SEO – we’ve all heard of it, but not everyone understands the intricacies of how it works and how to make it work for us.
In simple terms, Search Engine Optimization is the concept of layering your website and content with words and phrases (keywords) that will help it get pushed up higher in a Google (or another search engine) search.
Sounds simple enough, but there are seemingly endless different approaches to nailing down SEO. Here are a few straightforward strategies to help you along as a beginner.
Keyword Research
A great SEO strategy always starts with thorough keyword research. You need to know your topics and have an idea of what you think your audience is searching for before you begin. Once you’ve done some brainstorming, there are countless tools (even free ones) online that can help you identify thousands of potential keywords and narrow down the most high-value of the lot.
Partnering with professionals like SEO agency, Dark Horse, will help you determine appropriate keywords, implement them properly, and appeal to your target audience while also boosting your rankings.
On-Page Optimization
This concept can be simply understood as optimizing individual pages on your website to rank higher in searches and earn more relevant traffic. On-page optimization requires you to focus on a few different elements of your site and the content you publish.
For starters, try to structure your content with header tags (H1, H2, H3) whenever possible. You can also optimize the alt tags on your images to provide extra context for Google. Finally, make sure you’re publishing content (such as blog posts) consistently and that this content is optimized with the right keywords. Remember that the more content you create, the more keywords you can target to improve your rankings.
Quality Content Creation
If there is one thing for SEO beginners to take away from this, it’s the importance of creating high-quality and valuable content for your audience. Search engines will always favor content that is informative, interesting, and appealing to an audience, so avoid creating content just for the sake of creating content.
Beyond SEO and rankings, your content can help position you as an authority in your space and build trust in your potential customers. This is why publishing consistent, engaging, and useful content is a must. Stay on top of trends in your industry and consider what information you can put out there to genuinely help your customers, and lean into that as much as possible.
Link Building
Finally, focus on link building – a process of getting other websites to link back to your pages. This helps boost your page’s “authority” on search engines, ultimately helping you rank higher and bring in more search traffic. If other websites are talking about you, you must be legit!
Try earning your backlinks from relevant and well-respected sources in your space wherever possible. Strategies you could try include guest blogging, finding relevant partners in your industry, and promoting your content via outreach. Most SEO specialists recommend staying away from black-hat techniques like purchasing links since they can result in penalties from search engines.
