Of all the different components of digital marketing, search engine optimization, or SEO, is often the most confusing for beginners.
SEO is incredibly important for your business, as it determines how your brand can be found online and how high you rank on search engine results pages.
Without an SEO strategy, it’s unlikely that you will rank high enough for internet searches to be found by your target audiences.
But with so many specific SEO terms and advanced tactics, it can easily become overwhelming for beginners who don’t have a background in SEO.
Thankfully, with just a few simple actions, even beginners can improve their website rankings.
Read on to learn more about what SEO tips for beginners are best for your brand.
1. Complete Keyword Research
One of the main ways that your pages are found by searchers on search engines is through the use of keywords.
Keywords are the specific words and phrases that are entered into the search bar to help find relevant pages.
All of your website pages, blogs, and even social media posts should use keywords to help rank for those terms and appear higher on search engine results pages.
While researching keywords, look for ones that have a high search volume but low ranking difficulty.
You should also look for both short-tail keywords of a word or two and long-tail keywords that are longer phrases that can be added to your pages.
This helps you rank for more searches and have a higher chance of being found online.
2. Develop Long-Form Content
Long-form content is a piece of published writing that is between 1,000 and 7,500 words.
These longer pieces of content have a higher chance of ranking for multiple keywords and addressing more than one relevant topic.
That can help your content get noticed by search engines and improve your brand’s authority in the eyes of search algorithms.
Long-form content includes things like:
- Detailed blog posts
- eBooks
- Whitepapers
- Case studies
- Product guides
- Brochures
- Data sheets
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3. Tell Google Which Pages Not to Crawl
Crawling is a term often used in regards to SEO that beginners might not know.
When a search engine like Google “crawls” a page, it uses a software called a web crawler to discover information on your webpages like links, content, and keywords.
This is the way that Google finds new and updated web pages and indexes them based on their relevance, context, and value.
While crawling is important for your pages to be found and ranked, there might be some pages that you don’t want the search engines to look at.
Those might be pages like thank you pages, landing pages for ad campaigns, internal policy or compliance pages, or your own website’s search results.
Adding a robots.txt file to those pages tells the crawl software to avoid those pages.
4. Create Easily Digestible Content
Creating content for your website and web pages don’t just have to appeal to the search engine algorithms. Your content also needs to be valuable to human readers.
First of all, this helps your content become more popular for audiences, and it also helps the algorithms see the value in the content you produce as it resonates with your key audience segments.
When you create content, you want to make sure it is easily digestible for your readers.
That means that it needs to be grammatically correct with no spelling errors or grammar mistakes.
It also should be written in a way that is accessible to all audience members, even those who aren’t experts in your industry.
You might want to avoid insider industry terms that can alienate some audiences.
5. Create Unique Page Titles
The title of your page is an important SEO element that many brands don’t understand the importance of.
Your title tells both readers and search algorithms what the page is about and the type of content that the page will have on it.
Each page title you create should be unique and accurate to the page it is on.
Some brands and companies will throw the same generic page titles on multiple pages, which can confuse your audiences and the search engine algorithms and hurt your site’s chances of ranking high.
You should work to create a page structure where each page has a unique name that is informative, accurate, and easily understood.
6. Accurately Describe Page Contents
The page title is the first step in accurately describing the contents of a page, but there are also other areas that help both readers and algorithms understand what each web page on your website is about.
One of the things we have already discussed is the keywords on the page. You wouldn’t want your pages to rank for keywords that aren’t relevant to the topic at hand.
Another element that is important for determining the contents of a page is the meta title. This is an alternative title that is used on the backend of the webpage.
The meta description is another important element that can be used to create uniqueness and individuality in your pages.
This is a brief description of a page, and will often appear under the title in a search result link.
7. Use Headings and Formatting
The ways in which you go about labeling and formatting your web pages are also important.
Each web page should have only one H1 title, which is the main title of your page. From there you can create sections and subheaders using H2, H3, and H4 title tags.
This helps create a system on your pages that is easily understood by both audiences and search engines.
Other ways to improve the formatting of your web pages include using bullet points and numbered lists to break down information and create snippets.
You can also use small paragraphs and white space to create copy and text that is easier to read than heavy, dense paragraphs of information.
8. Plan Your Homepage Navigation and Site Hierarchy
Your site’s navigation and hierarchy are incredibly important to the rankings of your web pages online.
As mentioned earlier, each page needs its own title and, therefore, its own URL. These unique URLs help to create the page lists and navigation of your website.
Your URL structure helps search engine algorithms see which pages are linked to others, which are more important in your structure, and which are subcategory pages.
Your website’s homepage navigation can be a great tool for putting together your site hierarchy.
It gives your readers and the search engine algorithms an idea of how your site is structured, which pages are dropdowns of main pages, and how the flow of your website moves people from page to page.
9. Provide Readers with What They Want
SEO often gives brands the wrong idea that they need to be focusing on the algorithms and not on their audiences. However, the opposite is true.
As search engine algorithms update and become more advanced, they pay more attention to the types of pages and content that interest readers and provide accurate, relevant information.
Website visitors want to be able to easily navigate through your site, find the information they are looking for, and engage with your content.
By focusing on creating a website journey and customer experience that brings readers back for more, your website rankings and authority with search engines like Google will follow.
This allows you to create a strong website with powerful, compelling content that appeals to your audiences and search engines.
While SEO might seem overwhelming on the surface, by just taking a few SEO tips for beginners and applying them to your brand, you can see a major improvement.
SEO is a long-term strategy that you constantly need to be working on in order to see the best results, rise to the top of the search engine results pages, and grow your brand’s reputation.
There’s always room for improvement with SEO, even if you aren’t sure where to begin.
Taking our SEO maturity assessment can help you discover where you need to go next to really take control of your strategy.
Click on the link above to discover where your strategy falls on the maturity scale and learn what gaps can be filled and improved on in the future.
