Search Engine Optimization Guide For Absolute Beginners

SEO is everything you do in order to improve your internet traffic, help people find your website and eventually complete whichever goal you have in mind for your business or personal website.

Techniques for achieving this are various and include altering the content, changing the HTML tags on your web site in order to improve its visibility in search engines or linking with other sites in your niche, thus making yourself a part of a community.

Search engines understand only text besides lacking the perspective and general reasoning of humans, so algorithm that’s running these search ro(bots) is being constantly updated. A lot of this stuff is still done manually. Don’t think for a minute that Google or Bing bots and algorithms are running the show. After all, only people know what is relevant to them.

The reason Search Engine Optimization is becoming increasingly hot topic is simple – it enables you to make more with what you’ve already got.

It doesn’t matter if you are running brick and mortar business or if you’re a web designer, a nonprofit or just a blogger, blogging about SEO and its benefits. You have to try and make the most out of what you already have.

SEO is something that saves you time and increases the overall value of your web site. Consider it like saying hello to search engines. Almost everyone likes a neighbor that has nice manners.

How Search Engine Optimization Works?

HTML code is where all your site’s content is. Search engines, Google, Bing, Yahoo! and others scan or, as optimizers like to say, crawl your web site and store information in indexes. These indexes serve as knowledge data base, so if someone searches for “remote controllers” and you’re selling just that, your website would appear in the Search Engine Result Page or shorter – SERP.

But, would it?

Since there are, surely, many others who are in the same business as you are and there’s room for only 10 results per one SERP, you have to be very persistent in updating and optimizing your beloved site if you want to get on that first page which gets you almost 90% of all the attention.

Now, don’t let that scare you. Keywords or key-phrases are words that people use when they search for something and these phrases are exactly what you want your website optimized for. It’s always possible to find several keywords that would bring potential customers to your site. A little bit of time, the right set of tools and some patience can do you much good.

How Hard Is It To Implement SEO?

SEO nut is not that hard to crack once you develop the initial feel for it. It takes somewhere between two and six months to feel the difference for freshly SEOed website, because search engines are rather thorough entities and there are roughly 255 million websites on the internet today which are waiting to be crawled.

Sometimes, if not used wisely SEO can hurt your website traffic and that’s why it’s important to have in mind that Search Engine Optimization requires holistic approach and maintenance through educating designers and developers to work with SEO in mind, searching for quality keywords, linking with others that have high quality content on the web, assessing on-page factors, identifying competitors, tracking which techniques work and which ones don’t.

Measuring efficiency is one of the key factors for doing things the right way. Search engine optimization is no exception. Different businesses require different approaches. The key thing is knowing what your audience/clientele searches for and where they like to hang out.

If you’re just starting up in the Search Engine Optimization field or you’re just curious about how to use it to your advantage, stick around for some of my future posts as you’ll be able to see things much clearer once I adjust the focus on my SEO lens.

If you feel more confident after reading absolute beginners’ guide to search engine optimization then I suggest you read about being polite to search engines. It will give you a more detailed perspective on SEO in general.

Dragan Nikolic

Dragan Nikolic

Co-founder and Editor at ThematoSoup
WordPress and SEO is what I love working on. When I'm not doing website audits, I write about WordPress and manage WordPress projects. Feel free to connect with me.
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