SEO? Yes, please. Learn the fundamentals now!

Hello, my name is Stefan, I am an analyst at Virtono and I am back with another fundamentally necessary blog. I am here to guide you through this journey of online entrepreneurship, but if you want to make it, you need to learn the basics of SEO.

I do believe that you know what SEO is, every responsible website owner would have heard at least once about Search Engine Optimization.

So, what exactly does this thing do? Well, people have a tendency of browsing the internet quite often.

In fact, over 60% of the world’s population has access to the internet.

And on top of that, 53% of B2B & B2C website traffic comes from organic search.

Meaning that more than half of your website traffic could come from search engines just like our beloved Google, now I am going to ask you a question…

Do you need to optimize your website for search engines?

If the answer is yes, then we may proceed and learn how to be top tier in every niche!

If the answer is no, then sorry but this blog is not exactly for you… but hey, we have a lot of other things that you could learn about so go here, and see what interests you.

Approximately only 30% of US business owners have an SEO strategy, most entrepreneurs say that SEO is too time-consuming and that they have seen little SEO success.

Let me tell you a secret, SEO is not as complicated as it may seem, if you can grasp the fundamentals, you will realize that all it takes is some best practices and you are on your way to the top of the page.

If you are ready to get down to work, I have prepared for you this beginner’s guide to help you get started. We will cover the fundamentals of SEO, so pay attention and get ready to learn!

SEO Definition

Search Engine Optimization is the practice of optimizing your web pages to increase your website’s visibility organically in the search engine result pages (SERPs).

Let me put it this way, with paid advertising you are paying search engines just like Google to show your website on the search result bar, and we both know that usually, no one clicks on the ads on top, they scroll down to the first organic link.

With SEO you are optimizing your website, so it organically shows up on the first page, thus bringing more organic traffic and resulting in more conversions, because people are more inclined to buy something that they searched for themselves. #pshycology

Importance of SEO

SEO generates more traffic

Organic traffic to be more specific, and that is the best kind of website traffic because you don’t have to spend money to get visitors they just come by themselves.

Here are some analytics:

75% of searchers click only on the result from the first page, and even on the first page, there are interest spots, the closer you are to the top the more traffic you get.

The top result has a click-through rate (CTR) of 28.5%, going down significantly by the link as you can see in the graph below. If you are not on top you won’t get as much traffic, leads, sales, and in turn revenue.

SEO traffic stays consistent

When you are paying for ads your traffic fluctuates a lot, but when you are ranking well on SERPs your traffic grows at a constant rate.

Do you know how many searches Google receives a day? 5.6 billion. People are always searching for things, so it may seem complicated at the start but it’s well worth the effort.

SEO improves user experience

I heard that in the early days SEO was simple, you would stuff many keywords into your website and by magic, your content would appear on the top of the page. Think about how annoying it was to read an article with keywords repeated in almost every sentence?

You know SEO is good for your website because SEO helps your online business reach the top of the page, without SEO your blog wouldn’t get as much traffic as it should, so learn SEO and become a true online entrepreneur. SEO is your way to success.

Not really a good experience, is it? Thankfully, with multiple Google updates later, ranking now takes more than just keywords.

Good user experience is synonymous with good SEO practices, in 2021, Google introduced the Page Experience algorithm update, this update incentivizes websites to actively look at and improve their user experience. What I am trying to say is that you won’t rank high if you are not offering a proper user experience.

SEO = high ROI

Remember what I said about psychology, well it is true, people often tend to take more action when they come to a conclusion themselves. SEO nails that factor down, you can market something to a group of people and get a return of let’s say 5% but when the same people search for something on their own, you will see a return of more than 10%.

Here are some statistics:

With SEO your blog business value increases by 429%;

Customer acquisition costs go down by 89%;

For every $1 spent on marketing, you are looking at a $12 revenue.

Source: Terakeet.

What is there not to like?

How do exactly search engines work?

It’s crucial to understand how search engines work if you want to understand SEO because only by understanding all the aspects you will be able to determine which part of your website needs to be optimized.

Let’s take Google as an example, before Google can serve your website to its users, there are 3 important steps that it needs to take: Crawling, indexing, and ranking.

Crawling

Google sends an army of tiny robots (also known as spiders or crawlers) to follow hyperlinks on the web and discover new content. They gather all that information about the pages that they reach and follow links to other pages found on those pages. Then they report it all back to Google.

Imagine an ant colony with Google as the Queen.

Indexing

If crawlers find unique content, they bring it back to their huge database of discovered URLs, a.k.a “search index”

Ranking

Once everything is set up and collected the ranking process begins, for each search query, Google has to try and organize the results from most relevant to the least relevant.

Basically, if you want to show up on the first page you need to provide relevant answers to what people might search for.

Quite a big operation, for such tiny robots.

How to get your website on Google

We are working towards bringing the website up the ranks, but if Google doesn’t know that you exist then this work is for nothing.

Google will automatically add your website to its search index, but it tends to take some time, a few days or even weeks. If you want to speed up the process you can manually submit your website, you can even request Google to crawl and index individual pages.

There are 2 steps involved in this process:

First, you need to find your website’s XML sitemap, which is a file that lists all the important pages on your website. It shows Google where to find and crawl all those pages. Usually, you can find your XML sitemap by typing the URLs “greatwebsite.com/sitemap.xml” or “greatwebsite.com/sitemap_index.xml”.

Secondly, you will need to submit the sitemap to Google Search Console, this console is an SEO tool that helps you measure your website’s search performance.

First SEO lesson: content is king!

You need to create high-quality content that people want to read if you plan on being on top of the page, this is the real secret.

Google tends to take into consideration a lot of ranking factors, but to be real you could have the fastest website and the best structure, if people don’t find what they are looking for and then it’s all in vain.

If you manage to provide people with useful information, they are more inclined to stay more on your website, revisit, and even buy something from you. These signs let Google know that people find your website useful, and Google will rank it higher.

How to create more content?

The answer tends to be far simpler than you may think, blogging is the way to go.

Besides being a great content provider and an awesome SEO tool, it’s an excellent way to show your expertise on something.

Bonus secret: the more content you have on a topic, the more Google will regard you as an expert, which is extremely helpful when it comes to your SEO efforts.

Write articles that help people solve their problems!

Usually, people tend to overlook articles that sound and feel like forced marketing efforts, so I would advise that you leave the self-written reviews about how great your new garden hose is, instead write about why people should water their garden in the summer, write about the increased growth efficiency when watering your plants.

See, the idea is to let people know what should they do and then offer a means of doing said thing.

If you are looking for more content ideas, we have an article with over 120 trending content ideas just for you!

In essence, try to be genuine and helpful!

Keyword research

After you decided on your topic, went through the brainstorming process, and consulted our list above, you should sit back and do some keyword research.

Basically, you should get into the mind of your target audience, what would they search to get to your blog or website? Once you narrow the list you should see which of those words can send more traffic your way, and how difficult would it be for you to rank higher when writing about said topic.

There are tools that can help you in this process, some of them are paid solutions and some are free. Google keyword planner is one of the most popular out there.

Another way to go about this is by manual research, a great tool for this job is the Google recommendation system, each time you write something and it auto completes it, those are the important topics.

Let’s say you decide to write about gardening, well you would write “gardening” in Google and see what are the most searched for things.

Here is an example:

SEO Components

There are many factors that come into play when deciding on the most relevant pages for a particular topic while understanding the basics is a good fundamental to have, you are not obligated to memorize them.

So, we talked about content and how important it is for you to have good and helpful articles, but there are other factors that you should also know about.

Technical SEO

Here we are talking about back-end work, stuff that people don’t get to see, but search engines appreciate a lot.

Those Technical SEO efforts include:

• Optimizing your website structure;
• Implementation of structured data and schema markup;
• Website and page speed;
• URL structure;
• Mobile-friendliness;
• Website security (SSL & HTTPS)

On-Page SEO

These are all the things that you have direct control over on your website. Content is a big part of on-page SEO, but so are:

• Title tags;
• Headers;
• Meta descriptions;
• URLs;
• External & Internal links.

Off-Page SEO

Here we are talking about your overall presence on the internet, think of it as word-of-mouth marketing. Here, what others say about you really matters, so you better build up those connections.

Social media presence

Where do people spend most of their time? Exactly, social media, and that is where you want to be if you want to drive more traffic to your website or blog.

Guest posting

Here you can let your networking skills shine, it’s all about how you can convince more popular authors and websites to write content on your blog or put your content into theirs. Good way of creating brand awareness even if Google doesn’t approve of backlinks from guest posts… sometimes it’s okay to bend the rules.

Link building

In short, it’s about getting backlinks from other websites. That way Google knows how your content relates to other pages.

Some final thoughts

Let’s be real, SEO is non-negotiable, it’s a must if you want to bring more traffic to your website. Start learning and start applying, believe me when I say that trial and error will be a good learning process for this topic.

Remember that SEO takes time, but the efforts are well worth the wait.

Finally, quality hosting will give you a head start in SEO, with improved security, high speeds, and great performance, Google will love your website. Start you journey with the right foot by getting a hosting plan from Virtono today.