Seo Basics
SEO Basics: Beginner’s Guide to SEO Success
Do you feel that SEO is too hard and not worth the effort?
SEO isn’t that complicated. It’s quite simple—or at least the basics are.
But the basics aren’t enough to get you ranked, right?
Wrong.
Here’s the truth:
Most people who run
websites have a limited understanding of SEO, so you often only need to
get the basics right to succeed.
In this post, you’ll
learn the five fundamental steps to SEO success:
1.
How to figure out what
your customers are searching for
2.
How to optimize your
web pages for your target keywords
3.
How to make sure your
website is accessible to both search engines and humans
4.
How to get other
websites to link to your site, and finally:
5.
How to start measuring
your SEO success
I’ve made every effort
to keep this as jargon-free as possible without scrimping on actionability.
Step 1: Learn what
your customers are actually searching for
You can’t optimize
your website without knowing what your customers are searching for—that much is
obvious.
How do you figure this
out? The best starting point is to use common sense.
Imagine that you run a
hotel in Dublin, Ireland. It doesn’t take an SEO genius to guess that
your customers are probably searching for things like:
·
‘hotels
in Dublin’
·
‘place
to stay in Dublin’
·
‘accommodation
in Dublin’
Before you do anything
else, think about what your customers might be searching for and jot your ideas
down in a notepad. You could even ask them directly.
No need to go
overboard here—a handful of ideas will do.
Done? Good. Let’s do
some more research.
a) Figure out the most popular way people
search for your business
It’s likely that some of your customers are searching for your business using
the words and phrases you jotted down. Whether the majority of people are is
another story.
So the first step is to
figure out the most common way people search for what
you do.
You can use the ideas
you’ve already jotted down to do that. Start by doing a Google search for one
of the words or phrases on your list. It doesn’t matter how ridiculous or
long-winded this phrase is. I’ll use a purposely silly one to prove it.
Here are the top few
search results for that query:
Having skimmed these
results for all of 10 seconds, I can see they each have the phrase “Dublin
hotels” in the title.
This matters because
websites tend to optimize their title tags for SEO, so it’s likely
that these particular ones have already done some research and found that
“Dublin hotels” is the most popular way people search for places to stay in
Dublin.
But let’s not get
ahead of ourselves.
There’s no guarantee
that these folks know what they’re doing.
Let’s make sure this
is a good main keyword to target by checking out our original search term
in Ahrefs Keywords Explorer.
Bingo. When we search
for the same phrase in Keywords Explorer, it tells us that the Parent topic is “Dublin hotels” with a
monthly US search volume of 9,900. It also has good traffic
potential.
This confirms our
initial suspicions that this is a good main keyword to target.
b) Understand other ways people may be
searching for the same thing
Let’s take a look at
the SERP overview for “Dublin hotels” in Keywords
Explorer.
Take note of the “Kw.” column,
which shows how many keywords for which each of the top 10 web pages rank.
The average here is
around 150–200 keywords.
In other words, each
of these web pages gets traffic from hundreds of other long-tail and related keywords. That
means not everyone types “Dublin hotels” into Google when searching for a place
to stay in Dublin. Other people search for the same thing in different ways.
You can start to get a
sense of what these other keywords are by analyzing more Google search results.
Look for more similar
and related phrases that pop up over and over again.
In this instance, we
see such phrases as “hotels in Dublin,” “Dublin city hotels,” and “cheap hotels
in Dublin.”
These businesses have
likely identified these keywords and phrases already, hence the reason they
include them in their title tags.
If you want even more
suggestions, try the Also rank for report in Keywords
Explorer.
This report shows the
keywords for which the top 10 ranking pages also rank.
However, this report
tends to surface a lot of keywords, which can be overwhelming.
One way to narrow
things down to only super relevant results is to take the 2–3 most relevant top
ranking pages and paste them into Ahrefs Content Gap tool. That will unveil the
common keywords for which all of those pages rank.
c) Delve deeper into the more granular
searches your customers are making
Now that you know how
people search for your business, it’s time to delve deeper into the more
granular searches people make in relation to what you do.
A simple way to start
is to look at Google autocomplete results.
Go to Google and begin
typing a query in the search box, but don’t hit Enter. Google will immediately
suggest some additional search terms that people have used:
You can repeat this
step and get more results by adding each letter of the alphabet:
If you’re interested
in learning the questions people ask (and search for), check if there’s a
“People also ask” box in the Google results…
d) Find popular and engaging topics in
your field
Content marketing is the art of creating
useful and valuable content to attract your target customers or clients. But
don’t just start a blog and hope for the best—figure out what topics are
popular and engaging in your field and create content related to said topics.
For this, I’d
recommend starting with Reddit.
Find a subreddit
related to your industry (e.g., r/irishtourism). Look at what people are
talking about and which threads are the most popular. You can even filter and
sort by the top threads of all time.
On r/irishtourism, guides and resources about things to do and
places to eat and drink are very popular with folks interested in traveling to
Dublin.
Want to take things a
step further?
Enter Content Explorer.
Content Explorer
provides one of the quickest and most reliable methods to understand the most
popular and engaging in a given field.
Here’s what I got when
I searched for ‘Ireland travel’:
Notice how I used the
filters to find pages that get a substantial amount of search traffic even
though they only have a handful of links? This allows me to quickly identify
relevant popular topics that should be easy to
rank for.
I can even see the
keywords for which each of these pages ranks by hitting “Details” dropdown.
It looks like travel
tips are popular. That gives me the idea that we can publish a travel guide to
attract visitors and social shares.
Recommended reading: 4 Ways to Find Untapped
Keyword Ideas With Great Traffic Potential
e) Expand your keyword list by looking
literally anywhere else
Google search results
and professional keyword tools can give you a lot to get started with, but it’s
in no way enough.
To be successful
with SEO, you need to understand how people are talking about the niche
you’re operating in, what problems they have, and so on. Use every opportunity
to speak to customers and take notice of the language they’re using.
Doing this in person
is great, but also very time‐consuming.
So here are a few
places where you can find the words people use while talking about your topic
of interest:
·
Forums: There are quite a few communities where
people discuss traveling. For example, a simple search led me to the TripAdvisor Dublin Travel Forum.
·
Quora/Reddit: Quora is probably not the first place
that comes to mind when you’re looking for travel advice, but you’d be
surprised by the amount of information you can find there even on this topic.
Where it comes to Reddit, the adage that there’s a subreddit for everything is
generally true.
·
Facebook/LinkedIn
Groups: LinkedIn is more
geared towards B2B markets, but when it comes to Facebook, there are
groups for almost everything.
Any website or
social network with a large number of visitors and user‐generated content can serve as a source of
inspiration and keyword ideas.
Podcasts can also be a
good source of inspiration…
… as can the contents pages of popular niche-related books on Amazon:
Don’t be afraid to get
creative here. Inspiration and keyword ideas are all around you.
f) Understand the metrics behind the keywords
you’re targeting
Most people focus
entirely on the following two metrics when doing keyword research:
·
search volume (the number of monthly
searches, on average), and
·
keyword difficulty (an estimate as to how
easy or hard it will be to appear on the first page of search results for
that term).
These are important as
they provide useful insights into the potential of the keyword and how
difficult ranking for it is likely to be.
However, instead of
looking solely at search volume, you should try to figure out the true search
traffic potential for each keyword. That way, you can focus your efforts on
ranking for the ones that are likely to send the most targeted traffic
your way.
In Ahrefs, you can do
that by looking at the traffic stats for the current top-ranking pages in
the SERP overview in Keywords Explorer:
This tells you the
estimated total monthly search traffic to each of the top-ranking pages.
You can also see that
these pages (which rank for Dublin hotels) also rank for many other related keywords. Looking at
these stats gives you an idea of the kind of traffic you can expect to get to
your page if you manage to rank.
Note that true traffic
potential can significantly exceed the search volume of the keyword you’re
researching.
Learn more about keyword research
Keyword research is an
essential aspect of SEO, and it can be intimidating to those new to
the field. However, understanding the basic concepts and metrics is a must for
every website owner who wants more organic traffic.
To dive deeper into
professional keyword research, check out our extensive guide on the topic.
After you figure out
the keywords for which you want to rank and what searchers are expecting to see
when they type them in Google, you need to assign those keywords to the pages
on your site. It’s worth creating a map (in a spreadsheet or another file) that
ties each keyword in your plan to a page on your site.
Step 2: Create pages optimized for search
Keyword research is
only the first step towards attracting more organic search traffic.
You also need to make
sure your pages are structured well and satisfy the person behind the search to
rank for the keywords you selected.
Your optimization
efforts should start with making sure that your visitors are enjoying the user
experience (UX) your website provides. Use design and typography that makes it
easy to consume the content, and remove any unnecessary elements such as
pop-ups, opt-in boxes, etc. that can annoy your readers.
On‐page optimization is the next step in
your SEO strategy.
Even targeting the
most profitable keywords with the “best” content won’t help you if your pages
are not optimized for search engines.
There are many ways to
implement the features I discuss in the following sections, but if you’re using
WordPress for your website, I first recommend installing
an SEO plugin like Yoast SEO. It’s free and simple to use,
and it’s perfect for those who are new to on-page SEO.
Setting up your pages
for success in the search engine involves the following:
a) Create content that aligns with ‘search
intent’
Wanting to rank for a
keyword doesn’t mean you deserve to, even if your traditional
on-page SEO elements are on-point. That’s because of something
called search intent.
In short, there are
three main ‘types’ of searches people make:
1.
Navigational: They’re looking for a specific website,
e.g., ‘Dublin airport’
2.
Informational: They’re looking to learn more about a
specific topic, e.g., ‘things
to do in Dublin’
3.
Transactional: They’re looking to purchase a specific
product/service, e.g., ‘book
hotel in Dublin’
Naturally, searches
with a high level of commercial interest are more valuable from a business
point of view since the people doing them are closer to purchasing (i.e., further
down the marketing funnel) and thus more likely to
spend money if they land on your site.
But search intent isn’t always crystal clear
from the search query itself.
For example, take the
query “best hotel in Dublin.”
Now, you might be
thinking “my hotel is the best
hotel in Dublin, so this is probably a transactional term for which I can rank
my homepage,” right? Not
so fast.
The best way to
understand the intent behind any search term is to see what pages rank
for it.
So let’s do that:
Top 10 ranking pages for “best hotel in
Dublin” via Ahrefs Keywords Explorer
Here you can see that
almost all of the top-ranking results are blog posts and listicles—i.e., informational results.
The logic here is that
because Google’s primary goal is to satisfy its users, their algorithm keeps a
close eye on the behavior of people searching for a particular term and tries
to offer results that will meet the intent of their search. Thus, you can infer
search intent by looking at the commonalities between the current top-ranking
pages.
Never create content
without first understanding the search intent behind the query you’re
targeting.
b) Use short, descriptive URLs
The web address of
your page sends a signal to search engines about its topic. Getting this right
the first time is recommended because you should avoid changing it, if
possible.
Here’s Google’s advice about URLs:
A
site’s URL structure should be as simple as possible. Consider
organizing your content so that URLs are constructed logically and in a manner
that is most intelligible to humans (when possible, readable words rather than
long ID numbers).
In other words, don’t
go for…
domain.com/56945602_86587356.asp
…when you could go for
something descriptive like:
domain.com/dublin-guide
The other benefit
of descriptive URLs is that they often
include your target keyword (or at least words and phrases from it). That said,
don’t shoehorn keywords into URLs if they look unnatural.
c) Create compelling meta titles and
descriptions
Web pages have two
specific features that search engines use when building up search results:
Contrary to what the
name suggests, the meta title tag does not appear anywhere on your page. It
merely sets the name of the browser tab, and Google and other search engines
use it when showing the page in search results.
SIDENOTE.
Google doesn’t always respect the title
tags you set. They sometimes choose to display something slightly
different.
The title tag is a
great opportunity to write a headline which:
1.
includes the keyword
you want the page to rank for, and
2.
is compelling enough
to make searchers click and visit your site.
Conventional wisdom
also suggests keeping yours under 60 characters to avoid truncation in full in
search results. However, it’s not so much about the number of characters but
rather pixels. Therefore, it’s a good idea to use a SERP pixel tool to make sure your
titles don’t get cut.
Meta descriptions are
also important, mainly because they too can affect the click-through rate.
SIDENOTE.
Click-through rate is not thought to be a direct ranking factor, but it
does directly affect how much traffic you get from search.
If you want to avoid
the risk of truncation, your meta descriptions should not exceed ~155
characters. Use the pixel tool mentioned above to keep them
within limits.
Recommended reading: How to Craft the
Perfect SEO Title Tag (Our 4-Step Process)
d) Use headers and subheaders to create a
logical structure
Use the
standard HTML format for headers (H1 to H6) to make it easy
for search engines to understand the structure of your page and the importance
of each section.
Header 1 should be reserved for the on‐page title of your content and should ideally
include the main keyword (or something closely related to the main keyword)
that you’re targeting. You can have more than one H1 tag per page,
but we recommend sticking to one.
Header 2 should be used for the titles of the
main sections on your page. They should also include the main keyword you’re
targeting (whenever possible and natural—don’t shoehorn!) and are a good place
to add additional (longer-tail) keywords for which you want to rank.
Every time you go a
step deeper in your content, use the next type of header, e.g., Header 3 for
subheadings within an H2 section, and so on.
Here’s what a
well-structured piece of content looks like:
·
H1: The Complete
First-Time Traveller’s Guide to Dublin
o
H2:
Sights & Attractions
§
H3: Trinity
College
§
H4: The Book of Kells
Exhibition & Old Library
§
H3: The Guinness
Storehouse
§
H4: The Gravity Bar
§
H3: The Temple
Bar Area
o
H2: Accommodation
§
H3: Hotel 1
§
H3: Hotel 2
§
H3: Hotel 3
o
H2: Restaurants
§
H3: Upscale restaurant
§
H3: Gastropub
§
H3: Another
hip place
o
H2: Bars
§
H3: Bar with
live music
§
H3: Bar with great
cocktails
§
H3: Very touristy bar
o
H2: Conclusion
Following a clear and
exhaustive structure makes it easy for search engines to categorize your
content and also helps human readers.
e) Optimize your images
Images are great for
humans, but search engines can struggle to make sense of them.
To illustrate that
point, here’s what happens when you upload a photo of butter to Google’s Cloud Vision API—their
machine‐learning image
identification tool:
Google is 91% sure
that this is a photo of cheese, which is wrong.
To help Google (and
other search engines) understand your images, you should use the alt tag to
describe and explain them. In this case, a good alt tag would be alt=”Butter”.
In WordPress, editing
the alt tag is done by using the Alternative Text field in the image editor:
If you’re not using
WordPress, you can also add the tag manually:
f) Set up Schema
Schema has become a
popular way to improve how your website looks in search results. For example,
you can use it to add ratings to your search results entry, thus making it more
noticeable:
To get started with
using Schema, you should check out the official documentation and these tools
that allow you to generate and test structured data.
Learn more about on-page SEO
On-page SEO is
a complex beast. Everything above will get you off on the right foot, but
there’s always more to learn (as is the case with everything SEO-related)
Check out our full guide to on-page SEO to
learn more.
Step 3: Make sure your website is accessible
to both search engines and humans
When doing SEO,
it’s important to remember that you’re working for two separate
customers—your human readers, and the bots search engines use to index your
website.
While bots are
becoming more intelligent and human-like, many differences still exist between
the two. Therefore, your goal should be to create a positive experience for
both humans and bots.
Understanding how to
create pages optimized for bots can be challenging. That’s why, while it’s
important to have a strong understanding of the features we discuss in the
following paragraphs, I encourage you to delegate them to a professional
(preferably a developer).
Still, here are a few
tips to get you off on the right foot.
NOTE. I’ll keep this section relatively short and
straightforward, as I don’t want to get bogged down with too much technical
mumbo-jumbo in this guide.
a) Make sure your website loads fast
Both humans and search
engines prioritize the loading speed of websites. Studies suggest that up to 40% of people leave sites that take
longer than 3 seconds to load.
Using Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool or GTMetrix can help you find out how
quickly your pages load and give you actionable advice on how to further
improve their speed.
If you want to analyze
all pages on your site at once, run a crawl in Ahrefs Site Audit and check the Performance report
to see which of your pages need further optimization for speed.
b) Make sure your website is mobile-friendly
According to one
study, more than 60% of searches are now from
mobile devices.
Use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool to
make sure your website is mobile-friendly. Here’s what you want to see:
c) Install an SSL certificate
HTTPS is officially one of the ranking signals Google uses.
You can tell when a
site uses SSL because there’ll be a padlock in the URL bar:
Not using
an SSL certificate can also be a security issue—especially if you’re
running an ecommerce site or accepting form submissions.
Free options
like Let’s Encrypt allow you to secure your
website without breaking the piggy bank.
d) Create a sitemap
A sitemap is an XML file which
lists all the pages on your site. Search engines use it to find your content
and understand how your pages are connected (i.e., see the overall structure of your website).
If you’re using
Yoast SEO, the plugin will generate a sitemap for you. You can then
follow Google’s guidelines on how to test and
submit it. (There are also multiple other free tools you can use to generate a
sitemap for your site.)
Sitemaps do not affect rankings directly,
but they allow search engines to find and index new pages on your website
faster.
e) Upload a robots.txt file
While the sitemap lays
out the full structure of your website, the robots.txt file gives specific
instructions to search engine crawlers on which parts of the site they should
and shouldn’t index.
Having a robots.txt
file is recommended because search engines allocate a crawl budget—the number of pages they’re
allowed to crawl with each visit—to their bots.
All major search
engine crawlers and other “good” bots recognize and obey the
robots.txt format, including AhrefsBot.
f) Internally link between relevant posts
and pages
The strategic linking
of various pages on your website is a great way to increase the speed at which
search engines crawl your site, and point them to your most important pages.
There are various
strategies for doing this, such as the hub‐and‐spoke strategy, cornerstone content, etc. These work but they
can get complicated. For now, focus on creating a strong structure with plenty
of links between relevant pages.
In our example, we can
create a page that targets ‘Dublin guide’ and have it link to separate pages that cover ‘Dublin sights,’ ‘Dublin restaurants’, and so on.
To quickly find
linking opportunities use the following query on Google:
site:yourdomain.com + “topic of the post you
want to link to”
For example, if you’re
looking to link to your Dublin guide, you can type site:yourdomain.com +
“Dublin guide” (or “Dublin tips” or even just “Dublin”), and you’ll see
all pages on your site from which you can add links.
Recommended reading: Internal Links
for SEO: An Actionable Guide
Learn more about website structure and
technical SEO
The structure of the
data on your website plays a significant role in
successful SEO performance.
Read our guide to technical SEO to
learn more.
Step 4: Build backlinks from other websites
Link building is
critical for the success of your SEO strategy, so if you’re prepared
to spend resources (time, money, etc.) on producing content, you should also be
prepared to commit at least as much time to promoting and generating links to
your content.
Why? Because there’s
clear evidence showing that backlinks are one of the factors with a strong
influence on Google’s ranking algorithm.
Even Google admits
that backlinks are one of the top 3 ‘ranking factors.’
There are many tactics
you can use to get other websites to link back to your web pages. Some are more
legitimate than others. However, before you start cherry picking “link building
hacks” to try, take the time to review and analyze how your competitors are building
links.
It’s important to
use your competitors because each niche is different and
tactics that work great in one niche might not be so effective in yours.
When done with this,
consider some of the following tactics.
a) Swipe links from inferior content
Let’s say that we’ve
just published an excellent Dublin travel guide.
We put our heart and
soul into this guide. It’s extremely thorough, the user-experience is on-point,
and the information and recommendations are as up-to-date as it gets.
It’s probably the best Dublin travel guide on
the web.
In other words, our
Dublin travel guide is more deserving of links than any other one.
However, if we search
for “Dublin travel” in Content Explorer and filter for pages
with links from 20+ referring domains, these are some of the results:
Those two pages
combined have links from over 200 referring domains (unique websites).
Neither of those two
pages is bad. They’re just not as good as the guide we’ve put together. So it
may be worth reaching out to the folks linking to those pages and seeing if
there’s scope for them to link to us too.
To find out who links
to a page, we can paste the URL into Ahrefs Site Explorer and check the Backlinks report.
Not every link will be
worth pursuing, but even after skimming the backlinks report for just a minute
or two, I can already see a few good candidates from whom I’d love to get
a backlink.
Here’s one
of them:
The page even links
out to a few Dublin guides and resources, which makes it even more likely that
they would be willing to include our guide.
All that’s left to do
is find the email address of the person
responsible for the site and let them know about our content.
B) Broken link
building
Broken link building
is where you find relevant broken pages (with backlinks pointing to them) on
other sites. You then reach out to the people linking to the dead resource to
suggest that they swap out the dead link for a suitable replacement on
your site.
Sound confusing? Let
me show you how to do it.
For this example, I
decided to use the subreddit on Dublin, mainly because it contains multiple
links and I’m sure there would be at least a few broken ones. I run the page
through Ahrefs and check out the Broken links report:
I find one that looks
interesting. Based on the text on Reddit, this page contained a map of public
WiFi areas in Dublin. You can also use the Wayback Machine to find out what the page
used to be.
Then, I plug the
page URL in Site Explorer to check if any websites
are linking to it:
Bingo! Twenty-one
sites link to this guide. Ahrefs even makes it easy to find the exact location
of the dead link:
Now I can create a
similar page on my website and reach out to the owner of this site (and other
sites linking to this missing page) to suggest that they replace dead link with
a link to my guide.
The power of this
tactic lies in the fact that:
1.
you know what these site owners want to link to, and
2.
you’re helping them
improve their site (by fixing broken links)
To learn even more
about this tactic, check out our guide to broken link building.
SIDENOTE.
You can try the free version of Ahrefs’ Broken Link Checker.
c) Guest blogging
Guest blogging is
where you write for another website in your industry.
Many people think
guest blogging is dead because a while ago Google published a “warning”
about using guest posting for link building.
But read it carefully:
Google does not discourage these types of
articles in the cases when they inform users, educate another site’s audience
or bring awareness to your cause or company. However, what does violate
Google’s guidelines on link schemes is when the main intent is to build links
in a large‐scale way back to the
author’s site.
And one of the
violations is:
Using or hiring article writers that aren’t
knowledgeable about the topics they’re writing on.
So as long as your
guest posts are helpful, informative and quality, you don’t have to worry.
Guest blogging works
for link building when you follow three basic rules:
1.
You publish on an
authoritative website with a large relevant audience.
2.
You create a
high-quality piece of content, which is helpful to the audience of the website
on which it is placed.
3.
You link to relevant
resources on your website that will further help the audience expand their
knowledge on the topic.
When followed, these
turn guest blogging into a great tool for brand‐building, generating referral traffic, and
improving rankings. To learn how to use guest posting to generate links at
scale, check out Ahrefs’ guide on
the topic.
Learn more about link building
These tactics are just
the tip of the iceberg. There are many additional ways to build links. To learn
more about link building check out our list of 9 easy link building strategies,
or some of the individual guides listed below.
STEP
5: TRACKING YOUR SEO SUCCESS
The final step in
setting your SEO strategy is figuring out how you’ll track your
performance. There are many methods and metrics you can use, so it’s easy to
get confused.
My advice is this:
focus on the basics.
The most important
metrics when it comes to SEO are a) organic traffic, and b) the
average ranking position for the keywords you’re targeting.
a) Measure organic traffic
If you’re using Google
Analytics, you can quickly view your organic traffic by going to:
Acquisition > All
Traffic > Channels > Organic Search
You can also use Ahrefs Site Explorer to keep an eye on
your organic traffic along with the number of keywords your website ranks for,
the organic positions it holds for various keywords and more.
b) Track your rankings
Another important
thing you should measure in your SEO strategy is how your content
ranks on Google over time.
One way to do this is
by using Google Search Console where you can find data about the average
position, impressions, and clicks you get for various keywords.
You can also
use Ahrefs Rank Tracker for this purpose—it lets you
track up to 10,000 keywords, see how rankings are improving (or declining) over
time, and compare to the competition.
There’s also the option to schedule a weekly or monthly email update with all of the above.
Final thoughts
Search engine
optimization (SEO) can be competitive, but it is still by far the most
effective way to drive sustainable traffic
to your website.
Moreover, the efforts
you put in optimizing your website for search add up over time, helping you get
even more traffic as long as you’re consistent with SEO.
To achieve this,
remember to follow the five steps of good basic SEO:
1.
Find relevant keywords
with good search traffic potential
2.
Create and optimize
pages for search engines and users alike
3.
Make sure your website
is accessible to both bots and humans
4.
Build relevant links
from other high-quality websites
5.
Track what matters
Over time this process
will help you build up the authority of your site (check your domain’s authority here), and you will be able
to rank for more competitive keywords with high search volumes.
If you think I missed
some other crucial search engine optimization basics, please let me know in
comments!
