SEO Tips for Beginners

How to get your website in good SEO shape

Search engine optimization, better known as SEO is a well-known tactic doing circles in the internet marketing industry. SEO has always been there, influencing the web from backstage, but has quite recently got the attention it well deserves. SEO basically aims to tailor your website and embellish its content, making it a favourite of search engine spiders or crawlers and garnering it a better ranking in SERPs.

While SEO is not something you learn and master in a day, there are some sure shot tips that can have a big impact on your rankings. It can help your website gain an extra edge over your competitors in the digital marketing league.

Tip 1 – Don’t underestimate the power of good content

As simple as it may seem, quality website content is what makes your website sail in the right direction.  Regular content that is lucrative and engaging for customers will help you gain a loyal reader base which is one big achievement in this crowded digital world. Also, originality works every single time. Period. Search engines need to see you a genuine website with fresh content being continuously poured in.

Tip: Always get your content checked by copyscape or similar tools for plagiarism score. Gun for 100 percent uniqueness.  

Tip 2 – Keep special focus on URL, description and Images

A good structured URL, clear and concise description and carefully written Alt tag in images is one sure shot way to help the search engines realize what your website is about. Also keeping a tab on your site’s Meta description is beneficial for your SEO health. If your titles, description or domain name are relevant ( with keywords), half of your work is done. All this stuff which goes in the backend coding is extremely precious. Crawlers look for keywords in them before displaying search results.

Tip: If you are using WordPress for your site, Yoast is a good tool to help you check quality of your meta data and tags

Tip 3 – Let keywords be your weapon

When they say “quality over quantity”, pay heed. Keywords have long been proven to influence a website’s traffic and ranking. But beware, this strong weapon can either make or break your website. Right, relevant, targeted keywords that are slipped naturally into website content are thumbs up and will certainly benefit your site’s SEO. In the same manner irrelevant keyword density will get you in the black list of crawlers.

Tip: Use Google’s keyword planner to shortlist the important keywords. Don’t overdo.

Tip 4 – Keep a check on website’s loading time

If your website is taking more than 3 seconds to load, it needs mending. In order to keep the users hooked on to your website i.e your service; reduce your website’s loading time because it is also a parameter for search engine rankings. In order to do this, double check your codes and reduce image sizes which are main factors in increasing website load.

Tip: Google PageSpeed Insights can be used to be on target as far as loading time goes.

Tip 5 – Let the links play their game

Put your heart and soul into creating content that brings you readers and inbound links. Having links to your website at genuine sources and other competitive websites will boost up your SEO and get your website the right kind of traffic. You might have to take help of influencer marketing and social media marketing to build those inbound links.

Tip: SEMrush or Moz are good tools for check on the sources of your competitor’s backlinks.