SEO For Beginners - An Introduction

Hey there Side Hustlers. I thought I’d start a blog post about SEO for beginners to help those who are just starting out.

What is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. Essentially it is what it says, optimising your website for search engines, so in the over saturated world of the internet you can take steps to improve how your website is seen by search engines, namely Google but applies to all search engines, and improve your "ranking" in search results, and thus increasing your chances of people finding your website "organically" without you having to pay for advertisements. This traffic is called "organic traffic".

The Three Types Of SEO

There are essentially three components to SEO that you can work on to build your organic traffic:

Technical SEO

Technical SEO refers to the practice of optimizing a website's technical aspects to improve its visibility and performance in search engine rankings. It involves making strategic changes and improvements to the underlying structure, code, and configuration of a website to ensure that search engines can effectively crawl, index, and understand the content. This includes things such as website speed and performance, website crawlability and indexability (the ease at which a search engine can categorise/rank/index your website), mobile friendliness etc.

On Page SEO

On page SEO refers to the practice of optimizing individual web pages to improve their search engine rankings and attract relevant organic traffic. This involves various techniques and strategies applied directly to the content and HTML source code of a webpage. The goal of on-page SEO is to make a webpage more understandable to search engines, helping them determine the topic, relevance, and quality of the content, which in turn can lead to higher visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs). This is achieved in part by making sure your website content is quality content, with the relevant use of appropriate and strategically used keywords and that the search engines consider your content to be of value to your customers.

Off Page SEO

Off page SEO refers to the set of techniques and strategies that are employed outside of a website to improve its search engine rankings and overall online visibility. Unlike on-page SEO, which focuses on optimizing elements within a website, off-page SEO involves activities that take place on other websites, platforms, and online communities. The primary goal of off-page SEO is to enhance a website's authority, relevance, and credibility in the eyes of search engines like Google, which can ultimately lead to higher organic (unpaid) search engine rankings. The main focus of off page SEO is to drive traffic to your website via links, called backlinks, to your website from the content posted elsewhere on the internet.

What are Search Engine Results Page (SERP) Rankings?

SERPS are where keywords you are targeting for your business are used by search engines to return your page as a result for your potential customer. Your ranking in the SERP is a direct correlation to its perceived content "authority" based on the information you have provided for the keyword in content on your website, compared to your competitors. The higher you rank the more the search engine believes your site and its content to be an authority on the particular subject your keyword matches. These rankings will be discussed further down under the section Domain Authority and Page Authority.

What Are Keywords?

Keywords are single words or phrases (long tail keywords) that represent what your website and its content is about. In relation to optimising your website for search engines, they are the words and phrases that searchers, your potential customers, enter into search engines to find what they are looking for.

If you narrow down everything on each page of your website, including the written word, the images, any videos etc, to simple words and phrases like a title, these are your primary keywords for that page. For example: If you are selling gardening products, and you have a collection of shovels that you want to sell, your primary keywords for your shovels collection may include single words such as "shovel", "spade", and phrases such as "post hole shovel" and "tree planting shovel". As a website owner and content creator, its important to have the keywords on your page relevant to what your customers are searching for, to increase the chances of finding your content amidst the plethora of available content on the internet.

Why are keyword rankings important?

Ranking for keywords relevant to your business are extremely important when it comes to getting your website in front of people and increasing traffic to your store. In simple terms, there are two types of traffic that comes to your store:

1. Paid Traffic: this is where you pay for ads to get people to come to your site. Examples of this include google ads, social media ads like facebook sponsored posts, instagram, tiktok etc.

2. Organic Traffic: this is where your website appears in search results for keywords when someone is searching for a particular keyword or phrase.

The more authority your website has on a particular keyword, the higher it will rank in SERPs. and as such the more likely it is that the person searching for your keyword will click on your link and visit your site.

Ignite Visibility conducted research in 2020 that demonstrates the Click Through Rate (CTR) of customer clicks based on SERPs:

• Google Search Position 1: Click through rate of 43.32%

• Google Search Position 2: Click through rate of 37.36%

• Google Search Position 3: Click through rate of 29.90%

• Google Search Position 4: Click through rate of 19.38%

• Google Search Position 5: Click through rate of 10.95%

• Google Search Position 6: Click through rate of 10%

• Google Search Position 7: Click through rate of 5.28%

• Google Search Position 8: Click through rate of 4.13%

• Google Search Position 9: Click through rate of 4.13%

• Google Search Position 10: Click through rate of 3.11%

As you can see, if your website does not rank in the top 3-5 positions, the chances of someone clicking on your link decreases significantly very quickly. Essentially, if you aren't in the top 10 of a SERP for a keyword you want to rank for, you have a lot of work to do to get any organic traffic to your site.

Keyword Research - What Keywords Should I Use And How Often?

Although this may sound simple, it’s not just a matter of picking words and including them in your content. The reason for this is that keywords generally come with a difficulty rating. The more the keyword is used, the more competitive it becomes, and therefore the harder it becomes to rank well for it. Long tail keywords are generally easier to rank for but may not attract as much traffic volume (number of users searching and clicking for the that particular phrase), because they require your potential customer to type the entire phrase, or very close to it, for your site to be listed in the SERP.

There are plenty of free and subscription keyword research tools around. If you are serious about your business, I believe you can’t go past semrush.com as a paid subscription tool as it provides a complete solution. In the meantime, while getting started, a free keyword research tool like Spyfu is a great easy starting point.

Keyword Stuffing - Don't Fall Into This Trap

What is keyword stuffing? Well google defines keyword stuffing as "the practice of loading a webpage with keywords in an attempt to manipulate a site's ranking in Google search results. Often these keywords appear in a list or group, or out of context (not as natural prose). Filling pages with keywords or numbers results in a negative user experience and can harm your site's ranking. Focus on creating useful, information-rich content that uses keywords appropriately and in context.

Examples of keyword stuffing include:

• Lists of phone numbers without substantial added value

• Blocks of text that list cities and states that a webpage is trying to rank for

• Repeating the same words or phrases so often that it sounds unnatural, for example: We sell shovels. Our custom shovels are handmade. If you're thinking of buying a custom shovel, including our post hole shovel, tree planting shovel, flat shovel, and general-purpose shovel, please contact our custom shovel specialists at custom.shovels@example.com.

So don't get into the habit of just dumping keywords into your content. The easiest way to ensure you don't stuff your content with keywords is to consider the natural flow of the document, and only use the keywords as they apply in how the reader would interpret the content correctly.

Domain Authority and Page Authority

I spoke earlier about your websites "authority" compared to other sites in the same niche, and likely to be using the same, if not similar, keywords.

Domain Authority is the "authority" or perceived value of your website as a whole, while page authority is the level of "authority" attributed to an individual page. The factors that determine both are both essentially the same, however the domain authority is generally the one looked at from a website's ranking ability.

The best way to influence any measurement of authority, whether it be domain or page authority, is to improve your link profile. Link profile refers to the number of links connecting your site, or page, to other websites. This is achieved by getting external links from other high-authority websites, called backlinks, to point back to your site as a reference, and to consider outbound links to other sites to validate or support your content. For example, I used the semrush.com link earlier in this document as an outbound link. I will also be creating backlinks from other locations back to this document to increase the "authority" on this page, thus making it easier to find and rank against other articles that discuss the same topic. This creates a perceived "vote of confidence" for the content and as such, increases the authority of your page.

Domain Authority is measured by a number of websites, each with their own metrics, however the industry standard is a site called moz.com. You can quickly and easily see your own, or any other websites domain authority by simply entering the URL you want to view.

How Much Content Should I Write?

This will depend on the intent of your content. Are you writing a blog post, or a product description? Typically, a product description should be no more than about 250-600 words, while a blog post can be as much as 2500 words (this blog post is approx. 1600 words). Remember, the key here is to keep the reader’s attention just long enough to achieve what it is you are trying to achieve. If it’s a Call To Action like having the customer hitting the BUY button, you don’t really want to waffle on with stuff that is just going to bore them and have them look for the solution/product elsewhere.

So, in summary, the key to optimising your website for search engines like Google, is writing good, relevant content that captures the readers attention, utilising effective keywords to help search engines place your content in their search results pages (SERP’s), and sourcing other websites that would link back to yours to increase your backlink profile, thus increasing your domain authority and helping you rank higher in the keyword searches.

Steve…