Growing a business online can be tricky, but with a simple SEO guide, things might become a little easier. A business show wants to appear on at least, the top 2 pages of a search. This is because "around 94% of web visitors don't go beyond the 1st page for their search result (Baniya, 2013). So let's get into the SEO Guide for Beginners.
What is SEO?
Firstly, we need to understand what SEO is and what the abbreviation stands for. SEO stands for search engine optimization. Which is the art of ranking high on a search engine in the unpaid section, also known as the organic listings (Patel, 2019).
Optimising a webpage to appear at the top of a search is the number one goal for SEO. When searching a certain keyword or key phrase on Google, pages with the same keyword will appear in the search but the pages with better SEO will appear before others. Which is why SEO is super important for leads and business image.
A Beginner's SEO Guide
There are a few steps to getting a better ranking through SEO. A website or webpage should be the first step, your business or product won't appear if you don't have a webpage.
Step 1 - Keyword
Typically a webpage will have a dedicated keyword/s. For example, if a page is an SEO Guide, the keyword might be 'SEO' or 'SEO Guide' because those keywords are going to be searched on a search engine. So the first step would be to pick a keyword or key phrase for that page.
Step 2 - Content
Now a keyword has been chosen, the content of the page needs to match the keyword. There are a number of factors that will affect the SEO's performance. Here's a shortened list of some of these factors:
- Subheadings
- The density of the keyword within the body
- Image Alt Tags
- Webpage slug
- The first sentence of the webpage
- Many more...
Yoast SEO is an awesome WordPress plugin that breaks down a webpage and will analyse the best and worst aspects of the page for SEO. Using this plugin can help your WordPress site but if your website doesn't use WordPress, there are other alternatives, such as HIKE.
Step 3 - Meta Box
Once your content is complete, the next step would be to work on the meta description, slug and SEO title. These three elements are what will appear in the search engine. The SEO Title is will be the link to the page that appears in a search. So curating a title that people would click on which include the keyword is ideal.
The Slug is the ending of your website URL. So anything after the first forward slash is part of the slug. it would be fitting to have your keyword within the slug but in most cases, that isn't possible.
A meta description is another important aspect of SEO. It is basically a short description for that specific page, as all the other elements, try to include your keyword in the meta description at least once. Keeping in mind that the meta description has a recommended character length between 120 and 156 characters in length.
Other Tools
There are loads of resources and tools for SEO available for everyone. Here are a few that could help you out:
Hopefully, this guide helped build your SEO skills and your webpages rankings. SEO is a tricky skill to master and is always changing.
Sort it all out with Fonseka Innovations
