SEO Basics to Advance For Newbies Freelancer
SEO Basics For Everyone With Real-Time Experience
What are the basics of SEO?
SEO means search engine optimization. SEO is one of the most demanding choices of freelancing. A huge number of websites are available in this world and are building so many websites nowadays. Each website has needed SEO for ranking in search engines. So, SEO Specialists have high demand. If you want to be an SEO specialist, firstly you have to know about it.
When someone makes a website properly and posts so many articles in it then the work would not end. He should reach his website to his visitors. Actually, SEO is the most powerful marketing strategy. If your websites post to rank on google's first page for a valuable keyword then you will get so many, visitors. So, I hope you can understand the value of search engine optimization (SEO).
Types Of SEO
We can classify SEO in different ways. Generally, these types of SEO are known by an SEO specialist that's are given below.
- Local SEO
- Technical SEO
- On-page SEO
- Off-page SEO
Local SEO
Local
SEO is very important for a business. Nowadays, It has a huge demand in the
marketplace. You have to set-up local business information in Google my
business and then link it with the search engine. There are so many factors in
local SEO.
Technical SEO
Technical
SEO means link-up with google search console and other search engines. Custom
robot header tags and robot txt set-up are also included in this.
Basics of On-Page SEO
The
basics of On-Page SEO is the most important part of SEO. In this section,
keyword research, content SEO, image SEO, and video SEO has been done. I have
written about all of them that are given below and hope you will learn a lot of
things about SEO. Follow my instruction you will get better benefits.
Keyword Research
A keyword is very important for SEO. There are so many SEO tools that are available online but the maximum is paid. The Keyword revealer is the best for paid tools. You can use 3 keywords per day for free.
You can also use Google Keyword Planner for free. You have to choose a minimum 100-1k volume keyword for your post. If you want to rank a post, you have to select a low competition keyword.
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Basics keyword tools for SEO |
Content SEO basics
After
selecting a keyword, you have to write a proper content with this keyword. You
have to place the keyword properly. If you are a WordPress user, You can use
the Yoast SEO plugin for a proper SEO guide.
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Content SEO of Yoast basics |
Image SEO basics
You
have to use your targeted keyword in image alt text and title. You know, the
search engine shows images and videos for your keyword. So it is important to
rank your post.
Video SEO basics
You
can upload your videos on youtube that are used in your articles. Google shows
results by following an algorithm for a keyword. Map, Facebook link, youtube
videos, backlink wise, and keyword wise. I mean if you search any keyword, you
will see the result is coming from maps, Facebook links, youtube videos,
backlink wise, and keyword basis top result. So video SEO is also important.
Basics of Off-Page SEO
It's a link building process. You have to build so many links with your keyword to other sites. You can build a link by guest posting and commenting. There are so many link building sites online. Off-page SEO is a must for the stability of ranking. You have to generate some strong backlinks. If your backlinks are strong, your site will rank must.
Backlink
The backlink is the main part of off-page SEO. You can generate backlink in many
ways. But remember before posting a link, check sites PA and DA. To check the
Page Authority and Domain Authority, you can use MozBar SEO tools for free. SEOquake is also a great chrome
extension for SEO.
You
can generate backlink by
- Blog Posting
- Forum Posting
- Article Posting
- Answer Posting
- Commenting and
- Book Marking
Without
these, there are some extra categories of SEO like
Mobile SEO basics
Mobile SEO is nothing
but important for mobile useability. Your website should be responsible for
good results in SEO. Maximum users are visiting the website by using a mobile
device.
E-Commerce SEO basics
E-Commerce SEO is
important for an e-commerce website. Product description and reviews are very
essential for it.
Black Hat SEO basics
Black
hat SEO is an illegal SEO. To know about more with details click to continue reading
White Hat SEO Basics
White hat SEO is
legal SEO. In this post, I have written all about white hat SEO.
Grey Hat SEO Basics
It's the mixing and
blending of a Black hat and White hat SEO. I don't recommend doing that. That
makes your site down.
Negative SEO Basics
It's one kind of
Black hat SEO. To know in details, go to the continue reading post.
SEO Basics With Real-time Experience
Generally,
so many types of SEO are used for web sites. 3.5 billion searches are performed on
Google every single day. Seriously, no matter what you do, people are looking
for your products and services on Google; cell phone repair shop: 1,700 monthly
searches. iPhone charger: 34,000 monthly searches. best smartphone: 41,000
monthly searches. And these search volumes are only for US-based searches. But
here’s the thing: Even though there are billions of searches every single day,
our recent study shows that 91% of content gets no traffic from Google.
So how does one join the opposite 9% of sites and begin getting free, consistent, and passive traffic from Google? If you’re a beginner to SEO, then you're going to want to read this whole article because I’m going to show you how to start attracting customers from the world’s largest search engine. Stay tuned. What’s up everyone, Sam Oh here with me, the SEO tool that helps you grow your search traffic, research your competitors, and dominate your niche. This tutorial is called “SEO for beginners” because even if you haven’t got the slightest clue what SEO is, you’ll have very clear and easy action items that you can implement into your website right away.
So
we’ll be covering the most important things that you should know to ensure that
your website is optimized for search. Let’s get started. So what is SEO? SEO
stands for search engine optimization. It’s the process of optimizing your
website and webpages to get free organic traffic from search engines like
Google. Think of Google as a filing system in a library. The library has
millions of books with hundreds of trillions of pages. So let’s say that you
simply want to seek out something on, “global warming.” Then Google would
search through these books and extract pages that contain your keywords or closely
related words. But as I’m sure you recognize, search results aren't returned in
any random order.
Google
tries to return the foremost relevant results first by using sophisticated
algorithms. And they're so good at this, that most of us never have to click
through to page 2 of the search results. Nobody knows exactly how this
algorithms work or the precise factors it's at to rank a webpage, but we do
know tons of the so-called"Google ranking factors," so we can make
some optimizations. So your job is going to be two-fold:
Number
1, we need to make sure that it's easy for search engines to understand what
your page is about and creates that content that matches what we call, “the
searcher’s intent," right?
And
number 2, we need to show Google and other search engines that it’s ‘worthy’ of
ranking.
So
throughout this article, let’s say that I’m a new and budding photographer and
I live in Toronto, Canada. I’m starting my new wedding photography business
called “Sam photography.” Yup, I’m pretty awesome... but I don’t have any
friends, so referrals are out of the question. All right great.
Keyword Research in Details
Step 1 is to find relevant keywords that people are searching for and see how these search queries fit into your business. The easiest way to start finding relevant keywords is to put yourself in the shoes of a potential customer. So I might think that a bride or groom trying to find some magical wedding photos would look for “wedding photographer in Toronto.” is sensible, right? So I’ll go to Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer tool, which is one of our SEO tools that provides rich data on Google searches, and I’ll enter that search query here. I’ll also change the country to Canada since people in other countries, they probably aren’t trying to find a Toronto-based photographer as often.
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Ahref SEO tools for basics keyword research |
Now,
I’ll run the search. And you'll see that there are only around 60 approximately
monthly searches for this keyword phrase, which is way from exciting. But
looking below, you’ll see that the parent topic for our query is different. The
parent topic determines if you'll rank for your target keyword, therefore the
one that we originally entered here, while targeting a more general topic on
your page instead. In this case, the parent topic is showing that more people
look for, “Toronto wedding photographer,” over “wedding photographer in
Toronto.” Now, if we scroll to the rock bottom of the page, you'll see the
highest 10 Google rankings for your target keyword and a bunch of keyword
metrics.
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Basics of SEO |
I’ll
just touch on two of them for this article: traffic and keywords. Take a look
at these two ranking pages. You can see that they generate overflow thousand
search visitors every single month and next thereto, you’ll see that every page
individually ranks for many keywords.
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Basics of Search engine optimization |
If we click on the number of keyword rankings here, you can see all of the different keywords and ranking positions in Google search. This is a good thing to do because you already know that Google is ranking this single page for all of the keywords, so why Wouldnt you be able to rank for these keywords and maybe even more?
Try
and remember this part, because we'll be exploring things like keyword usage
multiple times throughout this tutorial. All right, now that we have a list of
keywords, it’s time to optimize your pages. In the world of program
optimization, this is often called “on-page SEO.” Since we all know the
keywords that folks are checking out in Google, it gives us clues on the
language we should always use to let both Google and potential customers know
what your page is about. For example, knowing that “Toronto wedding
photographer” may be a more popular search query than “wedding photographer in
Toronto”, which will help us make smarter copywriting decisions.
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SEO search engine basics results |
So
for your homepage content, you would possibly want to mention, “Hi I’m Sam, a
Toronto wedding photographer. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,” instead of “Howdy,
I’m Sam and I do wedding photos for couples in Toronto.” But I do need to make
two things very clear: First, you don’t need to use your exact-match keyword
since Google has gotten pretty smart at understanding what your page is about.
And second, it’s very important to note that you shouldn’t try to trick Google
by using keywords where they don’t belong. Your first priority should be to
optimize for people because the last time I checked, robots aren’t getting to
pay you for your services.
On-Page SEO in Details
Here’s
an example of what you shouldn’t do: "I’m a Toronto wedding photographer
that does Toronto wedding photography for your Toronto wedding.” This is known
as keyword stuffing and long story short, it does more harm than good. So the
key takeaway? Don’t do it. So for on-page SEO, I want to pass on 4 very basics,
but important tips that you can use on every page you optimize. The first is to
optimize your title tags and meta descriptions. When you look at
Google’s search results, you’ll see this part in
blue and the text below.
The top part is named your title tag and therefore the other part is that the meta description. The purpose of these is to entice someone to click through to your page. And if people are actually clicking through to your page, then that’s telling Google that your page is likely relevant to the reason why they had searched for the query in the first place, right? And you'll see that Google actually even bolds these keywords and similar keywords within the search results making them stand out. With that in mind, I'd create a title like, “Award-Winning Toronto Wedding Photographer,” then my name. But of course, if you’re going to do something like this, it should be true.
Then
for the meta description, you can explain in a couple of brief sentences what
the page is about. But rather than putting a generic description that everyone
else is doing and calling yourself the best, you can put something like “Sam
Oh was rated the Star’s Best TorontoWedding Photographer. He combines
creativity with science to capture life's happiest day in a million pixels.”
Awww...how sweet is that?
Now,
this can make me as a consumer want to seek out out who this awesome
photographer is. The last part of on-page optimization is the most important
and that’s the actual content on the page. For a typical wedding photography
home page, I might have some images, a brief “about us” or “about me” section,
possibly the services that I provide, and a few testimonials from happy brides
and grooms. Without over-complicating things, you will probably want to use
your primary keyword phrase within the main headline, often mentioned as an H1
tag.
And
looking at one among the top-ranking pages, you’ll see that they did this right
here. An example of what you probably shouldna be doing is something like this:
hello there. The H1 or heading tag here says, “hello there” which doesn’t help
anyone understand what the page is about. And remember, your job is to assist
Google best identify your page as being relevant to the user’s search query.
I’ll
go back to the organic keywords report in Ahrefs to see one of my competitor’s
keyword rankings and see if any other ideas might help Google better understand
what my page is about. You can see some other relevant keywords inhere like
bridal, photos, and GTA, which stands for the Greater Toronto Area. So as
you’re writing the copy for your page, you might want to keep these in mind and
sprinkle them in where it makes sense and reads naturally to visitors.
Alright,
so let’s take this Some Photography example one step further. Let’s say that my
business was growing, I got a lot more experience under my belt and I found out
that I have some mad skills in areas like landscape, portrait, travel, product
photography. So I decided, heck, I’m going to offer those services too! Rather
than trying to rank my homepage for keywords that aren’t exactly related, I
could easily create new services pages.
So
I’d do an equivalent thing by first getting to Ahrefs Keywords Explorer. Then
I’d type in something like “Toronto product photographer," and I’ll
quickly check out the search volume and see it's 100or so monthly searches in
Canada. Then I’ll take a glance at the parent topic that has around 200
searches. And here’s a quick but super interesting side note. With wedding
photographers, people seem to be searching for “Toronto wedding photographer”
the most. While people looking for product photographers in Toronto are
searching for “product photography Toronto.” So this step is vital to ensure
you’re targeting keywords that will provide you with the most exposure for your
pages.
So
for our services page, we would do the same thing as we did before with the
title tag, meta description, and the content on the page. The last item you
ought to do is to incorporate your primary keyword phrase within the URL of the
page. So for a product photography services page, your final URL might appear
as if this: If you’re a WordPress user, you'll just click here and edit it
using hyphens to separate spaces. So during this case, I might change it to
product-photography-Toronto. A really quick hack you'll do is to seem at the
highest 10 rankings and see how they’ve optimized those pages to rank there.
So if we glance at the Google search results for, “Toronto product photography,” you'll see that a number of the pages are keyword stuffing within the title tags which the meta descriptions are all kind of cheesy or they're truncated. Clicking through to this result, you can see that it’s just a classifieds site, similar to Craigslist, so it’s clearly not optimized.
Clicking
through to this one, you can see that they included their keyword phrase in the
heading and title tags, but then they're pretty much no content on the rest of
the page. And then clicking through to the present one here, this one seems to
be over-optimized for his or her keyword target. And if I do a ‘find’ for the
word “photo” you'll see over 110 instances of it on this page, which again,
will do more harm than good in the long run. What you’re seeing here is an
opportunity to overtake these search results.
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Keyword difference |
Basically,
Google has no choice but to settle on the simplest options from a nasty pool of
pages. Alright, so by now, we’ve optimized our main pages for our different
services, and we've covered the fundamentals of on-page SEO. And if you’ve done
this for all of your key pages, then I can assure you that you are miles ahead
of a lot of your competitors. The next part and arguably the most important
piece of ranking high on Google is off-page SEO.
Off-page
SEO often refers to link building. And link building is the process of getting
other websites to link to your web pages. Basically, links act as votes or
other people vouching for your website saying: “hey, these people are really
good at what they do and I trust them enough that I would send my visitors to
their website.” It works in a similar way that you simply would refer your
friend to shop for a product from whatever store because you’ve tried it, used
it, and loved it.
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link building |
Backlinks in Details
In general, the more quality backlinks you'll get from relevant pages, the upper you’ll rank in Google. Now I’m putting the stress here on the word “quality,” because there are tons of various sorts of links you'll get from like forums, directories, and editorial links to name a few. But if you think about it, a place like a forum where virtually anyone can place a link will likely hold less value than a link from someone else's blog. But to be clear, other sorts of links will still hold some quite valuable, but probably not the maximum amount as links like editorials would. So if you’re focusing on quality, then you'll probably want to prioritize editorial links.
And
the main thanks to getting links from other people's blogs are through something
that SEOs often ask as “outreach.” And outreach is strictly the way it sounds.
You’re contacting people and asking them for a link. But you can’t just email
someone and be like, “yo! I need a link. Hook it up.” It doesn't work that way.
There are three things that you need to make your outreach campaigns more successful.
- You need people who are actually interested in the stuff that you do.
- You need a good reason to contact them.
- You need a pitch that somehow benefits them.
Let’s
go through a few examples, shall we? First, we need to identify people who are
interested in what you are doing. The most commonsensical one within the context
of link building are websites that have already been linked to your competitors. You
can find these pages by going to Ahrefs'Site Explorer and entering a domain or
URL. So I’ll enter in mangostudios.com, who also does wedding photography in
Toronto. I’ll also narrow our search right down to pages that are linking just
to their home page. From here, I can click on the backlinks option in the left
column. And here, I’ll use this filter to narrow down the backlinks to only
links within content, since I discussed that I would like to urge some
editorial links.
On the left side, you can see the websites linked to the target URL or
domain, and on the right side, you can see which page they linked to and the
context of the backlink. Next, let’s click through to this one
on"Jaw-Dropping Gorgeous Wedding Flower Ideas." You can see that
there are a bunch of pictures of flowers. And hey! I actually have a great one
that’s way better than all of these. So let’s make sure off on our checklist
for successful outreach.
We
now have a prospect. So I can contact the author, Nicole, and let her know
about one of my pictures that were published in some kind of wedding magazine
because it’s that awesome. So this now fulfills checkbox #2. We have an honest
reason to contact her because we've something relevant to her piece. And in
fact, I’d be giving her rights to publish my photo, which also checks off #3.
As a side note, it doesn’t mean that she'll publish my photo or give me a link.
As a general rule of thumb, the higher the‘excuse’ you'll come up with to
contact the author, the higher your chance is going to be to urge the link.
Another good reason to contact someone is to offer a guest post. Blog owners are always
on the hunt for new content and since your site is new. You’ll be getting in
front of someone else’s audience in exchange for some of some time and content
where you'll easily use some watermarked photos that you’ve taken. With guest
posts, your reason to contact them is pretty reasonable and you’ll be providing
value, which is free content (that should be good), that benefits them and/or
their website. The next outreach prospect you can find are businesses in a
lateral non-competing niche. So as a wedding photographer, you might want to
contact other local flower shops, reception halls, and wedding planners. If you
check out the “jaw-dropping flowers” article, you'll see that there are two
people mentioned in the article.
There’s Mango Studios, which is that the site that we’re analyzing, also as an occasion and style planning company. You can contact these people to form meaningful relationships. Just think about it for a second. Your businesses go hand-in-hand and you can pass on referrals to each other. You can link back to each other as a ‘preferred vendor’ or link to others’ content in guest posts where it's relevant. And this isn’t limited to just local businesses.
This
applies to everyone. So, find some solid partners who are there on the same
journey as you during a lateral niche and help one another out. Now with link
building, there are numerous tactics and methods. So if you would like to
expand your knowledge during this sphere, then I highly recommend watching our
series on link building where you’ll get a full scope of the way to do that
effectively.
All
right! We are on to the last SEO basics tip that I see tons of beginner’s
avoiding. Now, if you've got something to sell, fixing your homepage and
product/services pages are perhaps the primary thing that you’ll do or did and
permanently reason. These are the pages that will directly generate leads and
revenue for your business. But here’s the final tip: start blogging. Now, I’m
not telling you to write about how you changed your storefront sign from red to
green.
By
blogging, I’m on providing practical content that will and can help your
prospective customers solve problems. In Dr. Jonah Berger’s book, Contagious:
"Why Things Catch On," he shares his research on why content gains
popularity and even goes viral. Content that gives “practical value” was one of
the key factors to success. People don’t just share funny cat videos or
emotional stories. They share things that help others. And the same goes for
gaining links.
People
are more likely to link to your content if it’s helpful, actionable, and solves
a problem. Look at what we do for the Ahrefs blog. We have numerous SEO tools,
but we tackle different big topics like keyword research and link building. And
albeit you don’t use our tools, you'll gain plenty useful through these
monstrous posts. But you’ll see that we include shortcuts or hacks where our
tool can make doing SEO an entire lot easier.
To
further prove my point, if you check out the “top pages” report inside Site
Explorer, you’ll see that the pages that generate the foremost search traffic
for us, mostly come from our blog articles. Blogging lets you reach large
audiences. For example, we saw that the Toronto wedding photographer had around
900 monthly searches in Canada. Let’s look up something like “wedding venues
Toronto” in Keywords Explorer. You can see that it has around 1,400 monthly
searches in Canada.
If you’ve been within the wedding photography business long enough, then you’ve probably done shoots at numerous venues. So you'll create a post with helpful and practical value. For example, I'd create a piece of writing of a number of the simplest venues that I had taken photos at and display pieces from my portfolio within the blog post. I would also detail the pros and cons of each place, pricing information, location details, items on their catering menu, or anything else that would be genuinely helpful to a person visiting this page. And if you think that about it, people usually book the venue before the photographer.
So
there’s a solid chance that after people see a number of your stunning
watermarked photos, they could look around your portfolio, and get in touch
with you for a quote that will generate more customers for you. And if you
think that about it. They'll haven't discovered you thru a special means
because they didn’t type during a keyword phrase like“Toronto wedding
photographer," or their friends didn't refer you to them. When you’re
thinking of those ideas, put yourself within the searcher’s shoes. What would
they be trying to find and what would help them solve the query? Now, when
you’re picking topics, attempt to persist with ones that provide value to your
business.
So
as a photographer, I might want to nearly always showcase my work because I
might be judged by my portfolio. As a software company, we showcase how our
tools can help in people’s SEO process because people will buy our tools if
they see how it benefits them. As a coffee roastery, you might show them how to
make the perfect cup of coffee or an article on how to roast beans. I cannot
emphasize enough, how much a blog can help you boost your SEO efforts. It’s a
great way to get ahead of your competitors who have been in the game for longer
than you, but they've been targeting only these‘obvious’ keywords.
From
here, you can just rinse and repeat the keyword research process, the on-page
optimization tips, and continually build links to your content and articles and
start climbing the Google search rankings. We have a ton of really helpful
videos where we expand on these topics. So I’ll leave links to those in the
description. Make sure to subscribe for more actionable SEO and marketing
tutorials and if you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment and I
would be happy to jump in and help out. Sam Photography, signing out.
Conclusion of Basics SEO
In this post, I have tried to clear all basics of SEO. If you follow these SEO tips, I hope you will get a better result in Search engine optimization. Please Like this post and don't forget to share it with your friends.
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