A Beginner’s Guide to Website SEO

You’ve built a website for your business and hit “publish”. Now you’re waiting for clicks – but no one is coming.

The problem could be search engine optimization, better known as SEO. Without strong SEO, your website will not rank highly in search engine results, making it difficult for potential visitors to find.

In our beginner’s guide to website SEO, we’ll explain everything you need to know about the basics of SEO: what it is, how you can improve your site’s SEO, and when to seek professional help. Keep reading to learn how to boost your website’s SEO today.

Key Takeaways

• SEO is short for search engine optimization. It’s a process of helping your site appear and rank higher in search engine results.
• SEO includes on-page SEO (like adding keywords and internal links), off-page SEO (such as gaining backlinks from other sites), and technical SEO (such as improving your site’s loading speed).
• Steps to start improving your site’s SEO include setting up Google Search Console, submitting a sitemap to Google, adding keywords to your site, and improving page loading speeds.
• You can start doing SEO on your own, especially if your site is small. However, it’s important to consider professional SEO help if you have a large website or you’re not seeing results.

How Search Engines Work (in Plain English)

To understand SEO, it’s important to first know a little bit about how search engines work.

Basically, search engines use automated bots to “crawl” your website and digest all the information on it. They read the text you’ve written to find commonly used keywords that indicate what your site is about. They also gather details about the images on your website, the structure of your pages, and the frequency of content updates.

All of this information is then added to the search engine index. This is the search engine’s master database, containing millions of URLs. When someone searches a word or phrase, it’s cross-referenced against the index to determine what URLs to show them.

This process matters to website owners for two critical reasons. First, your website needs to show up in the list of search results when someone searches for relevant terms. If the search engine doesn’t understand what your site is about, it won’t put it in the right place in the index, and it won’t appear in search results.

Second, the search engine uses the index to determine the order in which to present search results. This is important because 69% of people click on the top three listed pages. If your site isn’t appearing in those top three pages, your chances of attracting visitors go way down.

So, how does SEO play into this? SEO is a way to help search engines better understand what your website is about and match it to users’ search queries. Strong SEO ensures not only that your site is properly indexed but also that it appears higher in the list of search results for your potential target audience.

The 3 Pillars of SEO

SEO is a huge topic with many different components. We’ll break it down into three categories: on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and technical SEO.

On-page SEO

On-page SEO refers to any efforts you make on your website to improve its SEO, such as adding or modifying content. Here are some of the core ranking factors of on-page SEO:

• Keywords: Researching keywords relevant to your site’s topic and including them throughout your site is a crucial form of SEO. Keywords help search engines understand what your site is about and determine if it’s a good fit for a user’s search intent.
• Title tags and meta descriptions: Title tags and meta descriptions are displayed in the search results list after a search is conducted. These need to succinctly tell users what your site is about and convince them to click on your site over others.
• Headings: Most website builders enable you to add headings like H1s and H2s to your site’s text content. This is important because headings provide search engines with information about your website’s structure. Well-structured sites typically rank higher in search engine results.
• Alt text: Alt text is text you add to images that describes what they are. This text isn’t visible on your site, but it’s read by search engines. So, alt text can be a good place to add keywords.
• Internal links: Internal links connect one page of your site to another. Search engines catalogue these, and pages that are linked to more frequently tend to appear higher in search results. They’re also a good way to encourage visitors to keep exploring your website.
• Content quality: Search engines track how long visitors spend on your site and rank sites that retain visitors for longer more highly. So, it’s important to have original, high-quality content that encourages visitors to keep reading.

Off-page SEO

SEO isn’t just limited to changes you make to your website. Off-page SEO includes several actions you can take on other sites that boost your website’s status in the eyes of search engines. These are as follows:

• Backlinks: Backlinks are links from another website to your own. These are very important for SEO because backlinks are seen as a sign of trust and authority. If other sites are linking to your website, it’s a strong indicator that the search engine should direct people to your site also.
• Mentions: Mentions include any reference to your business’s name or brand on another website. While not as powerful as backlinks, mentions are also seen as a signal of trust by search engines.
• Online directories: Listing your business in online directories (like Yelp, Yellow Pages, or Tripadvisor) is another way to build your online profile. Search engines take into account not just your listing on these sites, but also any customer reviews your business has.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO involves optimizing your website’s backend to reduce loading times and ensure search engine bots can effectively crawl your page. This isn’t the most exciting part of SEO, but it’s important since search engines ultimately rely on a highly technical crawling and indexing process. Technical SEO involves the following:

• Site speed: Sites that load faster are ranked more favorably by search engines. This is because fast performance is important for the user experience.
• Mobile-friendliness: Sites that are mobile-friendly will see a boost in search engine rankings compared to those that aren’t.
• SSL encryption: Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption is crucial for your site to rank in search results. Sites without SSL are severely downgraded by search engines.
• XML sitemap: An XML sitemap is a file that lists all of your website’s pages and their URLs for a search engine, ensuring that none of your content is missed during crawling.
• Broken links: Broken links can harm your site’s SEO, so make sure all of your links point to valid URLs.
• Duplicate content: If you own multiple websites, make sure your content isn’t duplicated across different sites. This can cause one or more of the websites to disappear entirely from search engine results.

How To Start Improving Your Website’s SEO Today

Ready to improve your website’s SEO? We’ll help you get started with a six-step plan that’s easy for anyone to navigate without having to become an SEO guru.

Step 1: Set up Google Search Console

Search Console is Google’s tool for website owners to manage how Google indexes their site, track SEO performance, and troubleshoot SEO issues.

To get started, visit Search Console and click “Start Now”. Log in to your Google account, then add your website’s URL.

Next, you need to verify that you own your website. The easiest way to do this is to copy the meta tag that Search Console provides. Log in to your website builder, navigate to the SEO panel, and paste in the meta tag. Once you publish the changes to your site, it should be connected to Search Console.

Step 2: Submit a sitemap

The next step to take to boost your site’s SEO is to submit an XML sitemap to Google. Most of the best website builders create a sitemap for you automatically – just type in your site’s URL with “/sitemap.xml” added to the end (for example, https://mywebsite.com/sitemap.xml).

Return to Search Console and select “Index” from the menu, then “Sitemaps”, and click “Add a new sitemap”. Paste the URL of your sitemap into the text box and click “Submit”. Google will then automatically index any pages of your website that it hadn’t previously indexed.

Step 3: Boost your keywords

Another easy way to enhance your site’s SEO is to add target keywords that are relevant to your website.

To find out what these might be, you can use a free keyword research tool like WordStream or Moz Keyword Explorer. Enter the URLs of a few different competitor businesses to find out what keywords they’re using and which ones are getting the most search volume.

Aim to add three to five of these keywords to your homepage and one or two important product pages. You may need to add new content in order to achieve this. Make sure the keywords appear naturally in your headings and text.

Step 4: Improve page speed

Boosting your website’s performance is another good way to enhance your SEO. To begin, you can check how quickly each page of your site loads using a free tool like PageSpeed Insights or GTMetrix.

The great thing about these tools is that they not only indicate if your page is loading slowly, but they also provide guidance on how to fix it. In many cases, the culprit is large images. You can address these by reducing the resolution of your photos and then re-uploading them to your site.

Step 5: Launch a blog

A blog is a great way to enhance your website experience and encourage visitors to stay for longer, which reflects positively on your site in the eyes of search engines. Blog articles are also a great opportunity to include more relevant keywords and add new content to your site regularly, both of which are also important for SEO.

Most website builders have built-in blogging tools, so getting started is easy. You can also enlist an SEO content writing service to create a blog for you.

Step 6: List your business

Finally, you can boost your site’s SEO by listing your business in online directories like Google Business Profile, Yelp, Tripadvisor, and others. Focus on directories that are most relevant to your industry since your potential customers are more likely to find you in these spaces.

Common SEO mistakes beginners should avoid

There are a few common mistakes beginners often make when getting started with SEO strategies:

• Keyword stuffing: Keywords must fit naturally in your content. Cramming too many keywords into a small amount of text can turn away visitors and harm your site’s SEO.
• Duplicating content: Don’t cut corners by copying and pasting content across multiple pages. Search engines penalize sites for having unoriginal or duplicated text.
• Forgetting internal links: Internal links are key to boosting SEO and keeping visitors on your site. As you add new pages like blog posts, be sure to go back and update old pages with internal links to the new content.
• Not tracking performance: It’s important to know whether your SEO efforts are paying off. Use Search Console and Google Analytics to track your site’s visitor statistics over time.

When To Hire an SEO Expert or Agency

While doing your own SEO is much better than having no SEO at all, it’s also important to recognize when your website’s SEO needs exceed your abilities.

For businesses that have large websites or ecommerce stores, for example, the price of poor SEO can be very steep. Seeking professional SEO help is also crucial for websites targeting highly competitive keywords or those lacking a dedicated digital marketing specialist.

You should also consider professional SEO help if you’re not seeing more visitors to your website over time. This is a sign that your current SEO efforts aren’t addressing the biggest problems with your site’s visibility.

If you do reach the point where you need professional help, check out our guide to the best SEO agencies to find the right partner for your business.