SEO For Beginners [How To Get Free Traffic From Google]
So you are a beginner who has just started a blog?
But, you are unable to find your content on any of the search engines?
You are not getting any traffic or visitors to your blog?
What might be the issue?
Its Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
If you want to know what it takes to find your blog or your post on the first page of google search results then keep reading.
If you do a quick google search for the number of blogs that are created everyday you will find out that over 7 million new blogs are published everyday.
That’s insane right?
If you take a further look, you will find that in 2020 alone over 500 million blogs are active.
So as time goes by trust me the numbers are going to be much higher.
Which means the competition is getting tougher as each day passes by.
So how to rank your blog higher in the search engine so that you get more views and traffic to your blog?
What You Will Learn In This Post:
What Is SEO?
Right now if you go on google and search for something, you will see a list of blog posts that outrank other blogs.
Ever wondered why and how? Because, they are optimized for search engine.
This technique or strategy of optimizing your blog for search engines is called Search Engine Optimization or SEO in short.
When you are optimizing your blog for SEO, there are 3 factors that you need to keep in mind.
Yourself, the Searcher and the Search Engine.
How Do Search Engines Work?
While the search engines do not reveal the algorithm behind their engines, we can some how figure out the way they work.
So basically whenever you publish your blog post, Google crawl your site and figures out all the keywords that you have used in your article.
This is how Google finds out what is your blog post about.
Next Google checks for the bounce rate of your page.
What Is Bounce Rate?
Bounce rate is the duration of how long the visitor who landed on your page by clicking on the search result stays to your page.
Which means if a visitor spends more time on your page your bounce rate will be lower.
The lower the bounce rate the better for your site which also helps your site to rank higher in search results.
Types of SEO
Basically there are 2 types of SEO:
- On-Page SEO
- Off-Page SEO
On-Page SEO Optimization
When you are working on your On-Page SEO there are 3 factors that you should focus on:
1. CONTENT
Someone has rightly said Content is king.
Whenever someone searches for something on google and he visits a blog post on the results page, he will be very happy if he finds whatever he has searched for in one single blog post.
If you go on Google and search for “Homemade Barbeque Sauce”, Google will do it’s best to provide you with the best article it can find about eh keyword or topic you just searched for.
It will show you exactly what you searched for.
This is why it becomes extremely important to create great content so that not only google but also your reader understands the value you are providing.
There are 2 types of content:
a) Evergreen Content: It is the type of content that will live for years to come. Like How To Make Money Online etc.
b) Short Term Content: It is the type of content that brings you traffic for just a short period of time and you have to keep posting this content more than regularly to keep bringing traffic to your blog.
For ex: Best Laptops in 2021, Best Gaming Headphones in 2021 etc.
2. KEYWORDS
What exactly are keywords?
Keyword is basically a term that people type in Google to search a particular topic.
It is very important to use exact keywords in your blog post if you want to rank higher.
There are many free tools available that you can use to find keywords.
Below I have use Ubersuggest to do a quick keyword research for “Barbeque Sauce”.
Just make sure to avoid keyword stuffing.
What that means the density of your keyword in your post must be between 0.5 – 3 percent. You can use this tool to check keyword density.
Where to use your main keyword?
In title, In your post url/slug, Heading 2 tags and few in the post itself.
If you do excessive keyword stuffing then search engines might penalize you and you won’t rank for that keyword.
3. STRUCTURE
It is very important to make sure that your post title, heading tags and your content gives your reader a good experience.
If he like your content then he will stay on your blog for longer time, which will send Google a signal that users are liking this particular page and it will help in boosting your rankings.
People often ignore this aspect of their blog – Images!
Two important things you need to do in order to optimize your images for search engines.
a) Add your keyword to the image name
b) Add captions and alternative text to your images so that google can associate your images to your post. Which also affects your ranking.
Off-Page SEO
This is where other factors other than your content play a big role which can help you to boost your rankings.
1. PAGE SPEED AND BOUNCE RATE
Do you know that having a slow loading website increases your bounce rate.
People will leave your site if it does not load in 2-3 seconds.
This will not only affect your rankings but your conversions too.
This is why you should use a quality web hosting.
I use Cloudways Hosting – You can try it for Free!
2. SECURITY
Do you know search engines have now started security of a website as a major ranking factor.
If you open a website which does not have a SSL certificate google will automatically send you a warning saying the website is not secure to access.
So make sure your website has SSL installed and always starts with https://.
Cloudways Hosting offers SSL certificate for completely Free of cost.
3. BACKLINKS
If you have a page to which many other pages or blogs are linking to then your page is seemed to be important by Google.
But the issue is its very hard to get people to link to your article.
So first thing you need to do is create a blog post which is in-depth, well researched with stats and Infographics.
Then contact people in the same niche who are either linking to other blogs which has low quality content than you.
Ask them to review your article and if they like it they will link back to you.
This will boost your traffic than any other SEO factor, but it is also the hardest.
Tools To Improve Ranking
If your blog is based on wordpress platform then the best SEO plugin that you can use is Rankmath Plugin.
It not only analyzes your post but also guides you to make changes to it so that it becomes SEO friendly.
Another SEO tool that you should be knowing is SEMrush.
It is a premium SEO tool which can help you to get deep insights in to your competition, analyzes your top performing organic keywords, does backlink analysis and much more.
Do check it out here
Conclusion
If you decide to follow a good SEO technique or strategy it won’t take much of your time and effort.
But if you decide to ignore it then it will just stop your blogs growth.
If you take 2 days to write a blog post I suggest you to spend 10-15 minutes to optimize your post.
If you follow these strategies then it will surely help you to rank better and reach out to a larger audience.
