Finding effective SEO tips is one of the first main concerns for the beginners bloggers.
A lot of SEO techniques has been deprecated as search engines started to become more intelligent in understanding the contents of you page without the human inputs.
Here are the updated SEO tips for beginners that you can easily apply in your website.
1. Research Your Article Keyword
The very first thing you need to do is research the keyword you wanted to focus on.
There are a lot of keyword tools that let you do this but my recommendation is KWFinder.com as I find it very easy to access and very thorough on the data it represents.
For instance my idea is to create an article the revolves around ‘cooking tips’ so I just go to KWFinder, type my ideal phrase and it will show me the suggestion for keywords I may be interested in.
As you can see in the image, KWFinder gave me the columns for the Keyword Suggestions, Trend, Average Monthly Searches, Average Cost Per Click, Pay Per Click and the Keyword Difficulty.
You will also see the top performing competition websites on the right side based on the keyword you are currently highlighting.
Now it is all completely up to you to choose which keyword suggestion you would like to focus on.
You may want to focus on the keyword with high Average CPC or a keyword that has low Keyword Difficulty or the keyword with a high Average Monthly Search and so on.
This is just to give you an idea at where to start in Keyword Research.
The Keyword Research can actually be branch into multiple other steps. I will discuss about it into a more comprehensive article later on.
2. Optimize Meta Tags
The meta tags influence and effect on your ranking has gone down since the past couple of years.
But there are still important meta tags that you should prioritize if you want to keep your website to look and function as professional as possible.
The first is the description meta tag.
Do you see the sentence after the date on Google search result above? That is where your description tag goes.
People are more likely to click on a search result that has a relevant description tag that is why it is still important.
The second is Open Graph meta tags.
A great example is the Apple.com Open Graph meta tags below.
<meta property="og:title" content="Apple">
<meta property="og:description" content="Introducing the new iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max, iPhone XR, and Apple Watch Series 4.">
<meta property="og:url" content="https://www.apple.com/">
<meta property="og:locale" content="en_US">
<meta property="og:image" content="https://www.apple.com/ac/structured-data/images/open_graph_logo.png">
<meta property="og:type" content="website">
<meta property="og:site_name" content="Apple">Open Graph is made by Facebook to make it easier for Facebook to identify the contents of your website whenever your website is shared on their platform.
In the instance your website is shared in Facebook, your website will pass the data entered in the Open Graphs meta tags and customized the Facebook post appearance based on those data.
Not only that, popular social media sites like Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn now also added support on Open Graph.
The third is Twitter Cards meta tags.
Another great example is the Investing.com Twitter Card meta tags below.
<meta name="twitter:url" content="https://www.investing.com">
<meta name="twitter:site" content="@investingcom">
<meta name="twitter:title" content="Investing.com - Stock Market Quotes & Financial News">
<meta name="twitter:description" content="Investing.com is a global financial platform offering financial news.">The Twitter Card works similar to Open Graph and that it enhances the appearance of your website content when shared on Twitter.
If you use Twitter, you most certainly have seen one already. The most common one has an image then a title and description right below it.
If you are a new website creator, you might be asking how do I add these meta tags to my pages?
No worries, if you are in a popular platform like WordPress, Drupal, Magento, WooCommerce and so on. You can just download an SEO plugin that support these meta tags automatically.
No coding skills required.
3. Create Quality Content
Creating a quality content is gonna take you time but it is very important that you keep the quality high.
The reason behind this is even if you manage to get an impression and a click to your website. If the visitor find your content to be half-done or boring, then they would just immediately leave giving you a high bounce rate.
There is a long argument about bounce rate affecting SEO but it has never been proven nor disproved.
But the point is, statistically, 70% of visitors that leave your website will never back. So as soon as you got a click on your website, you should be doing everything in your power to keep them hooked in your website.
Do you remember those keywords we found in KWFinder?
You should be creating statements that will include them naturally.
The way I do it is I create the whole article first then later on I get back to KWFinder and study where I can add the keywords in my article where it would look genuine.
One final thing about this, every time you come up with a new idea that you can include to an already published article. Do not hesitate to come back and update your article.
4. Fix Google Search Console Errors
The SEO tips above are mainly article based but this one is gonna benefit your whole website.
Basically you need to submit your website and your sitemap to Google Search Console then wait for a day or two until it finally shows some data in your dashboard.
When your data finally shows up, I would recommend clicking on the lower left corner and go to the old version just so you can see the Current Status summary report.
You need to make sure that the DNS, Server Connectivity and Robots.txt Fetch are all green.
It also has a summary for URL Errors which will show the broken links that you have. Fixing a broken link is attained by redirecting the broken link to a working page.
My suggestion is to redirect the broken link to a closely related article and not just on your homepage which I see a lot of people do.
Do not worry if you find multiple errors here, Google will give you a suggestion on how to fix all of it and I assure you they are all fixable.
Once you applied a fix, you will need to wait one more day in order for Google to check that you really did fix them then update the status the next day.
5. Link Building
I honestly think that this is the most time consuming part in this list.
Yes I said time consuming, not hard. It really requires you to interact with other websites similar to yours. But before that lets work on some free alternatives first.
In link building you need to ask other websites to add a backlink to your website. But not all websites will agree on adding your link. In the past people spam the comment sections, forums, discussion platforms etc. but the community has grown tired of it and found ways to disable those now.
Those are not ideal anyway as those are considered spamming and not ethical at all.
Now let’s go to the valid and ethical ways of doing this.
1. The first method is setup your websites social media accounts.
For me, the very first step you should do in link building is create a Facebook Page, Twitter Account and Google+ Account for your website.
After you created them you need to stay active on it. And you need to make sure that every time you publish a new article is that you share it immediately on those social media platforms.
2. The second method is by guest posting.
This is exactly what mutual benefits is like and the best thing about it is you do not have to ask for permission.
Your article will help the website you are guest posting on and in return he is also helping your site by giving a free backlink to your website.
There are hundreds if not thousands of websites out there that allow guest posting for free. A simple search in Google for ‘Best Websites for Guest Posting’ returns tons of results and it is up to you to look for a credible site to guest post on.
I also allow guest posting in this website myself. Just go to my Become an Author page and signup for a free account.
3. The third method is through testimonials.
For instance you are currently using a paid product related to your website be it digital or tangible.
Now lookup if that product has a website and if they have a testimonials page.
If they do and they have a submit testimonials page go ahead and use it. If they don’t have a submit testimonials page just use their contact form and ask if they could add your testimonials and if possible add a link to your website.
Now this is just a tip of the iceberg when it comes to more ways you can build your backlinks but these steps alone will keep you busy for weeks.
I will create a more comprehensive article about link building later on.
Conclusion
I hope that these SEO tips help you understand how the modern SEO market works.
As you can see it is not really hard once you know where to start. It is just time consuming that’s why the SEO marketers are a fortune to hire.