Top 10 SEO Tips for Beginners

Introduction

If you are investing in a building a website or have built one but you are not getting the search
traffic you expected, then you need to understand a few basic things about SEO, or search engine
optimization. Getting good search rankings depends not only what you do on your website (on-
site optimization) but how you get visibility for this content also (off-site optimization).

Even if you have the on-site optimization right, you will not get traffic unless you use off-site
strategies to get visibility for the content. Likewise, if you spend your whole marketing budget
trying to get visibility, it will be a lot more difficult to get good rankings if you don't have the on-
site optimization right.

Here we are going to analyse the 10 most important tips for SEO to help you get good search
rankings.

Considerations

1. Consider which country your market is in. This is the one very important factor most
seo experts forget to talk about. If you are in the US, it is likely most of your results are
.com domains, but if you search for something in the UK or France, or Brazil the results
will be different to give local websites preference. This makes sense when you think
about it. If you search for a new bed, you don't want it delivered from the US if you live
in South Africa. So make sure you have a domain name which is most relevant to your
market. For example .co.uk for UK, .fr for France or .co.za for South Africa.

2. Do Your Keyword Research. This is the one thing 90% of people get wrong. While you
may think you know what your potential customers are searching for, you need to be sure
or else you could spend years trying to rank for keywords which no-one is searching for.
Google's Keyword tool is free and probably the best because it is based on actual monthly
searches on Google, which is the world's largest and most advanced search engine. This
shows you the local search volume for your country as well as the global search volume.
Also note that in advanced options you can decide whether the results must contain the
words you are checking or whether they can also include synonyms. The results may
sometimes suprise you.

3. Understand your competition. When you have chosen the keywords you want to rank
for, do a search on google to see how many websites you are competing with. For
example if I search for "keyword research" on google I see "About 44,800,000 results"
but if I search for "keyword research course" a more specific term, there are fewer results
"About 6,640,000 results" so less competition, and probably more relevant to the
searcher. If you are providing a local product or service, make sure you include your
location in the TITLE of your site and web pages.

4. TITLE and Meta Description Tags. Every web page should have a TITLE and Meta
Description. While these tags are not visible on your actual web pages, they contain the
 words which are displayed in search engine results. When you do a search on any major
search engine, the bold text for each result is the browser TITLE tag for that page, and
the description underneath is often the Meta description, but could also be some other
text on your webpage that the search engine considers relevant. Using compelling text
which is relevant to what they are searching for is the best way to get them to click on
your result. Make sure both the title and the Meta description contain the most important
keyword or search term for that page. The TITLE of the homepage of your website
should include the two or three most important search terms for your whole website. You
should not put more than 8 words in a TITLE and you should limit your Meta
descriptions to about 20 to 25 words. Also the words at the beginning of the title get more
relevance than the latter ones.

5. Focus on Quality Content. Don't worry too much about keyword density, and how
many times your keyword appears on a webpage. Write naturally but make sure you
include the most important keywords or search terms for the page, which should be the
same ones you used in the TITLE of the page. Make sure your content is unique. The
more unique your content is, the more value it will be given by the search engines. If you
just copy content from another site or sites, the chances are that the search engines will
see it as duplication and it will not rank so well.

6. Use relevant keywords in your Headings and URLs. In your HTML you should have
H1, H2 and H3 tags which are used for headings. Since this text is bold and larger than
the rest of the text on the page, it means you think it is important for your website visitors
and therefore search engines also give it importance. Include your main keywords or
search terms in your headings but don't over do it. It should still read naturally. You
should also where possible use friendly urls. For example if your page is about seo tips,
you should have the words seo and tips somewhere in the URL of the page. You would
do this by saving your page as seo-tips.html for example instead of page3.html. Many
content management systems have a "seo friendly" URL setting which basically uses the
heading of a webpage as the name of the page which appears in the URL. If you are
starting a new site it definitely does help to have the main keyword in the domain name,
but don't do this at the expense of developing a strong brand. If your site is called my-
keyword.com it may be difficult to develop it as a brand.

7. One page per search term. Remember that for every search there can only be one top
ranking page, one page ranking second, one page ranking third, etc... You are competing
with hundreds, thousands or millions of other websites depending on how much
competition there is for your keyword. So make sure each page is focused on one or two
search terms most relevant to it. Similarly sites which are totally focused on one topic
usually rank better, because they can put all their promotion into this one topic, but if you
are trying to rank for too wide a range of different topics, your promotion budget will be
spread too thin. If you have a number of related but different products or services, then it
is best to group them into clusters of related products/services on your website and link
the pages to each other through the navigation so that the search engines will recognise
the theme or sub-themes in your site by the way the pages link together.
 8. Getting Visibility For Your Content. Getting the above on-site factors right is only half
of the equation. To rank well for competitive words, you also need to do a lot of off-site
promotion. This involves using various strategies that result in other websites linking
back to your website. Your main objective should be to get websites which are relevant to
the topic of your site, linking to you, ideally from their homepage. Ideally you will want
these sites to link to yours with the important search terms (for you) in the link text, i.e.
the text which actually links to your site. You can do this by publishing articles, press
releases, or blog posts on other websites, and making sure they contain a link back to
your website. Also make sure the TITLE or heading of these articles, press releases or
posts contain your important search terms. To find such sites to publish on just search on
google for online press releases or article directories. Also list your site on relevant
directories related to your industry or topic. This will immediately give you incoming
links to your site.
9. Social Proof. In an ideal world, if you have very high quality or unique content, once
people find it they will start blogging about it, tweeting about it, talking about it on
forums, and linking to it from their websites. This is your dream scenario for SEO.
However to get the initial visibility you need to give it a kickstart by doing some online
press releases, or publishing some articles or blog posts which other people can find.
Google gives a PageRank value to every web page depending on how much visibility a
web page has, based mainly on links from other websites. If you download the Google
Toolbar you will be able to see the PageRank value of any webpage in the top or bottom
of your browser, by enabling the PageRank icon in the toolbar.

10. Search Visibility. What we have discussed above is mainly to do with how to optimize
your website. But bear in mind that getting visibility on the search engines is not only
about optimizing your own website. For most searches on major search engines, the
search results show not only standard web results, but also local search (map) results,
video results, image results, blog results, and product results. These all come from
different Google databases which you can search individually. If you can appear on the
first page of Google in the standard web results as well as news results and video results
you will have 3 times the visibility as appearing only in the standard web results. So you
should also aim to get visible in these different channels if they are important to your
business. For example appearing in local search results would be very important if you
are a restaurant. Appearing in product search results would be essential if you mainly sell
products online.

Conclusion

By following a few best practices for on-site optimization when publishing the content on your
site, and by focusing mostly on creating good quality content that people will want to link to, you
should be able to see an improvement in your search rankings.

The main thing is to start with a solid foundation. Do your keyword research properly and make
sure you are trying to rank for words which people are actually searching for and which don't
have too much competition.