5 Simple SEO Basics You Need to Master
If you’re a blogger, business owner, or marketing expert, you know how important SEO is in order to rank your websites in search engines.
Unfortunately, more and more people are now aware of SEO and therefore it’s becoming harder to rank well, especially for competitive keyword searches.
However, in this article, we will discuss 5 simple SEO basics, which if you master, will give you a much better chance of ranking your websites in the top results in search.
Table of Contents
5 Simple SEO Basics You Need to Know
1. Content
The content on your website is the key part of the ranking algorithm. Without relevant content and keywords on your website, you won’t be found by potential customers/readers in search engines. Search engines want to provide readers with the best content possible, therefore you need to write high-quality content that will engage with readers.
Low-quality, duplicate, or spun content will likely result in your website getting hit with a penalty, which is difficult to remove and means your website won’t rank at all.
A good tip is to try and write long-form content that has depth and includes as many of your target keywords as possible. However, don’t just keyword stuff in random places which doesn’t read correctly. Try to include your keywords in sentences that make sense to readers, as the algorithms have become much better.
Keep your content up to date regularly and the search engines will continue to come back and crawl your content, ranking you for new keywords and increasing your website traffic.
2. Links
Backlinks are an integral part of SEO and without them, you simply won’t rank for any competitive search terms. If you don’t leverage high authority links from niche-relevant websites, you simply won’t climb the search results.
However, building hundreds of poor-quality links will look spammy in the eyes of search engines and will do more harm than good for your website. You should look to build high quality over quantity. Look for backlink opportunities on relevant sites with high domain authority.
A good tip is to use a link-building service agency that specializes in building backlinks. We recommend you look for a blogger outreach service as this is one of the safest types of links you can build.
3. Headlines & Meta Data
The metadata is what search engines read in order to understand what the pages on your website are about. This data is also what you see in search results, the main title of the page, and a description underneath. Therefore, it’s important that your headline is catchy and the description relevant, in order to get people clicking through to your website.
Including your keywords will not only grab the reader’s attention but is also a ranking factor in how you rank in the search results, so pay attention to your metadata!
When writing your content, make sure to set your main title heading with an H1 tag, and include several other relevant headlines throughout the content with H2 and H3 tags. This is all part of good on-page SEO and will help your website rank.
4. User Experience
User experience is vitally important, search engines like Google take into account how users interact with a website and score accordingly as part of their ranking algorithm. A well-structured easy to easy-to-navigate site will help users find what they are looking for easily and prevent them from hitting the back button so fast.
Make sure your website is mobile-friendly and responsive. Test your site across multiple devices including tablets and phones to ensure your readers get the best user experience. Again, search engines take into consideration how a website loads in mobile search when ranking websites.
5. Website Load Speed
This is an important step that many fail to look at and fix. If your website is slow to load and clunky, users will bounce off and hit the back button. This will impact negatively your search rankings. Search engines want fast websites so their users get the information they want as quickly as possible.
Look at installing a cache plugin or CDN service on your website hosting, in order to speed up your site across the web. Google has explained to us recently that website load speed is now a ranking factor in search results.
Google has a free speed test tool that you can use to check the speed of your site and fix any issues it recommends in order to improve its score.
SEO can sometimes feel like an uphill battle that is never-ending. However, if you’re willing to put in the effort and be patient, the rewards are very satisfying. Implementing these five points on your website will greatly increase the probability of your website ranking well in the search engines, bringing you more traffic and ultimately more revenues.
Hope you like the article 5 simple SEO basics you need to know.