Seo for beginners: an easy  introduction to seo basics

For a couple of years now I‘ve been a member of several SEO Facebook Groups. These groups are where experts help people with little or no prior knowledge on SEO with tips and tricks to improve their websites and rank higher on Google.

On these groups I noticed two things: First, SEO can be very daunting to the layman. There’s just so much to take into account: Meta keywords, page speed, image descriptions or optimizing for local search. For people who just want to build a simple web shop or blog SEO can seem something that is very detailed, technical and takes a lot of time.  Something best left to experts.

Second, the experts in these groups would for the most part give excellent advice. Most of these experts are people working for years in the SEO business, either as freelance consultants or in corporate. But, while much of the given advice is helpful, it still can be too detailed and technical at times for the layman.

SEO can be mastered if you invest a little time and effort

Now, I know from experience, you don’t have to be a complete expert on SEO in order to improve your website. There are a couple of easy SEO basics for beginners that you can master if  you’re willing to invest a little bit of time.

In this article I will give several SEO tips you can use to improve your website without having to spend a lot of money on hiring an SEO Expert or the need to study every aspect of it in more detail. The basics of SEO aren’t that hard to master. But I must warn you: while these methods themselves are easy to learn, they will take time to implement.

What you will learn as a beginner about SEO

In this article I will touch on a couple of points that will give you a pretty good idea where to start with SEO:

• What is SEO
• Is SEO necessary
• Keyword Research
• Improving the Experience of your Users (visitors(
• Installing the Yoast or Rank Math Plugin
• Creating Backlinks and Internal Links
• Write a great quantity of high quality content
• Patience!
• Write content that is relevant to your audience

What is SEO

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is the strategy to ‘optimize’ your website/youtube channel in order to rank on the first page of the Google Search Results (also called SERP). If your website can be found on the first page of Google it means more organic traffic, which means more visitors (which in turn, means more clients and money ☺ 

Moz has an excellent, very extensive A to Z guide on every aspect of SEO, which you can find here. SEO is a so called holistic approach on marketing and improving your website. Meaning that there’s not just one method to get result, there are many methods. 

Is SEO necessary?

Whatever your business is, either owning a web shop or writing a blog, you need to have some basic understanding of online marketing and SEO.

SEO is absolutely vital in getting organic traffic that is free to your website. And you do want traffic, don’t you? More traffic means more visitors and ultimately more clients and money. Off course, you can invest in online ad campaigns, for instance on LinkedIn or Facebook.

But if you’ve got a small budget, investing time and energy in SEO is your best bet.

Key word research

The first you want to do is research the topics you want to create content about. With regards to a website (or podcast or Youtubechannel) this is also called: Keyword Research.

Whether you’re blogger or youtuber, your potential audience will find you through different keywords they type in on Google or Youtube.  So for every article or video you want to create you need to do a little bit of research beforehand on the different phrases or keywords to insert in your content. For instance in this article I researched and used the keyword phrase ‘SEO for beginners’ to start with. 

For your research you can use a combination of free and paid Keyword tools like Google, Google Trends, the excellent KW Finder (which I use myself), Answerthepublic and Ubersuggest. Whatever works for you best.

Or you can use paid Keyword Tools like KeySearch (an excellent tool for marketers with a smaller budget) or Semrush. Next to that, you can use AI like ChatGPT as well for your research. Read for instance this article on how to conduct Keyword Research 

The trick is to research  so called ‘long term keyword phrases’, that is a long sentence containing several keywords on which your article can be found. It should have at least 4 to 6 possible keywords. The more keywords, the bigger the chance of someone finding your article. So ‘SEO for Beginners’ becomes ‘easy SEO basics for beginners’ or easy SEO tips any beginner can master’.

You then want  to insert these keywords in a natural way into your text. For anyone reading the text the content should be relevant and legible. It should not  be obvious that this is a text  optimized for Google. Even though it is.

A simple way to start with keyword research is to type your topic into the Google search bar and see what pops up. But you can find a more extensive guide on Keyword Research here. That article will help you with both free and paid methods.

Improve your User Experience

The User Experience (also called UX) is basically an indication on how easy it is for visitors to your site to navigate. Can they find the right page or topic without any hassle? Is the menu clear and straightforward? Is everything readable on both PC’s and mobile devices? And do your pages load fast enough?

The User Experience (UX) of your website is a very important ranking factor for Google. It literally means how your audience  experiences your website.  In short, do your visitors have a good experience on your website and can they easily find what they’re looking for? 

In order to rank the User Experience Google will analyze the behavior of your visitors and test every page. The better the UX the higher your overall ranking factor will be.  So you should offer your visitors a good User Experience. 

Now, I can hear you think:’ This all sounds like a whole lot of tinkering! I’m not a web developer, I just want a simple design that is very easy to build by a beginner!’

Don’t worry about that! Nowadays if you’re using CMS (website builders) like WordPress or Joomla you can use Themes that already have these SEO features in mind. For instance, if you want to start a travel blog, install the ‘Zermat’ or the Ultra theme.  Or the ‘Newspaper’ theme if you’re building a newsportal.  WordPress and the different themes already have many features that are important for good SEO built-in. You just have to build the site within a couple of hours and start creating content!

Besides that you can test if your website is suitable by using a couple of free online tools, offered by Google.

To test if your website is mobile friendly use this tool

And to see the page loading speed of your website use: Google Speed Insights

These tools will offer advice on how to fix any problems, but you can easily fix these by installing free plugins like WP3 Rocket.

Install the Yoast or the Rankmath Plugin

As soon as you’ve built your website in WordPress, one of the first things you need to do is to install and activate the Yoast SEO Plugin (which you can find here). Or install the best next alternative: the Rankmath plugin. These handy tools are perfect for both SEO newbies and experts. 

After installing one of these tools it will analyze every page and post on your website and give you suggestions on much needed improvements.  It is very easy to use and a must have for any web manager. You can get either the free version, which has plenty of options, or get the paid, premium version.

What these tools do is basically walk you through every new blogpost or webpage point by point and have you fill in the right keywords, metadescriptions etc. And give you advice on which paragraphs you should optimize.

Creating backlinks and internal links

Both backlinks and internal links are still at the moment a very important factor in ranking high on Google. So for that reason, any website owner should consider linkbuilding as part of his/her arsenal.

A backlink is simply another website with some authority linking to your site. A backlink from another site to yours is excellent SEO practice for the following two reasons: first you will get traffic from that site. For instance, if a website with 3000 daily visitors is linking to an article or page on your website, you can expect a lot more organic traffic.

Second, Google will start noticing these backlinks and give your site a higher authority as well, resulting in a higher ranking. Now, Google itself claims it doesn’t take any backlinks into account, but almost every SEO expert I know has better success with a website when he/she also uses backlinks.

How do you get backlinks? One way is to contact other sites and ask them straight up to link to your articles. You can do this if you mention this site already (you have to offer something beforehand of course) and if both sites complement each other. For example, a travel blog can receive a backlink from a blog about hotels.

Do however watch out for using so called ‘black hat’ practices to get links. Those are methods that Google considers cheating. Buying backlinks or trading backlinks fall in those category. Google will penalize your site if caught, which means you will be relegated to a lower ranking. And you don’t want that!

Another, perfectly legal, method to get backlinks is to create unique content. By unique I mean content that only could be created by you or your staff. It can be an interview or a nice article containing some new statistics you’ve created. Other websites will then in turn use these articles as a source and link to you! Voila, another backlink!

Internal links

Internal links are links on your website linking to other pages and articles on your own site. For instance, this is a link to my home page and this is a link to my about page. Concerning page authority, Google counts 2 internal links as 1 backlink. So use internal links where you can! It also is good for your User Experience.

Write a great quantity of high quality content

In order for Google (or YouTube if you’re using video as a medium) to notice your site you now have to create a continuous stream of quality content. How much? Well, according to experienced marketer Miles Beckler at least 90 pieces of content. 90 blogposts of about a 1000 words on average if you’re a writer or 90 videos if you’re a YouTuber. Other marketers will give an amount of 30 content pieces.

In my opinion 30 pieces of content is really the bare minimum to get some attention from Google. Of course it all depends on how much time you can invest in writing content. But write your ass off! 

Regarding the quality of your content, strive for quality, but not perfection. Of course you should try to write an article as well as you can. But you also need to know what needs improving and what kind of topics your audience likes the best. 

For that you need to give Google some time to analyze and research your website. Google wants to find out what your website is all about and start sending organic traffic to articles that deserve it. With only 10 or 15 blogposts, this is quite difficult, so Google will hardly send any traffic your way. So start writing!

Besides that, with a sizable amount or posts and articles you can analyze what kind of topics will get the attention of your audience and start focusing more on those.

Again, nowadays, AI can help you with this. Either with outright writing the articles for you. Allthough I would still highly advice on at least editing these types of content before posting.

But where AI really shines is in helping you with the research and ideation proces.

Patience

Be Patient! Don’t give up too soon! After you’ve built your site and started posting content it will take at least 2 to 3 months for Google to rank your website and start sending organic traffic your way.  This process may take even longer if you didn’t sign up your website at your Google Search Console. Which I highly advise doing as soon as you’ve built your site. You can find the instructions by Google here.

The moment Google has ranked your site you can expect some 10 to 20 visitors a day through organic traffic. Then it’s up to you to keep the momentum going. Analyze what kind of topics your audience wants, improve your content and keep on writing!

Besides that, you can also use other methods to get traffic through other means. Social Media, forums or if you have a little money, online ads. At the moment LinkedIn is excellent if you offer content about B2B topics, freelancing, consulting or career advice.

Write content that is relevant to your audience

According to recent interviews with Google employees the most important ranking factor is relevance! Good keyword research, backlinks etc., those are all important. But the number 1 ranking factor is relevance. Meaning that you need to create content that is relevant to your audience.

Write content that your audience wants to read and addresses the needs and problems they need fixing. For instance, a while back I was doing some research for a new website on E-bikes I was planning on building. I came across an article called ‘The top 10 best low budget e-bikes’. This article ranked very, very low. Somewhere on the 3^rd page of Google. Why? Well, the first 3 paragraphs were a long description on the history of e-bikes. Interesting, but I could imagine many visitors who just were looking for the best low budget e-bikes left this site, looking for another article that addressed their search phrase.

Google will notice this. So keep your content relevant. A well written article that almost immediately lists the best low budget e-bikes won’t experience this. Google will reward that article with a higher ranking and in turn more visitors.

Conclusion

By now you have learned about the easy SEO basics for beginners (notice the keyword phrase? ☺ ).

You have learned about:

• Keyword Research
• Improving Your website’s User Experience (UX)
• The importance of both Backlinks and Internal Links
• Writing a great quantity of high quality content
• Patience
• And finally the number 1 ranking factor: relevance

These SEO methods are perfect for the beginner to master. I am convinced they are easy to learn for almost anyone. However, as I’ve stated in the beginning: they will take time to implement and bear fruit.

In the coming weeks I will write a more detailed article explaining in more detail on every aspect of these SEO basics how you can master these. Well, almost every aspect. Patience is something you need to learn on your own ☺.

A final word: I realize that not everybody who owns a website has the time for an SEO strategy. But for anyone doing business online it is absolutely vital to have a SEO strategy.

Bart