by samWhen starting out in the world of digital marketing, one is likely to be inundated with copious amounts of information. What with Pay Per Click advertising, social media platforms, online reputation management, conversion rate optimisation and a whole host of other digital channels, SEO is likely to be on the top of the ‘to learn’ pile.
The search engine optimisation world moves very quickly. Google, as the world’s largest search engine, update their algorithms regularly and as a beginner, it can be very difficult to keep up. If you do keep up though, SEO can make a huge improvement on your enquiries and sales, and as such, profits. In this post, we look a 5 must know SEO steps for beginners.
1) Technical Audit
When starting any SEO campaign, it’s always best to start at the beginning – your website. So, running a thorough technical audit of your site is a good place to start. It’s advisable that you look at technical ranking factors of your site, such as:
• Image/Alt tags – are your image tags optimised with keywords
• Page speed – is your site running at optimal speed for your users
• Back links – what is your external links to unique websites ratio (this need to be a close to 1:1 as possible)
• Anchor text distribution relating to back links – is there a nice mix of keywords
• Sitemaps – do you have an optimised XML and HTML sitemap
The above points are just a small number of technical factors that can affect the potential for your website to rank highly on search engines. Understandably, this may fuzz up your brain; however, stick with it. Take your time. Like most things one learns for the first time, it’s going to take time and dedication.
2) Keyword Research
So, what is a keyword? As far as a search engine is concerned, a keyword is a word used in its search for the most relevant web pages. From your point of view or the view of a company, keywords are words or phrases your prospective customers will use when searching for businesses within your industry, selling the things you sell. Basically, users type a search query into a search engine to find information and we call that search query a keyword. It’s important that you figure out what the most relevant keywords are to your business by doing some research. Remember, you want to find out what your prospective customers are likely to type into the search engine, not what you want them to type in. Check out Google’s keyword planner; this will give you a good insight into keywords.
3) Content Creation
As you’re a beginner to SEO, you may not have come across the term ‘content is king’ just yet. This phrase is a buzz word which has been batted around the digital world for quite some time now, and as over used as it is, it’s true. As far as search engines are concerned, content is quite high up on the priority list, as search engines wish to rank the most relevant content (website) as per a user’s search query. If this is a priority for search engines, then this should be a priority of yours, too. When a user lands on your site, you want that user to be quality. The higher quality the user, the better chance you have of turning that visitor into an enquiry or sale. Utilising relevant content on your website in line with strategic keywords is going to assist massively in your SEO efforts. Along with on-page content, it’s highly advisable that you create a blog content strategy. Blogging is a fantastic way to create lots of fresh content. Utilise your keyword list, and tailor blogs to target relevant readers and your keyword list. This will give your keyword a better chance of ranking your website on search engines.
4) Optimisation
Pretty broad term, optimisation, isn’t it. There are quite a number of actions you can make to optimise your website. Optimisation takes us back to point #1: Technical Audit. Now that you’ve done your technical audit report, your investigation has led you to understand what needs fixing. This is where optimisation comes in. Let’s take the 5 examples we uses earlier, here:
• Image/alt tags – ensure you input keywords behind relevant images
• Page speed – ensure all of your images and videos are compressed into CSS sprites
• Back links – start looking at quality directories and other 3rd party sites relevant to your services offering, and begin building back links i.e. gaining a link on a 3rd party site that points back to your own.
• Anchor text distribution relating to back links – make sure you use a mixture of keywords and your website domain for all backlinks.
• Sitemaps – create an HTML sitemap with a link and very short description for every page on your site. Create an XML sitemap with optimised crawl frequencies and priorities.
Again, the above points are just examples. Over time, you will pick up other elements you can utilise to optimise your website. Just don’t let this technical part scare you off!
5) Link Building
Once the be all and end all of successful SEO, link building was at the very top of every digital marketer’s to-do list. These days, however, the dust has started to settle. Back in the day, link building came in the form of link farms. Link farms are where you have one website, with thousands of link lists all pointing back to your site. This is very, very bad now. Today’s process is all about quality over quantity. Best to have 1, quality back link pointing to your site rather than 1000 bad ones. Link building will take time, and must be consistent for as long as you want your website to improve and maintain its rankings. The trick is to investigate quality, trustworthy, relevant websites, and then look to get a link from that website, and point it back to your own. A popular way to build good back links is to write blogs, and upload them to a good 3rd party website. Make sure your blog has a strategically inserted link to your website, and hey-presto, 1 x quality back link earned! Next step: repeat.
Thanks for reading our ‘5 Must Know SEO Tips for Beginners’ article – this post covers just a small number of factors involved for successful SEO. Be sure to visit our Digital Marketing Blog for all the latest happenings in digital marketing.
We’re Digital Clicks, SEO specialists working in Cambridge with clients across the whole country. We specialise in SEO campaigns, especially when one wants to optimise for an SEO campaign in Cambridge. For more information, any help or advice for your SEO campaign or to know more on how we work, don’t hesitate to get in touch with one of the team.
Error: Contact form not found.