People who are just starting a new internet business often think that search engine optimization is very technical while the competition in SERPs is enormous. So generally SEO is not worth the effort.

It is true that there are some niches where it’s difficult to succeed. So you have to get the basics to have success immediately.

One of the reason is that many business owners do not have much time.So they hire someone to do that for them.

SEO Basics

This guide will give you everything you need to know to achieve success with generating organic traffic for your blog.

Step 1: Figure out what your customers are looking for

SEO is predominantly about understanding your customers are and what they care about.

That doesn’t necessarily require any SEO tactics. The excellent way to begin with it is by talking to your clients and listening to their feedback. Here are some of the right places where you can start:

  • Comments on your website
  • Emails from customers
  • Your chatline
  • Events where you meet with customers

Keep an eye on what they are saying, but also what language they are using. Start making a list of topics your audience is interested.

Suppose we are working on SEO for a new hotel/bed&breakfast in Houston, USA. We do not have customers right now, so we use common sense to come up with different ways people may search online to locate us:

  • ‘hotels in Houston’
  • ‘hotel in Houston’
  • ‘place to stay in Houston’
  • ‘accommodation Houston.’

Get an idea of how people discuss your topic

Next step is to pick one of the terms with and run it  Keywords Explorer in Ahrefs.
A free tool like Google Trends can also provide insight into how people are looking around a specific topic, but that information will be nowhere near what an advanced tool like Keywords Explorer will give you.

Check out the search suggestions

Start typing your search topics in the search box, but don’t tap Enter. Google will automatically  suggest you  some additional search terms that people have already used

Ahrefs will save alot of your time on this type of research. With Keywords Explorer you will get an extensive list based on Google’s search suggestions. Our keyword tool will also automatically populate it with valuable metrics such as the number of searches each term gets as well as its ranking difficulty estimation

Seo-Basics

Get s hints from the related searches

At last, look at the related searches section.

 

This is the essential place to look at.From here you can see some extremely relevant keywords

How to expand your keyword list

Search suggestions and related searches will give you ideas for keywords.

Understand how people are talking about your niche:

Google search results can provide you with a lot, to begin with, SEO, but it’s not enough.

To be successful with SEO, you need to understand how people are talking about the niche you are working in, what issue they’re facing, what language they’re using and so on.

Here are few places where you can find the words people use while talking about your topic of interest:

Ahrefs Content Explorer

Content Explorer provides one of the fastest and most reliable ways to understand what topics are the most famous and engaging in a particular field.

Blogs with user-generated content are best spots.Places you can go to perform this type of analysis are:

  • Forums
  • Quora/Reddit
  • Facebook/LinkedIn Groups

Step 2: Creating pages optimized for search

Keyword research is the first step towards getting search traffic to your blog.

You also need to make sure your pages are structured well to rank for the keywords you selected

Perform basic on-page optimization

The next step in your basic SEO strategy is on-page optimization. Even if you have the most profitable keywords and have the excellent content for them, your effort would be gone to trash if your pages are not optimized for search engines.

Before we dig into the details of on-page optimization, let’s clear up what tools we need to perform on-page optimization. There are different ways to implement the features, but if you’re using WordPress for your blog, my recommendation will be  Yoast SEO plugin. It’s free and easy to use. It’s excellent for beginners with on-page SEO.
SEO Basics
And now let’s move  to set up pages for success with search engine goes through optimizing the following elements:

Content

It is the most important factor for the success of your pages. There is no chance of success without producing extremely high-quality content.

Many people think that good content = long content wrongly. But it goes like this:

Good content = content that is useful to the person consuming it.

Web Address (URL)

URL of your page sends a rather strong signal to search engines about its topic. It is necessary that you get it right the first time. You should avoid changing it.

Try to make the URL as short as possible and include the main keyword you want that page to rank for.

Meta properties

Web pages have two features that search engines use.They are:

SEO Basics

Headings and Sub Headings

Standard HTML format for headers to make it easy for search engines.

Header 1 should be used for the on-page title of your content.It should have the main keyword that page is targeting. Try to put only have one H1 header on one page.

Header 2 should be used for the titles of the main sections on the page. They should also include the main  targeting keyword

Header 3 for subheadings within an H2 section, and so on.

Internal Linking

Linking between the different pages on your website called internal linking.At least make one internal link per page.

Images

Use the alt tag to explain what the image is about.It is ideal to include the keyword you are targetting.

In WordPress this can be achieved easily by using the Alternative Text field in the image editor:

SEO Basics

 

Step 3: Make sure your website is well accessible to search engines and visitors

The most important things to keep in mind when doing SEO is that you’re working for two different customers —  human readers and the bots search engines.

Therefore, your goal must be to create a positive experience for both human and robot visitors on your website.

These are the technical issues you need to keep an eye on.

Optimize your website’s loading speed

Both humans and search engine give priority to the loading speed of sites.

Using Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool will help you find out how quickly your site loads. It  will also give you actionable advice to improve the speed of your website pages:

SEO Basics

 

Step 4: Building backlinks from other websites

As a website owner of your website, you have got full control of the keywords to target, on-page optimization, and site structure.

But, there is a part of SEO, which cannot be managed directly, which is how many websites link back to your page.

Backlinks are among the important ranking factors

Link building is must for good SEO.

Many ways you can use to get other websites to link back to your site. Some are more legitimate than others.

Each niche is different, and tactics that work great in one may not be so useful for your website.Keep in mind these famous tactics given below.

Identifying opportunities

The first step in your approach must be to find authoritative websites that would be a good fit for linking back to your page.

Guest blogging

Many people think guest blogging is dead.Which is not so right.

Guest blogging works for link building when three basic rules are used:

  • Publish on an authoritative website that has many audiences.
  •  Write a high-quality piece of content.
  • Create relevant links to your blog.

If you follow all my guidelines, i can guarantee you that your website will rank and get traffic.I hope you benefit from my guidelines.

See Also: WHITE-HAT SEO: HOW TO PLAY BY THE RULES AND WIN