SEO Beginner’s Guide For 2022
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of tailoring your website to rank higher on search engine result pages. SEO is one of the most important digital marketing practices to utilize for your business. The goal is to ultimately have your website rank highest on the first page of Google — surely you understand what that can do for your business. Are you ready to begin your SEO journey but don’t know where to start? Keep reading our SEO beginner’s guide to learn everything you need to know!
Content, Content, Content
To kick off our SEO beginner’s guide, we urge all aspiring entrepreneurs to start writing ASAP. The best websites have boatloads of organized, engaging content for people to read. That can come in several forms, but to start, we suggest writing five full pages of content at the minimum, but you’ll likely need to write at least 10 pages to boost your search ranking. Your content should provide information about your business, the services you offer, your location, etc. Once your site is live, the work should not end there! Regularly updating your content, adding more pages, and starting a blog are great ways to continually improve your SEO ranking.
Do Your Keyword Research
You can have the best written content ever typed up, but it’s only as good as the keywords you have dispersed throughout it. Keywords are essentially what bring people to your website; your keywords should be the words or phrases that people enter into their search engines to get information about a certain topic. For example, if you’re a gardener writing a blog about tips for the season, a possible keyword should be “summer gardening tips.” You shouldn’t just make up keywords all willy nilly, but rather do extensive research to find out which ones will perform best. There are numerous resources for you to see the volume of and how difficult it’d be to rank with certain keywords.
SEO Beginner’s Guide To Writing
Our SEO beginner’s guide would be incomplete without some general writing tips. When writing SEO content, there are certain guidelines you should follow to optimize your page(s). We recommend you do the following:
- Have a word count of 350-900 words.
- Disperse your keyword evenly in the body, title, and subheadings.
- Insert images and add alt text to them.
- Put your keyword in the URL/slug link, alt text, and meta description.
- Write to your human audience, not to search engines.
- Use active voice, not passive.
- Avoid run-on sentences.
- Limit word count to about 150 per paragraph.
- If writing a blog, keep a consistent publishing schedule.
Writing doesn’t come easy to everyone, but we hope we can at least get you going with these guidelines. If you want to be ranked number one on Google, you’re going to have to earn it!
Ready to begin? Great! We sincerely hope our SEO beginner’s guide has equipped you with everything you need to get started. For further reading, consider looking at Yoast SEO’s ultimate guide to content SEO. If you’d like someone to optimize your website for you, please reach out to Thump Local! We have endless digital marketing resources and solutions to help you grow your business.