Search Engine Optimization: a stepwise guide

Would you like to know everything about SEO? Before you understand how it works and how to do it, first we want to tell you what SEO is and then we’ll look at how SEO works.

What is SEO?

SEO means Search Engine Optimization. SEO involves taking action to improve the ranking of a website or piece of content on Google.

SEO is different from paid advertising. The main difference is that SEO implies “organic” ranking, which suggests you don’t pay to be in this space. Simply put, search engine optimization is about optimizing a piece of online content so that search engines will display it at the top of the page when someone searches for something.

Most users use a search engine such as Google. Therefore, before you take a web page with your content to the top, you also must understand how the search works.

Basic elements of SEO: On-Page SEO and Off-Page SEO.

When it is going to broader SEO, there are two equally significant ways: on-page SEO and off-page SEO.

On-page SEO

It is about creating content to enhance your rankings. It means to write high-quality content systematically, include keywords in your pages and content, and make sure your meta tags and titles are well-written and keyword-rich.

Off-page SEO 

It involves optimizing outside of your site, such as getting backlinks. This part is all about building relationships and making content that people want to share. Of course, this requires a lot of work, but it is an essential element of SEO success.

SEO Marketing Basics: A Full Analysis

Now it’s time to learn how to do SEO marketing. Needless to say, SEO takes a lot of time and effort. This is not an area where you can change something today and get results tomorrow. SEO takes day-to-day steps with the goal of long-term success.

Content

The main part is the content. Why? Because the user is very pleased when he finds the page that best suits his requirements. When you search for something, the search engine tries to give you the pages that best match your query. It attempts to give you exactly what you asked for. The search engine directs you to the best content it can find. This means that the number one task in SEO is creating great content. And even the most advanced SEO will be worthless if you don’t have quality content.

Content Elements

There are numerous aspects needed to create high-quality content; here are some of the most important:

  • Intention

Search engines pay a lot of attention to intent. They want to comprehend what the customer is searching for when he types something into the search bar. As a content creator, you need to understand this too. Therefore, keywords and subject content must be consistent.

  • Quality

Creating quality content that solves someone’s problem and lifts you up in the rankings is not easy. However, the good news is you don’t have to make content from scratch. You can use what others have created, but just add a few ideas of your own. The main goal of your content is to resolve a problem or propose a solution to what brings the reader to your post. If it doesn’t, they’ll quickly leave your page, telling the search engine that your content isn’t solving anyone’s problem.

  • Freshness

To stay at the top of the search engines, your content needs to be fresh and relevant. There are many ways to make already published content more relevant. Updating content for precision, updating data with new stats, fixing broken links, and more will make the search engine consider your content still merits a spot on the first page.

4 Tips for Making Quality Content

Here are the best tips for making quality content that readers adore and search engines rank for:

Understand user intent:

You need to understand what the reader desires to get when they read your page.

Break the text up:

It is hard for people to perceive long monotonous texts, you need to break them up with a large number of headings and images.

Create a client image:

You also need to understand who your potential reader is, what they enjoy, what they don’t enjoy, and why they are on your page.

Make content actionable:

Your content should contain complete information so that after reading the article, the user does not have to look for additional information.

HTML

Your website’s HTML code is an essential part of the SEO marketing puzzle. Without the right tags, titles, and descriptions, it will be challenging for a search engine to comprehend what your content is about and why it should rank more increased than the competition.

After learning that HTML is an element of SEO, people start to get scared, but there’s nothing to bother about. You don’t need to comprehend the code, and there is very little concern about the process of adjusting tags and descriptions. For the most part, modifying HTML is as easy as copying and pasting from an SEO standpoint.

HTML elements

Let’s take a look at some of the things to keep in mind when it comes to HTML.

  • Title tags

One item that many people confound is the title tag and the H1 tag. These are two distinct titles and should be considered as such. The title tag is what appears in a tab at the top of the browser and is displayed when your page appears in a search engine. This is the most notable title in the search and is highlighted in blue or purple. You need to use this passage reasonably by using your primary keyword and making the title attractive to make users want to click.

  • Meta Description

The meta description is the spot below it. This is where you have a chance to tell the user what the content is about. It is significant to optimize this section for keywords and it should not exceed 160 characters if you want it to show properly on both mobile and desktop screens.

  • Subheadings

One example of a subhead might be your H1. This is the title of your article and appears at the top, this is your main title.

This title tells the search engine what the piece of content or article is about. This is also your chance to engage readers when they first are on the page. It should not be invasive or transactional. You want to encourage readers to continue following your page with an H1.

Scheme

The schema is the consequence of cooperation between several search engines. Basically, it’s just a subset of certain HTML tags that enhance the way your content appears in the SERPs.

When you’ve done adding your schema, you should test your page to be certain everything operates smoothly.

4 Tips for Improving HTML in the Right Way

Here are some significant tricks to follow when enhancing the HTML on your site:

Combination with competitors

Using someone else’s content is bad, but using your best competitors for inspiration is not. If you’re working to find out what you should use for your title tag or meta description, take a look at what the competition is doing.

Use tools to help you:

Different SEO marketing tools are worth funding in because they will help you determine HTML problems on your site. For example, Ahrefs informs you if a site has the same title tags or if many articles are omitting meta descriptions.

Don’t ignore the H2, H3, and H4 headings:

Don’t forget to use the rest of the headings in addition to the H1 heading. These are all meaningful places where you should have your main keywords to help inform the search engine on what topic your article concentrates on.

Never add keywords:

There is nothing more harmful than a keyword-filled meta description that is difficult to read. The search engine will see this and may even punish you if you do it often enough.

Research and selection of keywords

Keywords are a concept that includes a lot of things. They also determine how you build links, the tactics you choose, and how you implement them. Another typical mistake people make is that they stop. The site can be updated frequently, filled with information, and then everything just stops and takes its course. Some people think that once you do keyword research, you can leave everything at this level. But SEO requires constant work with keywords.

Keyword research is accomplished for some causes, but the two main ones are search engine ranking and creating appropriate content. Keywords can frequently open the door to motivation, telling you exactly what people desire to know founded on what they’re searching for.

Keyword Selection Elements

Keyword choice is a much broader concept than it seems at first glance. You need to comprehend the purpose of the keyword as well as its marketability. Here are the most important elements underlying keyword selection:

  • Competition analysis

You’ve chosen the right keyword from the start. It’s contextually applicable to what you’re doing and fits better with what you’re attempting to sell. What will you do next?

You open a keyword tool like Ubersuggest to get multiple suggestions for related keywords. Naturally, you start to gravitate toward those with the most searches, but here’s what you’re missing out on: your capability to rate for a keyword is often more dependent on the competition you’re facing.

  • Choosing the right keywords

Choosing the right keyword will attract the necessary and appropriate audience to your page, and vice versa, the wrong keyword can attract visitors, but your service may not be used.

Intent of search

Search intent is very important. Most people concentrate on keywords. But you need to look not at what people enter, you need to try to understand what they are looking for.

This is what is called search intent. This is the difference between getting a small amount of traffic and earning a real income.

Search engines help us with this by corresponding the search intent to the phrase the user enters into the search bar. From your point of view, what matters is that you create content and choose keywords according to the user’s search intent.

3 tips for choosing the best keywords

Here are some tips for choosing keywords:

Use the tools to help

You can’t do better keyword research without the tools to help you. Tools like Ubersuggest and Ahrefs give you an understanding of your competition and make your life more comfortable.

Watch your competitors

One of the best methods to do keyword analysis is to glance at what your competitors are doing and follow their lead. If someone ranks first for the keyword you desire, go to your keyword research tool, enter their URL and see what keywords they use with a space in the keywords.

Know the intent

You must know the intent of the keyword. Comprehend that there is a big contrast between what a customer enters into a search engine and what a researcher enters into a search engine. If your content answers a question, you don’t need a customer. If your content sells something, you don’t need a researcher.

Links

Links are one of the most significant Google ranking factors. One issue that many SEOs have is that they don’t comprehend how to do it correctly. If you employ the wrong tactics, failure is guaranteed to you from the start. If you select a long-term strategy and set up your links appropriately, it may take a little longer, but you will thank yourself in the future.

Link building elements

Here are the most influential factors to regard when building links for your site:

Link quality

Links aren’t considered to be everything, but when viewing links, their quality is everything. It is much more important than the number of links you have. Building quality backlinks is all about going to the right sources and presenting value in exchange for a trustworthy link. There are many methods to build links correctly, so the search engine pays those who do it right.

Most people only look at the total number of links, but this is a big error for several reasons:

Search engines may skip the extensive majority of links if they are of low-grade quality or contain spam.

Repeat links from existing sites are not so valuable as links from brand new sites.

Links from other sites are more valuable than plenty of links from your own site.

Number of links

And of course, the number of links is of great importance. You are required to create high-quality backlinks. It is worth noting that in the first place it is not the total number of links that is important, but their quality. After all, sites with quality links have a greater advantage. Nevertheless, it also turns on the pages you get links to. Linking to your homepage is fine, but most organic links won’t lead to your homepage unless they specifically note your brand name. The quality source of the links is of great significance, but so is the location they link to.

Anchor text

Anchor text is the text that is used below the link. The purpose of such text is to fit seamlessly into the article. You should have many different types of anchor text because each one has its own place in SEO. The only thing not to do is to have a lot of “click here” text pointing to your site. Anchor text should tell search engines what your text is about.

3 advice to enhance your link profile

We would like to present you with some advice on how to enhance your link profile and get the most out of it.

Remove Dangerous Links 

Search engines have a so-called rejection tool that lets you dismiss links that could harm your capacity to rank. You should use this tool attentively because declining a ton of links can damage your site. 

Don’t use shortcuts

You should work properly to build shortcuts right because there are no them in link building. This includes talking to people, introducing yourself, and talking about how you can add value to their site. Search broken link opportunities, discover sites that fit your niche and promote them via email or social media.

Take into account internal links

Internal links are also a significant part of the system; not only external links should be worried about. Sure, external links are significant, but creating a network of topics in the same niche helps the search engine creep your site. If you can resolve all the problems in one place with a group of articles covering the topic from start to finish, then that’s great.

Site architecture

An excellent user experience is provided by a good website architecture, which is very essential for SEO. It concentrates on things such as a safe connection, fast loading times, and user-friendly design.

Ideally, you should consider the site architecture even before buying a domain. This gives you the opportunity to really get inside your user’s head and redesign your path to a great user experience (UX).

Your UX must be effective. You also should optimize a few things for a fantastic “search engine experience”. The more obtainable your site is to a search engine, the better it will rank.

Site Architecture Elements

The following elements can be distinguished in the site architecture:

Duplicate content

Many mistakenly believe that duplicate content hurts the ranking of the site and content should only be original. In reality, search engines do not punish sites for duplicate content.

Republishing your content on different websites or republishing guest posts on your own site won’t damage your SEO unless you make it spammy.

For example, if you post the same content on a large resource like Medium, it can damage your rankings because the search engine indexes your article on Medium first because it’s in a more authoritative domain. This is often guided to as the “canonicalization” problem, and without your knowing it may already be occurring on your site.

Canonical issues arise when one or more URLs on your site contain similar or duplicate content. In fact, there is plenty of duplicate content on the Internet.

Easy to crawl

The word “crawl” is often used. This means that the search engine is looking at your site to attempt to figure out what it is. The search engine diagnoses problems on your site, defines important keywords, and use these factors to specify your ranking. If they check all the pages on your site well, they will probably report a good result. Creating a sitemap will make this job much easier. You can use some simple plugins for this,  for example, WordPress, or use an online XML sitemap generator. Your aim should be to make your site as easy to use as it possible.

Page speed

A lot of attention is also paid to page speed and usability. In case when some elements or your site load slowly the search engine may punish you or make it harder for you to get ahead of the competition.

3 Tips for Improving Your Website Architecture

There are three essential factors that will help enhance your website architecture.

Get a sitemap

Creating a sitemap is essential to make it easier for search engines to track your site. You can use for instance a WordPress sitemap plugin for this if you have a vast site.

Make sure you understand Core Web Vitals

One of the main elements is to understand Core Web Vitals. What they are, what you can do about them, and how they affect your rankings are what you need to comprehend. By learning more about this, you will understand whether you are working with your site correctly.

Elimination of problems with canonicalization.

You should understand that a feature that can cause duplication of content is frequently built into a site. Some methods exist which can fix canonicalization problems like this. To solve this problem you should determine what causes it. Deleting a line of code can help you or maybe restructuring the whole site will be necessary.

Conclusion

We hope the information in this guide has been helpful and consistent. Another thing to reiterate about SEO is that there are no shortcuts and you need to do your best to stand out.

You should not hope for a quick result either, you need to devote enough time to this to see the shifts. You need to constantly be on top of your content, modernize it regularly, and keep creating great new content to edit your site and show the search engine that you are still active.