SEO Basics: A Beginner’s Guide To Search Engine Optimization for Bloggers
Have you ever been curious about how Google, Bing and other search engines determine what websites show up for the things you search for?
The simplest answer would be that the web-pages shown are determined by a set of rules or a formula that is created by these search engines that help in identifying those web pages ‘ relevancy to what you searched.
These formulas, or rules, are called search engine algorithms. By understanding SEO basics, you can prime your website for these algorithms and rank higher on search engine results pages.
Table of Contents
What Is SEO (Search Engine Optimization)?
Let’s start by defining what SEO is.
A quick Google search will tell you that search engine optimization is the process of increasing the number of visitors to your website/blog, by ensuring that your website is listed high within the results returned by a search engine for a specific search query.
The simpler definition would be the steps you take for increasing your website’s rank in search results.
SEO involves understanding the factors associated with search engine algorithms that determine your website’s rank and implementing changes to your website accordingly.
Search engine optimization is all about increasing your website’s visibility in an effort to gain more organic traffic.
Why Is SEO Important?
So, why should bloggers care about SEO?
Think about it for a second.
How deep do you go when searching for something online? I am assuming you are like most people and very rarely go beyond the first search results page.
That right there is why SEO is important.
A typical user barely ever goes beyond that first page, meaning as a blogger, you want your content to appear within the first few spots on search engine results pages.
A lot of people are searching for things that are within the realm of your blog’s niche. You want your blog to be there for when they search for those specific things.
SEO is the bridge to fulfilling a user’s search intent and increasing organic traffic to your blog.
Now that you know what SEO is and why it is important for a blogger to learn and practice, let us dive further into SEO basics.
Having a Secure Website
If you haven’t noticed, there is a string of letters at the beginning of every URL. That chain of letters most likely is “http” or “https.” That “s” on the end stands for “security,” indicating that the website is secured with an SSL certificate.
An SSL certificate is what secures the connection from a web server to a browser. It is also the first SEO basic you need to know about.
Back in 2015, Google stated that having an SSL certificate linked to your website or blog can serve as a tie-breaker between your site and another if you both are indicating the same search engine signals.
Flash forward to today and people are also a lot more interested in digital security. Nobody wants their data harvested or to feel that they can be digitally compromised by visiting a website.
This has elevated the importance of having an SSL certificate. It reassures the user that your website is secure and their information is safe.
Not only does having the SSL give you an advantage over non-secure websites, but users are more likely to click on links that they know are safe.
Page Speed
Page speed refers to your blog’s load time and has become a main component of SEO.
Google has made it public that page speed is an SEO factor. The reason being is because users place a lot of value in their time and Google has found that users are more likely to abandon websites with slower page speeds.
Refer to the classic saying “time is money.” Users value their time and do not have the patience for waiting on a website to load when there are plenty of other options available.
Slow page speed also affects how your blog is indexed.
Search engines have a “crawl budget” for each website they visit. This means that they are allocated a certain amount of time to crawl your website.
Therefore, the slower it takes for a bot to crawl your website, the fewer pages will be indexed.
The best SEO practices for increasing your page speed is, to begin with compressing files including your images, CSS, HTML and JavaScript code.
Another basic SEO practice is to Minify CSS, HTML and JavaScript code.
This involves removing any unnecessary characters found within the strings of code associated with your blog.
These characters are unnecessary styling attributes, commas, spaces, etc. You can remove basically anything that doesn’t drastically affect your website. Even something as simple as deleting or removing unused plugins can increase your page speed.
Mobile Design
In 2018, Google announced mobile-first indexing, meaning that Google will first index the mobile version of your website as opposed to the traditional desktop version.
Now, mobile-first indexing won’t necessarily change your ranking, but it does mean that the content on your mobile website is what will be crawled and indexed.
Therefore, you want the mobile version of your blog to have the same look and feel as a user would experience on your desktop version.
For the most part, implementing this SEO practice won’t be much of a hassle.
Most blogging softwares, like WordPress, have themes or plugins that will make your website mobile-friendly without any work on your end.
What you need to consider, however, is if your images are scaled to size for mobile and that your content mirrors the content on your desktop version.
Domain Name
In regard to SEO basics, your domain can help with your SEO efforts.
First, you can go the route of choosing a domain that establishes your brand. Take my domain, wykasworld.com, for example. My domain is referred to as a branded domain and really doesn’t contribute to my SEO efforts. This route is okay if you’re already an established brand.
The other route you can take is to incorporate a keyword or keyword phrase that ties into your blog’s niche within your domain name.
This is much more SEO friendly, but can also be problematic. If you choose to incorporate a keyword phrase into your domain name, make sure to add a twist to.
A company like searchengineland.com took the route you should go if you want to focus more on an SEO friendly domain name. They built their domain around a hot keyword (search engine) and made it unique and memorable.
Google knows which domains are considered “spammy.” Google flags domain names that are just keyword phrases which will result in a poor SEO ranking.
Technical SEO Factors
You need to understand the basics of technical SEO if you wish to rank high in search results.
Technical SEO refers to the efforts you put into your blog that will help search engines crawl and index your website more effectively. I should also mention that page speed, mobile design and security fall under the technical SEO category.
Google and other search engines take into account technical factors such as the presence of 404 Error codes, poor redirects and duplicate content when deciding your page rank.
This is because the presence of any of these can disrupt and confuse the crawler agents that are indexing your blog. Remove or correct any instances of these problems on your blog if possible.
Now, on the other end, Robots.txt files, Sitemaps and even your Meta Data are technical SEO factors that will help crawler agents scan your website more efficiently.
You want to make sure all three of these are up to date and reflect what you want search engines to crawl on your blog.
Optimized Content (On-Page SEO)
On-Page SEO and writing optimized content are the most important SEO basics you need to know as a blogger.
Simply put, these SEO factors revolve around content creation and the pursuit of attracting search engine traffic.
On-Page SEO includes a variety of variables such as your URL structure, title tags, alt text for images and the overall organization of your blog pages.
SEO content also involves the use of researching and incorporating high volume keywords into the content you display on your blog.
Keywords are words or phrases people use to search for things online. They are used to help search engines determine the relevancy of your blog in regard to the user’s search intention.
Optimized content also consists of content containing LSI keywords (Latent Semantic Indexing) throughout your blog post.
LSI Keywords are synonyms to your focus keyword that also help Google determine your post’s relevance to a search.
On-page SEO also takes into consideration other aspects of your blog posts which include the H1 and H2 headlines, internal linking, outbound links and the overall length and quality of your content.
If you haven’t yet, I suggest checking out my article that covers how to write an SEO friendly blog.
Linking
SEO does take into consideration the hyperlinks that are scattered throughout your blog posts.
Internal linking is the SEO tactic for including links in your blog post that direct the users to another page or post on your website.
By doing this, you’re helping Google and other search engine bots connect what content on your website is related to what.
External linking is essentially the same practice as internal linking, but instead of using a link from your own website, you incorporate a link that directs towards another website. External linking is typically used when referencing an outside source.
Incorporating internal and external linking into your content is done all in an effort to help search bots connect the dots between both your content and other website’s content.
When internal and external linking, you want to use what are called “anchor texts” instead of simply copying and pasting a URL.
Anchor texts are words, most often phrases, that you convert into hyperlinks. These anchor texts should be relevant to the content you are linking to.
Lastly, we need to talk about the importance of backlinks. Backlinks, or outbound links, are a known SEO factor that influences your search rankings.
A backlink is when another website or blog links back to your blog.
Backlinks act as a credibility signal. Search bots will notice other websites referencing back to your content which signals to them that your blog must have high credibility. Higher credibility results in higher search rankings.
Social Sharing
When we talk about social media and its effects on SEO, it is important to understand that the number of likes, shares or comments you receive do not contribute to your search ranking directly.
However, sharing your content on social media does a few important things that relate to SEO in the long run.
We recently mentioned backlinks and how they are a huge ranking factor when it comes to SEO.
Well, social media platforms have always been strong channels for generating backlinks.
By creating high-quality content and sharing that content across your social media platforms, you are putting your blog posts out in front of a larger audience.
The more your audience shares your post, the higher your chances are for obtaining a backlink, which in the end will boost your SEO.
Social media also gives you the opportunity to build brand awareness and acquire an audience. This will eventually lead to more branded searches.
More importantly, social media enables you to learn and understand your audience. Being able to identify who your audience is, what they are interested in and their intent when searching for topics within your niche will help you tailor your content.
Social sharing and SEO go hand and hand which is why you need to make your content as easy to share as possible.
You also should allocate some time to building social media accounts associated with your blog. Search engines do in fact index social media platforms, so it is important to have a presence on them.
SEO Basics Conclusion
I want to emphasize that search engine optimization takes time and that you should not be discouraged if you don’t see results right away!
SEO is a continuous process. Google and other search engines change their algorithms periodically making it difficult to come up with a set method for implementing SEO.
You also have to take into consideration that other blogs within your niche are most likely also focusing some of their efforts on SEO as well, making competition fierce.
It is a constant battle for the first search results page!
Just remember, Google and other search engines are all about fulfilling the user’s search intent.
By knowing SEO basics you can bring that user to your blog. Rank high with SEO and increase your organic traffic.
