How to learn SEO basics for generating organic traffic to your website?
This is a common question to the newbies in the online world. And hence this article is dedicated to all the beginners in online marketing.
Are you one of them? Have you built up your website but not getting enough traffic?
Don’t worry! I’ll lead you in the right direction, and show you the way I learned all about SEO. In general, my websites are fully dependent on organic traffic. I rarely pay for advertisement unless I launch or promote a brand new item in the market.
I am glad to say presently my websites earn mid to high range 4 figures ($) every month from online, and more than 90% of my visitors come from organic traffic. Of course, you have to work in a proper way to get free of cost organic traffic like mine.
Let me show you the most essential areas you should focus on; in fact, these are the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) basics.
What is SEO?
I suppose, you already introduced yourself to the online world. If you did so, the term Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is probably well-known to you (or even may not be). I’d like to start from scratch as I’m supposed to help a newbie on the topic, how to learn SEO basics.
As a definition you can say, SEO is a process that determinates the visibility of a website in the search engines through an unpaid method.
Whenever you search a product/service online, several advertisements are visible at the top of the search engine result (say Google result), and then a list of originally ranked search result starts. You see top listed products are marked as “sponsored” or “Ad”. That means they are paying the search engine for advertisements to make it visible at the top.
But just after the advertised products you’ll see the list of other search results that are NOT marked as “sponsored” or “Ad”. Those pages actually originally ranked pages and appeared by following SEO strategies. That means, those web pages are capable to generate traffic for free of cost (those pages don’t need the assistance of paid advertisement for promotion).
As an example, Google is a search engine giant, and you have a website with 30 pages. If you can apply the SEO strategy proper way to your website, most of your pages will be appearing on the first or second page of Google when visitors will search with related keywords. And …
More will be the visitors = Higher will be the revenue
So, how would you like to generate traffic to your startup business website, by paid advertisements or by FREE of cost Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
Is Search Engine Optimization Worthy?
Firstly, SEO is always important; the range of importance depends on your business category.
If you start e-commerce, that means you already invested a lot of money for your business, and you need some quick profit to run your business, and hence, paid advertisements are necessary.; but application of SEO right way can decrease the advertisement expenses to half or even less.
In case of e-commerce you should go for product SEO. In addition, if you can create some search engine optimized content, that will leverage your sell for sure.
If you are selling a digital program you have to go for other paid options similar to e-commerce, but once again SEO can increase your sell to some extent.
In case, you are running a blog based affiliate marketing business, creating content is mandatory. So, it is essential to focus on SEO.
Affiliate marketing is a low investment high-profit business model. So, as you are not investing a lot of money for your business, you may not wish to invest a lot in advertisements. Rather, generating organic traffic via SEO should be a much wiser strategy for you.
Secondly, the importance of SEO depends on whether you prefer a long term or short term business.
When you are investing your money and effort to build up your business, you must wish to make money from it on a long term basis. Few people come to the internet, start a scam website, suck others, make a lot of money in a short period and runway. I hope your business model is not in this category.
If you are intended to launch such a scam site, this article is not for you.
A short term business owner can’t afford too much time for SEO, the owner needs to rely on high paid advertisements before someone others occupy the place.
I suppose, you are planning to run a long term business, and in that situation, I strongly suggest you rely on SEO. Because from the day the search engines start to love your website, the website will start to generate a gradually increasing traffic, and your revenue will be increasing day-by-day.
I personally prefer to use SEO strategies for Google ranking of my websites. More than 95% of traffic on my websites is organic and this really helps me to earn a lot of revenue online. And of course, I am highly thankful to THIS PLATFORM, where I learned all about SEO.
Is Search Engine Optimization a hectic job?
To be honest, SEO is not an easy job. It needs a lot of time and effort. But it saves a lot of money and provides you a long term existence on the internet (If you can do it proper way).
It needs hard work, but still, I’d suggest you focus on SEO, especially if you want your online business to be your permanent source of income.
Frankly speaking, I am the founder of several websites and those are my full time earning sources. Most of my websites are blog based affiliate marketing sites, but I also included dropshipping in some of those.
I spend a lot of time there for SEO (for both blog-based and dropshipping websites), and in return, they provide me a good deal of revenue which is more than enough for the monthly expenditure of my family, all my traveling expenses (I’m a travel lover) and my future savings.
And YES, I achieved all my success mostly by SEO (and fractionally by PPC). I don’t prefer paid advertisements unless I promote a brand new product. The lessons of SEO helped me to turn my passion into profit.
SEO basics: What are these?
SEO is a critical beast actually because it depends on several things.
SEO basics are all those strategies that help your website to rank well in Google and other search engines. To be honest, the list of tricks is very long, and you need to maintain all of those to optimize the search engines.
Full discussion in such a small article is not really possible as it is a long learning process. Even I had to spend over 6 months to learn everything perfectly. But I must show a brief overview of your basic understanding. And of course, I’ll guide you on how to learn SEO basics and where to learn.
As you are searching for some tips on SEO basics, I can expect you have already chosen a niche and started building your website.
If you haven’t yet, you check here for the NICHE idea and visit here to launch a website within minutes.
Let’s head over.
1. Figure out the customers’ needs: keyword ideas
An idea of customers’ needs will help you to select keywords for your website contents.
So, firstly you should figure out the list of topics your site visitors are looking for (based on your niche). You can take Google’s help.
Suppose you are in a weight loss niche.
(i) Check what are the most common terms people are searching for.
Those may be…
- How to lose weight
- How to lose weight fast
- Ways to lose weight
(ii) Figure out the alternative ways people are searching to find the same thing.
People often search the same thing in different ways. You may have a general idea to generate keywords for your content.
For example, losing weight may be searched with different search terms.
- Lose weight at home
- Ways to lose weight without dieting.
- Tips to lose weight
(iii) Check for the search terms which are a bit unconventional
Apart from the common and alternative search terms, people also search in an unconventional way to find out something specific on a topic. In your weight loss niche, people may be searching for terms like…
- The fastest ways to lose weight
- How to lose weight in a week
- Avoid foods to lose weight
- Lose weight after pregnancy
There are many on the list. You can see the images below for an idea.
In this way, you can get some awesome keyword ideas to reach your visitors easily.
2. Keyword metrics
Keywords are one of the most important parts of search engine optimization (SEO) strategies, and it is the most basic step for SEO. A perfect keyword can rank your website within hours.
In the above section, you got some keyword ideas in Google. But how will you choose the best one from the list?
You should never think, all the keyword ideas you figured out earlier in Google, all will rank well; because traffic and competition are the major facts for a keyword.
To select the right keywords you need to understand the keyword metrics very well. You can check THIS ARTICLE to get some in-depth ideas on keyword metrics.
You need to focus on average monthly traffic, keyword competition and SEO strength for a particular keyword you are looking for.
- More the traffic = better search engine trust = higher the rate of conversions
- Lower the competition = Higher the chances to rank in Google = higher the conversions
- Better the SEO strength = higher the chances to rank in search engines = higher revenue
The metrics are designated in different terms in different keyword research tools. That doesn’t matter, because you can manage these metrics with a short term practice. But you can’t manage if the produced results are not accurate. Inaccurate results may ruin your online business. So, you are strongly suggested choosing the right keyword research tool for SEO.
There are many keyword research tools on the internet, such as Soovle, JAAXY, Ahrefs Keywords Explorer, Google Keyword Planner, SECockpit, Google Search Console and many others. It’s really difficult for a beginner to choose the right one. Because as a newbie you’ll have limited knowledge on the quality of output, price, ease of handling, etc.
I am glad to share my personal experience which may help you out.
After a lot of experience with several keyword research tools, I finally chose Jaaxy and I am sticking to it for several years. The reason behind my choice is…
- Jaaxy is extremely easy to handle
- It produces results with very high accuracy so that most of my articles rank in Google on the same day I publish.
- Metrics are pretty easy to compare.
- There are several other facilities within Jaaxy keyword research tool.
- It is a relatively low cost than other keyword research tools.
Are you interested to explore more about Jaaxy?
Click the above link to know all about Jaaxy. I hope, you’ll enjoy the in-depth knowledge on keyword metrics and strategies.
3. Make your pages visitor-friendly
Customers are angels from the gods for a business person. As you are running an online business, you have to focus on visitors’ satisfaction. Violation of this rule will diminish your online business.
If the visitors don’t like your pages, they’ll stop visiting your web pages. Without a visitor, your website is nothing but a dumb sheet. No mechanical SEO will work there.
If you have a wonderful website, visitors will return again and again and they’ll start sharing your pages with others. Your website will be becoming popular day by day and so will be reflected in your income.
So, how will be making a page visitor friendly?
- Create helpful content.
- Decorate your pages wonderfully.
- Include beautiful relevant images.
- Typography should be nice looking.
- Use headers in the proper places.
- Create easily readable articles.
- Choose a mobile-friendly theme.
4. Optimize your pages for SEO
This is mostly for the search engine bots and partially for the visitors.
(i) Meta details
You need to let the search engines understand the topics of your pages or posts. There are many ways to do this manually, but I’m discussing here on WordPress website because WordPress is the most popular one nowadays for building a website.
In your WordPress website, firstly you should install an SEO plugin such as Yeost SEO or All in one SEO. Both of these are free and beginners friendly.
You need to fill up the meta title and meta description at the SEO options. These two will be visible only when your content will appear in the search engine search results. On one hand, this will let the search engine understand the topic and on the other, this will let the visitors know the same.
(ii) URL should be short but descriptive
Long-tail keywords often work well, but you should avoid a long tail URL, because Google doesn’t like it.
Your keyword should short but that will describe the topic as well. This method will let the search engine bots understand what you are describing in your content, and ultimately help your content to rank well.
5. Image optimization
People often overlook the fate of an image. I have seen many bloggers include several images in their blogs but they ignore the image optimization part.
Google bots are very intelligent, still, Google bots can’t read an image but read the corresponding description. If your image bears a numeric title, Google can’t relate the image to your article.
When the bots find the image title and image descriptions are unmatched to your content, SEO gets affected.
You are suggested to fill up the Alt text, title, and description properly for every image you introduce in your article.
6. Internal links and external links
Internal links are very useful in all aspects. These actually help you to rank well in 3 ways.
- Google and other search engines like internal links. Linking an article internally to the other articles on your website lets the search engine bots realize, your website is having all the related knowledge on the particular topic.
- It drives your visitors to your other related articles. Your visitors get benefited by accumulating higher knowledge on a topic.
- You also get benefited because your visitors will surf your other pages. If they find them interesting, they will take necessary actions (such as sharing, etc.). Ultimately you’ll have a higher number of audiences.
Search engines also like the external links on your website. Inclusion of external links means your website is not an isolated dumb, rather it is a socially active media that stay connected to others, and accumulate knowledge from everywhere.
7. Website security
There is a big difference between http// and https// URLs. People avoid visiting an unsecured website having a cross marked lock sign.
When your website URL appears with a green-colored lock sign it provides the visitors a safe and secure feeling. In fact, an https// based secure website is really safe to surf.
Even I personally prefer to visit those secure sites, rather than surfing an unsecured website. Like human, search engines also prefer the secured website.
That means, an unsecured website often decreases the number of visitors and subsequently affects the SEO.
But the major problem is, most of the hosting platforms will charge you to provide SSL security for your website.
Why will you spend some extra bucks for this simple but very important feature?
I’d say, no need to spend your hard earn money to make your website secure, better you select a hosting platform who provides SSL security for FREE.
After clicking the above link, you’ll reach an article; check a chart within this article. The platform doesn’t charge extra for SSL security for the premium members.
8. Sitemap
I have seen many bloggers are actually unaware of the sitemap function.
You should know, the sitemap is a very important function that helps the search engines to navigate your website and web pages. If you avoid introducing the sitemap to the search engines, your SEO will be affected.
If you are interested to get your website navigated by Google, you have to sign up for Google search console. You should follow the steps to introduce your sitemap to Google.
>> This platform will provide you full guidance on sitemap feature <<
9. Backlinks
Backlinks are important. They drive traffic from another website to yours. For beginners, one of the simplest backlinking methods is guest blogging.
Guest blogging means writing blogs for another website with backlinking to your website. You should choose a popular website for guest blogging.
One of the major rules of guest blogging is, the written blog should be relevant to the other website’s niche and the backlinking should also be relevant. That means, for guest blogging you need to choose a popular website that is related to your niche.
10. Tracking the SEO results
Now it’s time to check SEO results. Unless you check the SEO results, you’ll not realize the rights and wrongs.
Google Analytics and Google search console are two important tools to track SEO results. You should connect your website to these two tools, check the rate of success every morning, and take necessary actions.
Where to learn all about SEO?
The above discussion was already long enough. But still, I could just provide you the major points of SEO basics.
As I mentioned, it is not possible to explain SEO topics in a small blog. You need to move through a full learning curve, you need to invest your time to learn all about SEO basics and become an SEO expert.
SEO is the only way to promote your website for FREE of cost and receive organic traffic permanently. If you wish to convert your website to a full-time source of income, I strongly suggest you rely on SEO, as I personally do.
I learned all the SEO strategies right from This Platform, which helped me to turn my passion into profit. After knocking several doors online, I finally found this is the only platform that is offering a complete training on SEO.
In the above link, you’ll be able to discover all about the platform that I suggested for SEO learnings. Here I’m just giving you a brief idea about the list of things you’ll get inside.
1. In-depth training on SEO
- Profitable Niche selection
- Building a website
- Keyword research strategies
- Creating useful contents
- Page and image optimization
- Sitemap knowledge
- Using the Google analytics and Google search console
- Other important tricks to drive organic traffic
2. Weekly live webinar for gaining advanced knowledge on modern SEO techniques and monetize your website.
3. Thousands of additional tutorials and training videos on various topics to monetize your website.
3. Hosting platform for 50 websites: You can build up to 50 websites in this platform on any niche.
4. An ultimate keyword research tool that generates very accurate results.
5. A great community eager to helps you anytime.
6. Other facilities.
Are you interested to turn your passion into profit as I did?
I tried my best to provide you an overview of SEO basics, and also suggested my favorite platform for learning SEO strategies. Have you got the answers to the question, “how to learn SEO basics”?
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Have a great day.
