The Complete SEO Guide for Beginners
Before we dive into specific techniques and aspects of SEO, let’s cover the basic definitions, vocabulary and frequently asked questions. Are you ready? Let’s start! What is SEO? Search engine optimization (SEO) is a process of optimizing your website with the goal of improving your rankings in the search results and getting more organic (non-paid) traffic. The history of SEO dates back to the 90s when search engines emerged for the first time. Nowadays, it is an essential marketing strategy and an ever-growing industry. Search engine optimization focuses only on organic search results and does not include PPC optimization. Both SEO and PPC are part of Search Engine Marketing. The search engines are used by internet users when they are searching for something. And you want to provide the answer to that something. It doesn’t matter whether you sell a product or service, write a blog, or anything else, search engine optimization is a must for every website owner. To put it simply: SEO is all the actions you do to make Google consider your website a quality source and rank it higher for your desired search queries. Note: Although SEO stands for “search engine optimization”, with the current dominance of Google, we could simply use the term “Google optimization”. That’s why all the tips and techniques in this guide are mainly about Google SEO, although many things are universal and apply to the optimization for any other search engine. Frequently asked questions Can I do SEO on my own? SEO is not easy. But it’s no rocket science either. There are things you can implement right away and there are concepts that will take much more time and effort. So yes, you can do SEO on your own. The only question is whether you are willing to invest some time into learning all the aspects of SEO, or you’ll hire a professional and invest your time into something else. How can I learn SEO? There’s a couple of things you should do to learn SEO: Read reliable resources Get hands-on experience Don’t be afraid of experiments Have a lot of patience (SEO is a marathon, not a sprint) Implementing the things from this guide is a great way to start 🙂 How long does it take to learn SEO? To answer this question, we’ll use a common answer of SEO experts to almost any SEO issue: it depends. While understanding the basics won’t take you longer than a couple of weeks, the actual mastering of this discipline depends largely on the practice, which is a question of months, even years. Last but not least, SEO is evolving all the time. You should always keep learning and stay updated with the latest updates, experiments and findings. Do I need SEO tools? If you’re serious about SEO, you shouldn’t neglect the useful data and insights provided by various SEO tools. They give you a great competitive advantage and save a lot of your time. Here are some essential SEO tools every website owner should use: Google Search Console a traffic analysis tool (e.g. Google Analytics) a keyword research tool (e.g. KWFinder) a backlink analysis tool (e.g. LinkMiner) a rank tracker (e.g. SERPWatcher) Is SEO dead? When people use the phrase “SEO is dead”, they usually mean that “the spammy attempts to cheat the Google algorithm that were used 10 years ago are dead”. Other than that, search engine optimization is an essential marketing strategy and an ever-growing industry.