14 Tips on SEO for Beginners to Attract A Lot of Traffic
SEO | 7 mins read by Sayan Banik
Interested in driving more organic traffic to your business website? We want that for you too! As a professional, you would want your website to be on top of the Google SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages).
Numerous metrics can make search engine optimization (SEO) tricky.
But if you critically observe, you’ll find that it’s neither technical nor super-Cody as long as you’re doing the basics right for each web-page.
If you’re completely new to SEO optimization and want to learn more, we have put together 14 quick optimization tips in this article to ease things up for you.
We can assure you that at the end of this article, you will discover some valuable methods that you can apply to become an SEO wizard.
Best Optimization Tips For SEO
It’s time for us to grind and get into some real live action! While reading through this, if you get any doubts or get stuck somewhere, do not hesitate to leave a comment so that we can help you resolve your queries!
1. Targeting The Right Keywords
One of the most important aspects of SEO is Keyword research. If you are about to begin writing content for your website, this should be one of the key things which need to be considered. The doorway to SEO heaven is very simple if you get your keywords right!
Google follows an algorithm that requires you to use relative keywords, which increases the chances for your site to appear more on the upfront result pages.
We have some keyword suggestions that can help you a lot.
Good SEO work only gets better with time. It's only search engine tricks that need to keep changing when the ranking algorithms change.
ONE WEBPAGE, ONE KEYWORD
If you want to know the secret about keyword research, this is the most definite formula.
The Yoast SEO plugin makes things easier for you by choosing a focus keyword, which can be used for your content.
So what is “user intent”?
In simple words, it’s the relative information that the person is looking to find on Google.
For example, if you try to sell dog food through your website, you’ll have to use keywords such as purchase dog food, best dog meals, etc. so when a user wants to purchase dog food, he/she will find your store.
On the contrary, if you’re into affiliate marketing, you can use keywords like compare dog foods, types of dog foods. etc.
2. Always Target Low Difficulty Keywords
An important metric to keep track of while writing content for your website is keyword difficulty.
Whenever you use premium tools like KWFinder or Ahrefs, you’ll find a column denoted as “KD” meaning Keyword Difficulty. It shows how tough it is to rank for a particular keyword.
Choosing keywords with decent traffic volume and a low KD score would be a wise decision.
Our choice? Ahrefs. It shows all the relative keywords and suggests one which is easier to rank for.
With a difficulty score on a scale of 1 to 100, it also gives the estimated number of clicks for the keywords.
Let’s say, Ahrefs shows the Keyword Difficulty for a keyword is 80, this means it is highly competitive and very tough to rank for.
Something like the best organic dog foods will have a low difficulty score.
3. Target Long-Tail Keywords
Dog Food and Fresh Organic Dog food. What’s the difference? Well, one is a 2 phrase keyword and the other one is a 4 phrase keyword. These 3 or 4 phrase keywords are called long-tail keywords. They generally have low competition and are easier to rank.
It might be the case that a user searches for a highly specific keyword like “best dog foods”, and if your content contains that particular keyword, then there is a high chance for your website to rank good.
Title, description, and subheadings are some of the places where you need to use your keyword.
Using Ahrefs to find the best long-tail keywords is easy. Enter your keyword and then click on Questions on the left panel. It will display all the long-tail keywords related to your site.
Whenever you see a quora thread ranked on Google, it means that the keyword difficulty is low and you can easily rank high.
If you want to find these threads, visit Ahrefs > Site Explorer > Type “Quora.com” > Organic Keywords > Filter by Keywords used in your content > Filter by positions 2 and under > Sort Volume.
A list of keywords that rank in the top 2 of Google, will pop up. Take a note of them and include them in your notes.
Finally, you have all your important keywords right under your grasp. Now it’s time to learn on-page optimization to put them into great use.
4. Use Keywords In Titles, Headings, And Subheadings
Well, before entering any site link, it’s title appears in the Google pages you search for. So, having keywords in your title plays an important role.
Try and use relative keyword variations in all the headings tags as well.
Maintain the semantic density of your article to around 2-3%. Anything more or less can result in keyword stuffing which is not good for optimization.
5. Use Captivating Meta Descriptions & Titles
You might have come across the term Click-through rate (CTR) before. Coincidentally, it’s an important ranking factor for your page on the search results.
Here’s an example for you.
Suppose your “dog food” website is ranked 4th for a keyword and manages to get more clicks than the first article appearing on the Google SERP for that keyword. Eventually, your website link will rise to the top.
For you to achieve this, you will have to make keyword related titles and meta descriptions compelling the users to click on your site link, ensuring that you keep your top spot intact.
Just 55 characters. Count on that. You cannot exceed this limit to express your thoughts.
These are a few guidelines that you have to follow while structuring an SEO title and meta description for your page.
- Make sure that your title and meta description never cuts off in Google. You would always want your potential niche to know what your business is all about.
- Add relative keywords in your title and meta description.
- Keep a semantic density of 2-3% for the article. Make sure it sounds natural.
If you have a Yoast plugin installed in your WordPress, just sit back and relax as it will take care of the titles and the description.
6. Create Responsive Webpages
Mobile-first indexing is a metric followed by google. It counts the mobile layout searches even if the search is on a desktop. As a result, your mobile appearance is preferred more than the desktop layout.
Get a WordPress theme, and everything will be sorted out. You can get many WordPress themes in the market. Pick a theme that matches your website’s ideas and you’re good to go.
7. Optimize For Featured Snippets
Optimizing your website for it to show up on the featured snippets, is a good way to rank your page at the top.
Featured snippets are displayed before the first position, usually in a box with an image, video, or a table. They get featured in the SERPs which can get you more clicks.
There are 4 different types of featured snippets you might have heard of:
- List (both numbered and bulleted)
- Table
- Video
- Paragraph
8. Optimization Of Images To Drive More Traffic
Look! Here we have a secret for you, that most people are not aware of. Google Image Search is a very powerful resource, through which you can have a lot of traffic coming into your webpage.
What you have to do is just add Alt Text to the image. Click on the featured photos and write an alternative text for every image.
Make sure to put an appropriate Alternative Text so that Google recognizes what the text is all about and displays the result in searches whenever a user does Google Image search.
Besides image alt text, you also have to ensure faster loading of your images. The simple and easy way to do it is by using WordPress plugin like ShortPixel. It compresses your images and makes them load faster.
9. Put User-friendly Permalinks
Make sure that your URLs are short and descriptive so that the website gets user-friendly URLs.
Before updating your page status, make a habit of changing your default permalink so that the user knows what he/she is looking for.
Avoid using URLs that include special characters or dates. They make them unnecessarily long and ugly.
10. Improve Your Site's Load Speed
A very important metric in Google is a page’s loading speed, which needs to be better than the competitors in order to beat them.
Suppose even if it was not a ranking factor in Google, still no user would like to wait long for a page to load up.
Checkout Google Page-speed insights to improve the loading speed of your website.
Try to implement all the recommendations and suggestions made by google. Your site’s loading speed will improve significantly.
Having a caching plugin installed on your page can also boost up the loading speed. We would like to recommend WPRocket, one of the best plugins available.
Want to know more about improving speed? Check out our blog on speed optimization.
It’s time for us to now look into some technical SEO tips that are done with the keywords part and optimization for pages.
This is the interesting part! Technical SEO is set up when you’re aiming for your website to be a grand success.
It’s okay. Don’t sweat it out! You just have to keep track of a few things, to do technical SEO. You do not require a knowledge of coding to do it.
Here are some of our advanced tips to help you out.
11. Create A Proper Content Hierarchy
It is just the process of easing up things for google and the audience. Content hierarchy implies a need to build a page that is easy to navigate for the users, and Google recognizes the relevant importance of every page.
Ensure that all the pages are interlinked and user-friendly. Putting a search bar right on top of the home page would be a wise decision.
Effectively use your header and sidebars for linking your important pages.
12. Installation Of An SSL Certificate On Your Site
We suggest you move to SSL as soon as you launch your website. Moving to SSL will make your site accessible on HTTPs. Besides, the fact that Google prefers sites who have SSL over those who don’t.
If you haven’t got your website installed with SSL, a warning of “Website not secure” will appear in the left corner of your website.
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13. Submission Of A Sitemap To Google Search Console
Do you know that Google crawler is designed to read data from all your pages? Using a Sitemap will make it easier for Google to scroll through your info smoothly. It’s a matter of minutes before Google identifies all the sites linked from your page.
Submitting a sitemap will help Google rank you faster.
You can use the Yoast plugin to generate a sitemap for your site. To know more, read “How to get a sitemap”.
14. Remove Thin Content
Generally, web pages with content less than 300 words get classified as thin content. These types of content offer no value to the website’s ranking factors and are not of any use.
It’s always advisable to either increase the wording of the content or just delete it.
Conclusion
We have tried our best to put up everything we know about SEO. Now it’s your job to implement all the things you just learned.
Try to have some patience with all your optimizations. It’s not an overnight thing. Just make sure that you record every change you make and measure the performance of your SEO strategy. Make it a habit to check your page’s ranking factors regularly.
Every day new things are being implemented into SEO, but it’s always important to keep the basics right.
We hope you enjoyed your stay here. If you’re looking for an advanced in-depth study of SEO, check out our “ultimate guide to SEO for beginners”.
