The best way to build your career in SEO is to learn the complete basics and every components of search engines.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the important marketing channel since 1991. To dominate this industry this beginners guide to SEO will help you learn the proven strategies.
Most experts tell, “SEO is all about execution and not a knowledge problem.” But, how do you fix coverage issues, if you don’t know the exact mechanism of how do a search engine work.
So, an SEO professional should be well-versed with the complete concept, terminologies, roles, and implications. Post this, you should practice every day to execute in a flawless way.
Basics of SEO:
SEO is the process of increasing online visibility and brand awareness with accordance to the relevancy of your web pages and user matches.
You should learn the fundamentals to streamline the system to autopilot the process.
You should understand a huge potential behind building your website, SEO – optimized content, UX/UI, etc. SEO-friendly to attract organic audience.
To know this, you should learn step-by-step starting from basics about search engines, their algorithm, types of SEO practices, reporting, data analytics, etc.
Our founder Ashkar Gomez has decoded this beginner guide to SEO into several fragments (chapters)
- What is SEO?
- How do search engines work?
- Basics of Google Algorithm
- Google Algorithm Updates History
- Keyword Research
- On Page SEO
- Technical SEO
- Local SEO
- Off Page SEO
- Featured Snippet or Structured Data
- Data Analysis and Reporting in SEO
The basics of SEO should be learnt in such a way of understanding the science behind the search engines, then moving forward to content, finally optimizing for featured snippet.
This beginner guide to SEO is lined-up in accordance to the Mozlow’s hierarchy, and below are the steps a beginner in SEO should walk upon
- Crawl Accessibility – What is the use of high quality content, if your web pages are not crawlable or indexable by search engines.
- Compelling content – The content of your web page should completely answer the intent of your user’s query. The best way to create compelling content is by 10x content strategy.
- Keyword Optimization – Once the web page with compelling content is published, it’s important to reach SERP to get noticed by target users.
- Great User Experience – Google gives more importance for usability of web pages (page experience). So built web page that has rapid loading time, with proper navigations, etc.
- Share-worthy Content – Your content should be such quality that it gets natural citation and contextual links.
- Use relevant and descriptive title, meta description, and URL to drive high CTR.
- Schema Markup/Structured Data – To acquire more organic traffic, your web page should be ranked in featured snippet. To do so, you need to work on schema markup.
Let's Decode the Beginners Guide to SEO:
Chapter 1
What is SEO?
Before moving for a long run, you should go for a warmup. Thus, this chapter helps SEO beginner to learn on basics of SEO, the importance to any business growth, types, good practices, etc.
You will learn the terminologies like white hat and black hat SEO, keyword research, content, link building, On Page, Off Page, Technical, and Local SEO as definition. (you will learn them in detail in the following chapters.)
Chapter 2
How do search engines work?
Do you know? The world teaches that the search engine’s works are crawling, indexing, and ranking. But, they aren’t.
Actually search engines have 5 stages of working— URL discovery, crawling, rendering, indexing, and ranking.
You will get to learn on the reasons that could stop your web pages from crawling and indexing. Also, this is the most important Google ranking factor that any SEO professional should practice.
Chapter 3
Basics of Google Algorithm
The one word that every SEO expert is curious about is the “Algorithm update.” Is these updates are planned as they are announced? No.
From their initial days, Google focused on providing the quality and helpful content that are relevant to the users query.
Keeping this as the core component, they build the complete algorithm on five basic principle. In this chapter, you can decode 5 pillars of Google algorithm.
Chapter 4
Google Algorithm Update History
As previously said, algorithms are the most important to any SEO professionals.
Why is it so important? Maximum websites have seen a down trend during these updates. So, to overcome this, one should understand what the update is all about and how to overcome.
We would advise to completely follow the web master guideline by which none of these updates will shake your performance.
In this chapter, you will learn the history of all Google algorithm updates since 2012 to till date.
Chapter 5
Keyword Research
SEO is the best inbound marketing strategy, as it matches the users’ query to the web page intent.
To understand, what your target audience are looking for and their intent, keyword research is a mandatory skill you should learn as a beginners in SEO.
“Never write what you think; rather, write what your audience wants.”
This chapter helps you to understand the basics and importance of keyword research. Besides, this article deep dives in understanding the types of search intent and methods to identify potential keywords.
Chapter 6
On Page SEO
Once the keyword research is done; it’s time to optimize the important HTML tags (On page SEO) components with primary (focus), secondary, and other semantic keywords.
On page SEO is nothing without helpful content, and to deliver a compelling content, you should stick to Google webmaster guidelines for quality content.
Besides, this chapter helps how to make sure the web page gets visible in the SERP. Many says, “optimize your web page for user and not for search engines.”
Understand that until you reach the 1st page of SERP your web pages aren’t visible to users. So, learn the basics of optimizing HTML meta tags to dominate organically.
Chapter 7
Technical SEO
Technical SEO is the most underrated type of SEO. This deals with crawl accessibility and real-world user (page) experience in a web page.
Your basic SEO practice should start by making your web pages crawled by search engines and indexed. You should know how to work with robots.txt and XML sitemap for better crawl management.
This chapter also deals with fixing crawl errors, coverage issues, website loading speed, and Core Web Vitals.
Chapter 8
Local SEO
If you have a business that focuses on local audience or location and has a physical store you should focus on local SEO.
In this chapter, you will learn how to optimize a web page for local searchers by understanding the science behind location based keyword research.
Also, how to increase authority with the help of Google business profile (formerly “Google my business”), approaching local listicles and NAP citations.
Chapter 9
Off Page SEO
Backlinks are still an important ranking factor, as it helps in building authority and trustworthiness for every web page.
But, as a beginner you should avoid building spammy links by practicing the general submissions that the market does on zero traffic websites.
Our complete guide on off page SEO helps you understand what are the techniques you should follow to outreach and earn links from high authority websites, and how to choose a quality website.
Chapter 10
Featured Snippet Optimization
Featured snippet is currently the 1st position in SERP. Here you get to learn different types of featured snippets that could drive you the traffics.
In addition, you will get to know the top 10 practices to get your articles positioned as featured snippets.
Chapter 11
SEO Performance Measurement & Data Analysis
It is important to measure SEO performance; this helps you understand whether your process is yielding the targeted result.
In this chapter, you can understand what are the important metrics and tools to measure the performance of SEO campaign.
