The concept of search engine optimization is often misunderstood by beginners and how it works. In this post, we examine the SEO basics – the fundamentals of ranking well on search engines.
Improving your website’s search engine rankings is no easy task. Nonetheless, SEO is relatively straightforward to understand. During a search, hundreds or thousands of websites compete with each other. First place goes to the person who creates and hosts the best web page. Consolation prizes are awarded to runners-up.
The performance of your SEO campaign is the sum of hundreds, thousands, or even millions of such competitions. You will attract more organic traffic when you achieve enough ranking, directly related to generating leads. Although this may seem like a complicated procedure, it consists of only three steps:
- Build a solid foundation.
- High-quality content
- Examine your performance.
Build A Solid Foundation
The backbone of a successful search engine optimization campaign is a fast, well-written, and high-performing website. Your website’s quality will significantly affect your ability to rank for the search terms you are trying to rank for. This occurs because Google heavily considers the performance of websites (particularly mobile sites) in its ranking of search results.
This document provides a list of several essential but non-negotiable technical requirements adapted from SEO in Brisbane from Edge Marketing and these should be carefully considered.
- Raw site speed
- Time to interactive
- Largest contentful paint
- Valid SSL certificate
- Cumulative layout shift
- Broken internal links
- Title tags
- Sitemap
- Site structure
The content of your core pages is equally important as these technical aspects. Home, about us, services, solutions, and product pages should rank well for your most meaningful target keywords if they are written well.
High-Quality Content
The optimization and launch of an existing site should provide you with a solid foundation of organic keywords. However, this will only get you so far. For long-term SEO success, it is necessary to add more content to your website.
The quality of your content, such as news articles, case studies, and white papers, will have a significant impact on your SEO basics performance. As it relates to gaining keywords and driving traffic, blog posts top the list. It has been proven that posting a blog regularly is the best way to improve your search engine optimization performance.
In this case, the word “consistently” is essential. You will need to continue creating content for months and even years. You will not achieve your objectives by publishing 12 posts at a time and then forgetting about them. What is the recommended frequency of posting per month? At the very least, one blog is appropriate. Two is better. Three to five is excellent. Ten and above is transformative. Regardless of your capabilities, just keep at it consistently, and you will see the results.
Examine Your Performance
If you are spending time and money on SEO, you should ensure that your efforts are practical. Analysis of SEO performance requires a layered approach. SEO performance can be measured using several tools. You can view the number of organic keywords that appear for you over some time on the organic keyword graph. Essentially, this is a measurement of your visibility in organic search results.
Consider the big picture. How does the graph trend? Is it upward or downward? By what amount? It is recommended to aim for growth of at least 10% per month. The growth rate compounds, so if you maintain a 10% growth rate for one year, you would see a 185% increase in your visibility. Also, you can make comparisons with your competitors to put things in perspective.
Once all these are in place, you must remember the following set of rules.
Progress Takes Time
It takes a considerable amount of time to master the basics of SEO. With billions of websites competing for attention, search is a competitive landscape. The best way to rank highly in the SERPs is to pay your dues and establish authority in the field.
Do Not Cheat
The Google search engine is the most popular for a reason. They have been in business for over two decades, employing thousands of people, and are experts in their field. You can’t fool or manipulate them. Despite cheap tactics and content sometimes resulting in some traffic or numbers initially, Google will eventually catch on. Whenever it does so, it will strike down your website and could ban you for several months or years.
No Guarantees
Google is one of the most sophisticated technologies humans have ever developed. Billions of users make approximately 2 trillion searches per year. And Google indexes billions of web pages every day. Google guards its algorithm with great vigilance. Thus, search is too complex to guarantee rankings or results. However, it is possible to rely on experience, research, and patterns to make firm predictions about how your SEO campaign will perform.
Last but not least, keep in mind that when someone Googles something, they are looking for information regarding a specific problem they face. For a page to rank No.1 for a specific keyword, it needs to convince Google that it contains the best answer to that person’s question. An excellent way to deliver this experience is to develop informative, well-written content that addresses the reader’s question. One of the absolute worst things you can do is create content that emphasizes sales.