This is a complete guide to what SEO is and what is it for. At the end of this article, you will be able to know everything about Search Engine OPtimiagion and you will be able to rank your site higher in search engines.
What SEO is: SEO Stands For
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization.
What SEO Means
To understand what SEO is we should probably begin from what SEO means. SEO means it is a process of getting organic traffic by adjusting your post for certain keywords. This is a way of getting unpaid search results on search engines.
How Much Does SEO Cost
If you do it yourself, SEO does not cost you a thing. The only cost it has is time and energy. You need to follow few steps and do the work. That is all it takes. This is why you need to understand what SEO is.
What SEO is and Why SEO Matters
Once you understand what SEO is, then you need to understand why it matters. SEO is a way to get an organic traffic to your site, with out paying for it. Inorder to get ther you need to rank for a certain keyword, so that your website comes on top of google search for that specific keyword.
The other way of getting traffic is paying for it. You can do that on search engines or social media. Google adwords or facebook advertising are few of these tools.
Adveritzment is an expensive task. Althought many markerters advise to advertise before things get more expensive, it is impossible to do that for every post or for every product. Many beginners don’t even have money.
Then you need to find a way to rank organically, and it is here SEO comes in to the picture. By following few steps and principles you can rank on google and other engines.
Why SEO Is Important For Business
SEO is important for business. Due to competion, your business may not get the attention it deserves. But through SEO , your business will get a traffic and more purchase.
Below I will show you the priniceples and tools for what SEO is and how you should deal with it to get thousands of traffic for free.
How SEO Works: Keyword Research
Keywords are a necessary part of a blog post. Without keywords, your post may not be found by readers. Keywords are the terms that your readers use to find a solution on the search engines. For example, ‘how to change my life’ could be a keyword, a long one. Or it could be as short as ‘life’.
In this case, you may need to write your blog post targeting these keywords. And answering the questions and giving solutions for your readers.
There are two types of keywords, broad and longtail keywords. The broad keywords are short and general. For example, ‘health’ is very general and the person who is searching the internet for such a keyword could be searching for anything. In this case, it is hard to rank for such a keyword because the competition from fellow bloggers would be very hard.
Since the term would be searched by many people, it is wise to expect it is also used by many bloggers. In this case, search engines would favor the ones who are known and have reputations.
For example, if you write a post targeting the keyword ‘health’, you will be slamming with other bigger blogs such as healthline.com and shape.com. These blogs are already on another level since they started a long time ago and since they have a lot of writers.
Then, what shall you do? This is what SEO is. It is how you can use terms that have a good search on the internet but low competition. Therefore, here is the longtail keywords that come in. The longtail keywords are longer than one-word search terms that readers use to search on the internet.
For example, instead of ‘health’, search words such as Health definition of health and wellness or health benefits of ginger have good ranking possibilities. Each of these words has near 18,000 monthly search volume, much less than the keyword health that has 11,000. But it is easier to rank for five low competition keywords, than fighting for a big one.
Longtail Keywords
There are various types of longtail keywords. These are made using questions and longer forms of general keywords.
Questions are keywords that contain a certain general keyword. In the above example, that is health, Someone could ask ‘how to keep my health’ or how to have good health after 40’. You could find such keywords by adding WH terms with the general keywords. For example, in google, search ‘what * health’. Then google will give you a result of what others searched before using question prepositions.
Second are keywords with prepositions or adjectives or other added words. ‘best health’ or the best health food’ or ‘Buy a book on health’
# What SEO is and Keywords
What Are SEO Tools: Where To Find A Keyword To Blog?
There are various places you can find a keyword to blog about. Many bloggers advise to rather guess what keywords people would use to find a certain solution on search engines, rather than keyword tools. What SEO is, is to know in prior and respond to it.
There are various places where you could find keywords.
Ubersuggest
One of the recent tools I found is ubersuggest. This is a small tool that could tell you a search volume for a certain keyword, SEO difficulty. This tool is different because it has bloggers and writers in mind. Recently the tool has become limited and you need to pay to get some results. But it is still one of the best tools out there.
Once you put your keyword, then it will give you an overview of the keyword. I used the term ‘fashion’ to check. And I found out that the term fashion has about 135k searches each month. That is a high number of searches. The problem is both paid and SEO are difficult to rank. As we can imagine the competition is very high.
You see in this image that many of the blogs are paying to rank. Even though the term cost starts at .8 cents, due to the competition, the price could go much higher.
So what can you do here fo find a better keyword?
A better keyword is good to search volume( that is more than 1k per month, sometimes less if it is necessary) and SEO difficulty is below 30 for beginners.
To find such keywords here below this page, you will find new word idea. Click ‘view all keyword ideas’ You can download and filter the results to remove high competition keywords and work with the low competition and high traffic ones.
Here in the image, you can see most of the terms with good traffic are hard to rank for. The ones in the green still have good traffic but these may not be interesting topics. If you are a new blogger, this should be your starting point. You don’t have to waste time on competitive keywords. Start with the low competition. Once you dominate these keywords, then you will come back for the bigger ones.
You can also use the blog domain of your comparators to search their top keywords.
Google Keyword Planner
Google keyword planner is another free service the helps you find keywords that advertisers can pay to rank for.
Once you sign up go to tools then google keyword planner. Here you have two options to find a good keyword to use. Here you can search using other’s websites or a general keyword.
The first box in the image is for keywords you have to enter to begin. The second is you can use a competitor’s website.
Here, Google will give you a volume of each keyword and average CPC and competition for the keywords. Since this tool is designed for advertisers, you don’t have to run from ‘high competition’ keywords in the google keyword planner. Because the more competition the keyword has, the more advertisers have to pay for it to rank, and the more you are going to make advertising their content.
What SEO is in Google Keyword Planner
Google trends
Sometimes it is not enough to get a low competition keyword. You also need to understand the search trends. A certain keyword may have a good search volume for now, but that may not stay for long. Seasonal keywords are a good example here. Christmas is searched more in 2 or 3 months, and it will decline rapidly.
If you base your blog on Christmas, you will surely fail.
The other is regions. Some regions may search better than others. In google trends, it is possible to see which region search what. Sometimes a keyword could have thousands of search volume and the source of traffic could be non-English speaking or non-paying countries.
What SEO is and Google trends
The Keyword Selection
Once you saved the keywords you searched in keyword planner and ubersugges then you need to open them in excel. (both these platforms allow you downlowedCSV file.)
Select the Top row where the title is found and click sort and filter. (home>sort and filter>filter)
You will see a drop-down on the top row titles.
Click the search volume to drop down and remove keywords that have less than 500 searches. If you have a narrow niche, then you can go up to 200 searches. Writing for 100 searches maybe is important but for now, let’s focus on more searched keywords.
Next, click the competition dropdown. If the data is from ubersuggest remove high and medium Search difficulty( that is above 40). For now, let us focus on fewer competition keywords.
Step 3: Take these keywords, and write content on them.
Step 4: Use SEO plugins to see if you are writing as needed to rank better. Yoast SEO or Rank Math are good options.
These plugins may ask you to do the following and it is necessary to fulfill them and at least get above 90 percent rank.
- Use the keyword you want to rank for at the begging of your blog title. ( your SEO title could be different from your blog page title. There fore, in the plugin you can use a different title that is keyword rich. But your blog title could be smaller and easy to read.
- Use your keyword in the URL
- Enter a focus keyword so that you tell the plugin for which keyword you are working for
- In the meta description, enter a keyword at the beginning as well
- Use the keywords a few times in the blog post. If you write a 2000 words blog post then include as much as 15Â or more keywords.
- Make sure to add positive or negative words and one power word in the title.
- Numbers are not a must but add them increases a click from readers.
- Use the keyword in the H2 and H3 headers
- Add the keyword in the Image alt
- Make sure your post has above 2500 words. The more the better. But avoid clutter and unnecessary words just to fulfill the number.
- The Appropriate SEO title is 64 characters or less including spacing.
What SEO is and keyword selection
Back Links
Backlinks are your website URL on other websites. These used to determine the authority of a website. For example, social media sites and youtube videos have a high probability of having lots of backlinks because these are sharable and the sites are known.
How many pages from other websites have you copied and shared in your blog post? You are creating a backlink for these sites and you are helping them rank as well.
Comments, social media posts, and links from other websites are also considered backlinks. Some spamemrs are looking to get backlinks from your site by commenting on spams. If you already have a blog, you can check your comments, and probably many of them are spams. The comments may not have links or call to action, however, the authors have a website attached to their name. Therefore, they hope someone who is visiting your website comment section would click their link if you approve them.
The best way to get backlinks is to have good content. Then you can ask others to link your sites in their posts.
Create sharable content such as infographics.
Paying for backlinks is a dangerous thing to do these days. You don’t want to end up on bad websites or you don’t want to offend search engines.
What SEO is and Banklinks
Google Search Console
Google search console is an admin platform for website owners. Google gives you a place where you keep your domains and see their performance, or submit a site map and see if there are problems on your website.
Google search console is easy to use. You simply go there and sign in using your email.
1- Overview
In the overview section of google search console, you can see the list of your blogs. You need to follow the steps to add your blog to the console. Usually, you will have code to add to your blog. You can also use google analytics if you have it already to integrate your blog to the console. It is an easy process.
2- Site Map
A site map is a structured map of your blog. Depending on your categories and pages the site map categorize and make a hierarchy of your website and submit it to search engines. This is very easy to do these days, through Yoast Seo Or Rank Math.
You can submit your site map into the search console. Your site map is usually yourdomainname.com/sitemap_index.xml
Search using this URL and if you see the XML site map page, then go to the next step. If you don’t see this page, then you need to install the plugins listed above then these will show you your site map and these will help you submit your site map to google search console.
The next step is to select ‘sitemap_index.xml’ and go to google search console and click the site map on the left side and paste it on the place provided.
3- Site inspection and Indexing
Indexing on Google takes some time. Ven if you submitted site map to google console you sometimes may not see some of your posts and pages on google.
To check this you can search on google ‘site:yourdomainname.com’
This will show you which pages are on google.
Or click on-site inspection in google console and see which of your pages have problems and which are indexed. If you follow the google steps, usually, you should not get these errors. If you get them, it is ok. Just follow the steps they will provide you and you will fix it in no time.
4- Performance
Performance in google console is how well your blog is working. This shows you the total visits, clicks, and your average position on google. You don’t have to get top clicks and average position in a day or two. It may take up to 6 months to rank for a certain keyword. Because it takes time for a search engine to believe your site and for you to compete with other fellow bloggers and rank for the keyword.
What SEO is and Google Search console
Site speed
Speed is necessary for pages to get more visits. Imagine a website you have visited before that was very slow to load. You probably were displeased with it and you wanted to run away from it. If you have a slow website, then your bounce rate would be higher. And people would go away within a few seconds or minutes.
You can check your site speed using these two good tools.
1-Google page speed. This tool tells you how fast your website is on website and mobile search.
2- GT Metrix is another tool that will tell you your page performance, and what you can do about it. For every problem, you get you just need to search on google and find the suggested plugin and install that plugin. Easily you solve that problem that is slowing your page.
What SEO is and website speed
Secured website
You probably have got a message saying that this page is not secured. This is due to that website is not using an SSL certificate and their URL is HTTP not https.
There are places you can buy an SSL certificate. Many hosts offer that service for free. Â You need to check that before purchasing a registrar service.
What SEO is and website security
Traffic And Back Links
1- Quora
The best places to get traffic are social media. These social media understand what SEO is and how it functions. That is why most of these links are follow links.
Quora is one of the best places to begin your Social media SEO journey. It is a place where you can link your page as a signature with your answers. If you can stay longer on the website and answer people’s questions, they will give your website a shot.
I recently advised a friend to try quora for his development type project. He then chose a small niche and started posting answers to questions. He soon became top 10 in that sub-niche. He also got a lot of daily traffic. He is currently changing that to blog traffic.
Quora is a good place to meet like-minded people.
2- Pinterest
Pinterest is another great place to get traffic. Pinterest is like a search engine and the posts won’t go down, instead, the results work with keywords. Unlike media like twitter, Pinterest is not a trend. This is is good to get constant traffic.
Start posting your blog post cover, if necessary add some text on it and make it clickable. You will surely get traffic to your page.
What SEO is and Traffic
Finally, What SEO is and How it Works.
As the overall concept of what SEO is goes to getting organic traffic to your page. In order to get this traffic there are few things you should do including, finding keywords, ranking for keywords, creating backlinks, creating traffic, and more.
This seems a very complicated task for some. In reality, once you understand the principles the process is easy. It s a continuous and repetitive work. Since the competition is very high, it is always better to go to low copetition keywords as a beginner. In fact you can keep working on your website until you finish all your low competition keywords and go for the high competitive keywords.
This may take time and you should do it persistanatily. The problem is that many beginners quit before they see their blog getting to a good result. If you work hard and for at least a year or more , then you will getter results.
I believe this article helped you to understand what SEO is and how to rank for keywords and how to get traffic and how to make your site fast and lovable. If you have questions contact me or comment below.
