How To Do Website SEO For Beginners

What is Website SEO? The act of improving the search presence of a website is SEO. Establishing what a company will be, what the website will look like and the overall message is the fun part. Trying to make that website be seen by other potential customers when they do keyword searches is the hard part. Understanding what to even focus on can be frustrating. If you’ve hired a marketing agency or freelancer SEO, you’ve most likely heard of on page SEO, off page SEO and technical SEO, since these 3 categories make up SEO in general.

There are 3 main parts of search engine optimization:

• On Page SEO – What websites have control over: ( meta tags, content relevancy, keyword research )
• Off Page SEO – What websites don’t have control over: ( backlink optimization / Social Media )
• Technical SEO – Focuses on website indexing by search engine crawlers called ” searchbots “

When you get a website up and running, no matter who you set the website up with, you will need to make sure some basics are done to ensure the website you just setup, is found by others online. For every webpage that you have on your website, something called meta titles will need to be optimized. Meta titles are part of what is called ” on page SEO ” and is among the most important SEO factors to consider, since the website user has direct control over fixing on page SEO factors.

Setting up a GoogleMyBusiness profile will be among those 1st things a new website owner should do. Having a GMB profile, will help convey trust to potential customers and provide another avenue for further marketing of new products, posts and other information, using images and even establishing a location server area.

Don’t Focus On One Factor Of SEO

Many times website owners will either think a metric is better than another and get SEO tunnel vision. When website owners focus on one SEO factor more than others, often the other SEO factors NOT being monitored are causing problems. That’s because SEO is all interconnected, you can rank without one, but there will be problems as a result.

In competitive niches, EVERY SEO variable plays a part it ranking in the top 3 or not. And for the amount of ROI a website can get from being in the top 3 rankings of a proper user intent keyword search, it’s priceless. As once a website makes it’s users happy, the word of mouth marketing machine takes full effect, and it’s better than any paid advertising campaign you can ever do.

Backlinks can bring web traffic but not user intent

Right now, backlinks are some of the most prized SEO off page factors that exist. Simply because Google has put such a value on these trusted handshakes between websites. The more high quality websites linking to another website, the higher the keyword ranking for that website will be. However, if a website just focused on this, maybe the traffic would be there, but the goal conversions wouldn’t be. That’s due to the importance of a well crafted website message, that keyword research coupled with user optimization can achieve. So when a website has all the SEO factors optimized, each SEO factor is working with one another to create this user flow that leads to goal conversions.

All SEO Shortcuts Come At The Price Of Extra Effort

Many SEO shortcuts, often called ” SEO Tactics “, ” greyhat SEO ” or ” blackhat SEO “, since that’s just what they are, ever changing ways to do the same thing. An SEO Strategy is to take the same approach every time for the same results. In SEO every shortcut will end up costing you extra time to remove the shortcut and repair anything it may have messed up. Google and other search engines are stupid, they have other SEOs working for them, often to find website’s trying to sweep things under the rug or hide things from search engine crawlers. When Google finds these things out, many times they release a algorithmic update to combat the issue.

When this happens, many website owners and SEOs will not know unless it can be seen in the data. The problem with this is, a website can appear to be ranking great, only to suddenly drop and the symptoms will often lead to the SEO factor that a shortcut was used on. Things like buying backlinks, webpage cloaking, keyword stuffing, and other tactics end up costing more time. While they will work and show results at 1st, eventually the day will come when an update from a search engine corrects the ” SEO tactic ” and reverts all website rankings to before.

Whitehat SEO is efficient and reliable

Then while other websites who were doing whitehat SEO are improving, the websites who used the tactic that doesn’t work, has to work even harder just to rank even with competitors. If you’re running a business, the risks just don’t outweigh the rewards, unless you only intended being in business for a short period of time. Since user trust will be lost, and also the overall way search engines measure the site will change until the SEO shortcuts that were used are removed. Then the website will need to do more optimization to have that competitive edge again. It’s just much easier and more productive to stay on the straight and narrow path of whitehat SEO. With skill and experience proper SEO becomes more of a template to follow.