What is SEO?

To understand what SEO is, it’s necessary to know how search engines like Google, Bing, and others work. How do they determine their search rankings? Imaginably, there are a vast amount of websites out there which cover similar topics. 

A search engine like Google, indexes web pages (if not otherwise determined) – Imagine it as one of those old, yellow phone books, only in a digital format. 

Once you create a website, search engine bots crawl your website to understand the information it contains and index it accordingly, so that it appears in related search results. Search engine bots now are capable of understanding contextualized information (text, structure, and non-text content) on your website and index based on different factors, such as relevance and authority. 

This is where search engine optimization comes into play. SEO refers to the process of making your site better for search engines. It’s about optimizing websites so that search engines understand relevance value and rank it accordingly on search. 

Now, let’s make one thing clear about SEO: 

Search Engines index pages(!), not your website as a whole. This means that your SEO work should be done page by page.

 

Why is SEO important?

The previous section already gives us an idea about the importance of SEO. To further understand, think about your own search habits. 

Let’s say you go to Google because you want to find information about a specific topic, for example, ‘best tools for email marketing’. You type it in just like that or maybe you’ll just type in ‘tools for email marketing’. Immediately you get a list of results. 

Which one do you click? 

Did you ever go to the second or third results page? Probably not and if yes, not that often. 

This example showcases why SEO is important. Having your pages optimized for search engines helps your overall search ranking. 

Your goal is to be on the first page (even better: within the first few listings) of the search your customers are making so that you see increased traffic to your site.

 

How to do SEO for a website

Let’s look at 10 essential SEO for beginners tips that you can use to improve your website right now.

 

1. Do keyword research and use relevant terms 

Keywords play an important role in SEO. A keyword indicates the main topic of your article and it’s what makes it possible for people to find your article once they make an online search for a topic of interest. 

A keyword is essentially what people will type in when searching for something. This is why you should make sure your keyword aligns with the search intent of your target audience. It can be a short keyword like ‘digital marketing’ or a long-tail-keyword such as how to create a good digital advertising campaign’. 

Shorter keywords usually have a higher search volume. This means they can be more difficult to rank for. Long-tail-keywords have a lower search volume, but in comparison, they are very specific. The advantage being that you are able to target the exact audience interested in that. It’s best to go for a mix of both – long-tail and short – keywords. 

Furthermore, it’s ideal to consider search volume and rank difficulty of the keyword intended on being used. The search volume indicates how often people search for this specific keyword. A higher search volume means that people are more interested in this topic. The rank difficulty, on the other hand, indicates how difficult it will be to rank in search engine results. 

 

Keywords are vital, but are not the only component to optimizing a website. You need to focus on other important aspects to boost traffic. 

Let’s look further at some strategic ways to optimize your website.