If you want to successfully attract an audience to a site, you need to incorporate SEO practices and SEO positioning into your routine.
One might think that learning SEO takes a lot of time. And if you are a student combining work on a website and college studies, you probably do not have a lot of free time. The college curriculum alone is quite dense and leaves little room for other activities.
optimaStudents are always busy trying to meet assignment deadlines and write various papers like essays or case studies. If it is the case, the professional service WritePaper.com is ready to help anytime. It is an academic writing service that assists students with all types of college papers. Experienced writers offer writing, editing, and proofreading help even on short notice. So whether you desperately lack the time or do not feel confident in your skills, they will help.
It is a great opportunity to keep up with your studies, have more free time for other activities, and learn from experts.
As for SEO, surely, there are some intricacies there, but the basics are pretty simple. In this guide, you’ll learn all the fundamentals a beginner needs to know to gain higher SEO positioning.
What is SEO?
SEO stands for search engine optimization. It is a set of practices that ensure a web page gets a high ranking on an engine. This ranking means that your page will be higher on search results.
If you search for anything on Google or Bing, you rarely get to the second page of search results. All the relevant ones are at the top anyway. So to make any website visible to people, you need to optimize it.
Why is SEO important?
SEO is the best way to acquire organic traffic. These are users that come to your platform from the search engine. Whether you are launching an online store or blog, you need people to be able to find it. It doesn’t matter how good the content or product is if no one knows about it.
The SEO offers such benefits as:
- Free traffic to the website (no need to pay for ads or promotions);
- It increases the overall flow of traffic significantly;
- The traffic is consistent, especially for evergreen content (useful at all times);
- It boosts brand awareness;
- It ensures that even beginners can compete with popular platforms.
A lot of SEO can be done with free tools and plugins available. So it is one of the most effective and affordable ways to grow your website’s audience.
The SEO Hierarchy
There is lots of information on various techniques and tricks, so it might be overwhelming at first. That’s why it is helpful to understand how the SEO positioning hierarchy of needs works.
Here is the pyramid from the bottom to the top:
- Crawl accessibility (algorithm can find your page to analyze);
- Great content;
- Keyword optimization;
- Outstanding user experience;
- Shareability of content;
- On-page SEO, like title, URL, and meta description.
To make sure you do everything right, start from the first point and move down step by step.
How to Optimize Your Site for Search Engines
Now, let’s uncover the steps in detail to boost your student blog, online store, or small business website.
1. Crawlability
When you publish a site or page, Google will eventually find it on its own. However, you can make the process faster.
You can submit the site by yourself. Find your sitemap by typing in the browser “nameofthesite.com/sitemap.xml.” After that, create a Google Search Console account (it is free) and submit your sitemap there. It may also be wise to invest in a crawl tool to assist you.
2. Content
This is pretty straightforward. You need to create unique and compelling content that is useful for people. Something that a specific target audience would look for. It is essential to answer the search intent. To find out what people are looking for, you can use sites like AnswerthePublic. It shows related searches to any phrase or keyword you type in.
So if you are looking for topics for a beauty blog, you can uncover what Internet users are looking for.
3. Keyword Research
Keywords and phrases indicate the main topic of an article or post. It signals the engine what you are writing about and who might need this information. It is what you would type into a search bar.
So if you use keywords like “solo traveling” or “solo traveling tips,” the page will rank according to them. It will be compared to other pieces with the same keywords to find out which is the best.
There are short ones like “digital marketing” or long-tail keywords (LTK) like “how to create an advertising campaign on Facebook.”
It is much easier to rank higher for LTK because they are more specific, and there is less competition. Think of how many pages rank for “easy recipes.” The competition is immense. But if you rank for “15 minutes vegan recipes”, the competition is significantly lower.
4. User Experience
This refers to technical aspects of SEO: loading speed, ease of use, great UI, compelling design, etc. The page needs to be mobile-friendly and readable. Also, make sure the navigation is user-friendly, the structure is logical, and people can easily read the content. Optimize the layout, fonts, colors, and speed. For instance, if your website offers travel adventures, it’s essential to consider professional SEO services for tours and activities to ensure that all these aspects are well-tailored in accordance with your needs, ultimately improving your site’s search engine visibility and user experience.
5. Sharability
From a technical point of view, you need to add social media share buttons to the page. From the content point of view, it needs to be worth sharing. The elements that increase shareability are:
- Quality of content;
- Pictures (especially with cute animals);
- Engaging title;
- Infographics;
- Data and facts that others can refer to.
This will increase the number of links to your site, which shows credibility to search engines.
6. On-Page Optimization
This includes putting keywords in the title, meta description, and URL. Also, you can add internal links to other pages, optimize images and videos, and structure content in manageable chunks.
Free SEO Tools
Here are some tools one can use to find relevant data and optimize the website:
- Google Analytics (all data on the site’s performance and traffic);
- Keyword generator;
- SERP checker (traffic potential for topics);
- Keyword difficulty checker (how difficult is it to rank);
- Yoast SEO (tool of on-page optimization);
- Ahrefs webmaster tools (search for errors like missing titles or tags);
- Ahrefs backlink checker
- HARO (link opportunities).
- Backlink Checker by Sitechecker
Conclusion
By covering these basics, you can get a better index for a page and higher SEO positioning in search engine results.
