The Ultimate SEO Guide For Beginners

Welcome to the ultimate SEO Guide For Beginners! You are probably curious about what SEO stands for. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines via the “natural” or un-paid search results also known as “organic”. There are non-organic forms of SEO, which is paid or PPC (Pay-per-click) advertising. SEO is essential for any business – the higher you rank on search engine results, the more frequently a site appears in search results. In turn, this will lead to more visitors to your website.

SEO Guide For Beginners Part I – How the Internet Works & Local SEO

As a newbie, a few of the first things you learn is how to create content for social media accounts, how sites get crawled and find all the pages that exist under the domain. When you start your SEO education, you will gain a better understanding of the Internet and see how everything connects. Search engines analyze the web using bots. Google crawls the whole internet over and over constantly, explores websites, and ranks them based on complex algorithms.

Our job is to make sure the site is working properly as well as all the pages and links. The URL’s should act as little files, organized into folders, organized into bigger folders, and contained in one giant folder (the domain). When these folders are arranged with keywords and phrases it allows Google bots to scan the sites. This allows Google to crawl the site quickly, see which pages are related, and determine the main concepts easily. Additionally, these are also keywords and phrases that your client searches for.

SEO Guide For Beginners Part II – Business Citation Pages

Part of SEO involves the creation of business citation pages. Business citation pages are nothing more than an online profile for all your business info- including your business name, address, phone number, email etc. A few of the larger websites for business citations include Google, Bing, Yahoo WhitePages, Yelp etc. Google sets up your business citation page with your business info, and it is the same info is the same on your website, social media profiles, your Bing other business citation pages.

Having multiple business citations is good for SEO purposes. When there is a lot of consistent information that can be found about your company it is good for SEO. This consistency makes you seem established and trustworthy, and those are two important ranking factors for a domain.

SEO Guide For Beginners Part III – Keyword Research, Content & Going Beyond SEO

As a SEO beginner, you will be doing plenty of keyword research. Keywords are words and phrases that define what your content is about. For instance, you are doing SEO for a law firm. Keywords and key phrases used to find lawyers in the area? Is there search volume around “child support”, “prenuptial agreements”, “attorneys”, “divorce”, etc.? When you start the keyword research,  you might find that people are searching for “Winter Park family attorneys” and “Florida parenting plans”. These are pretty specific queries, aren’t they? That’s the point. There are less pages competing for “Winter Park family attorneys” than “attorneys”.

If you can optimize a page for one of these “long-tail” keywords, you can penetrate the search results pretty easily. Keywords that are Geo-located  – “Orlando” or “Altamonte Springs”. This is the SEO application of niche marketing. It’s better to be #1 for “Winter Park family attorneys” than #30 for a something more popular like “attorneys” because you will actually gain traffic from being #1. You will not gain much traffic from being #30.

What if your SEO client is getting plenty of traffic but missing out on conversions? Research the competitors to find out if they are losing to sales promotions, lower prices, or unique product offering. Sometimes, the problem isn’t on the website, and the client needs fresh eyes to look for other potential issues. If that client falls right in line with their competition, the problem is elsewhere. At that point, you will have to continue the investigation onto Google Analytics. Geographically, where are your visitors coming from? What are our top landing pages, and what’s the typical flow from there? Which pages have a significant drop-off? How do we bring all this information together to funnel traffic to our website?

Get Started With SEO Skills

SEO is a complex, challenging, stressful, interesting, and crucial process.  There are a variety of tasks that go into it. Some are creative, others are technical, and many fall somewhere in between.Your head may spin at times, but organic search plays such a huge role in generating business that the effort is always worth it. Not sure where to start on your own SEO Campaign? Boost your website the right way with SEO campaigns that produce results.  Our web specialists have worked with many businesses – big and small to improve their website ranking and reach. Reach out to Faceless Marketing for a quote or FREE consultation. Call 1-800-357-1299 or Shoot us a Message Here.