyword before you start writing which encompasses the focus of the piece, and then make sure that keyword appears frequently in the text. This will mean that when people search your term, they find your webpage.
SEO Beginner TOP TIP #2: PAGE TITLES
Each page on the web has its official title, which may not be seen or noticed by the user. It will be noticed by the search engine, however, so it’s important to make it clear and relevant. It should act as a summary of the page topic, similar to how a book’s title can summarise its content.
SEO Beginner TOP TIP #3: LINKS BETWEEN WEBSITES
Another tip for SEO beginners is that search engines pay attention to how many other websites have linked to yours. When one web page links to another, it’s usually a positive recommendation saying that the other site is worth reading. If your site has been linked to lots of times by others, therefore, it can give your site a good reputation and the ranking system will favour you.
SEO Beginner TOP TIP #4: INTERNAL LINKING
Internal links within your site’s webpages can help search engines find out what content on your site is related and the value of that content. Linking internally will give the search engine an idea of the structure of your site and then establish a hierarchy, which means that you can apply more link value to your more important pages and posts and vice versa. Using the right internal linking strategy when you’re an SEO beginner can boost your optimization. To read more on this, click here.
SEO Beginner TOP TIP #5: FRESH QUALITY CONTENT
One last factor to prepare for when you’re an SEO beginner is your content. You want a consistent record of fresh, engaging content on your site. You also need growing numbers of quality links to your page from other sites. These things will mean that the algorithm starts to see your site as a high quality, trusted source of information and will rank it higher. For more info on the power of quality content for SEO, click here.
Remember: higher rankings lead to higher visibility which leads to more business. Consider these simple SEO beginner top tips to kickstart your search engine optimization.
Need more help with Search Engine Optimization? Or do you need guidance on creating content that will deliver traffic and leads? Get in touch with the team to find out how we can help!
