SEO for Beginners

By: Kaito Kasai | Last updated: Nov 24, 2024

New to SEO?

This guide covers all the basics you need to get started.

Zero fluff. Straight to the point.

Exactly what you need to hit the ground running.

Let’s go.

1. What is SEO?

2. How does SEO Work?

• What is SEO crawling?

• What is indexing in SEO?

• How does SEO ranking work?

3. Why is SEO important?

• SEO Statistics

• SEO & Content Marketing

4. How to apply SEO

• SEO Strategy

• Keyword Research

• 3 Types of SEO Application

5. How to maintain SEO

6. Continued Education

What is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization.

It’s about helping people who are using search engines (e.g. Google) find your website.

Search engines use an algorithm that determines what to show users whenever a particular set of keywords are entered.

The more you optimize your website for SEO, the higher you’ll appear in search results, and the easier it’ll be for new visitors to discover you.

But even though your rank depends on an algorithm, keep in mind that the purpose of the algorithm is to be as helpful as possible to search engine users.

Search engine providers are businesses after all — Google competes with Bing who competes with Yahoo! and so on.

The more helpful the search engine, the more users it’ll have, and the more money it’ll make.

So if you focus on being as helpful as possible and make sure your website provides exactly what your target audience is looking for, you’ve already won half the battle.

Senior Search Analyst from Google (John Mueller) said:

“Our algorithms explicitly try to find and recommend websites that provide content that’s of high quality, unique, and compelling to users. Don’t fill your site with low-quality content, instead, work on making sure that your site is the absolute best of its kind.”

So the first thing to remember is to prioritize helpfulness.

Now that we have that out of the way, let’s take a deeper dive into how SEO works.

How does SEO Work?

Every search engine uses an algorithm that’s unique to them.

However, no matter the algorithm, they all involve crawling, indexing, and ranking.

What is SEO crawling?

Crawling is done by crawlers — automated bots deployed by search engines that work 24/7, discovering new websites and data on the internet.

They’re like little machines that find data and store it in a massive library called an index.

But, they can’t see like humans can — they see everything in code.

So it’s important to update the file names of visuals on your webpages, since these crawlers are only going to see the names your image files have, and not the images themselves.

This is what an image looks like to crawlers
— just code with a file name and alt text.

Lastly, if a webpage is uncrawlable, whether by accident or on purpose, it won’t be indexed.

What is indexing in SEO?

Whenever crawlers discover new webpages or new data on old webpages, they add it to their grand library of information (e.g. The Google index).

All results generated by search engines are pulled from their index and placed in front of you on a search engine results page (SERP) in a ranked order.

How does SEO ranking work?

Search engines aim to be as helpful as possible.

Because of this, they use an algorithm to automatically rank webpages by helpfulness.

And this perceived helpfulness is based on the keywords entered into the search bar, what’s available in their index, and of course their unique algorithm, which factors in many other things that I’ll get into later.

Now, this is all supposed to work naturally.

But, there are people who try to trick the algorithm and even violate a search engine’s terms of service in order to boost their ranking.

That's called black hat SEO and it’s a surefire way to get heavily penalized.

(Penalties include your search engine ranking taking a massive nosedive.)

Now, as long as you focus on actually being helpful and you avoid violating any terms of service, there’s still plenty you can do to improve your search engine rankings the right way.

Why is SEO important?

Better SEO means more visitors to your webpage — which is all free organic traffic.

If done right, businesses can generate millions of new visitors, without any paid advertising.

I’m sure you already believe me, but let’s check out some of the stats.

SEO Statistics

A HubSpot study found that 61% of businesses reported that SEO was their top priority for inbound marketing.

A Search Engine Journal study found that SEO outperformed Email, Paid Search, and Social Media by 2X in terms of ROI.

Bright Edge Research found that SEO generated 2X more revenue than Paid or Organic Social marketing strategies for B2B businesses overall.

Based on these studies and many others, it seems like SEO is the most effective marketing strategy for many B2B companies.

Now, remember when I said search engines try to be as helpful as possible to its users?

Well, providing valuable information is one of the most helpful things a search engine can do.

Which brings us to the topic of content marketing.

SEO & Content Marketing

Why Sales Pages Don’t Rank Well

Search engines prioritize information that users see as valuable.

Of course any business owner should believe what they have to sell is valuable.

But from a search engine’s perspective, it’ll see an educational webpage (like a helpful blog article) as something more valuable to users than a piece of advertising.

Which is why many successful businesses leverage content marketing as a way to improve their SEO.

How Content Marketing Impacts SEO

Let’s start with what is content marketing.

Content marketing is an indirect method of marketing that works by providing valuable content to an audience (e.g. free education) which naturally builds trust, credibility, and familiarity.

When this is done over a long stretch of time, it’s what marketers call ‘nurturing’ an audience.

After lots of nurturing, your audience will know, like, and trust you at a much deeper level.

Then, when you finally have a product or service to sell, they'll be much more likely to buy from you.

There are many ways to implement content marketing.

As for driving traffic from search engines to your website, blogging is one of the most effective ways to directly improve your search engine rankings and lead generation.

According to the marketing advisory firm, Demand Metric, companies with blogs produce 67% more leads per month than companies without blogs.

With more visitors arriving to your website for valuable information, search engines will consider your website helpful, and boost your rankings.

There’s a lot more to this, but hopefully this provides a gist for now!

Okay, now let’s talk about implementation.

How to Apply SEO

SEO Strategy

Identifying Your Customer Persona

The first step of any marketing strategy is to get clear on exactly who you want to help.

At the end of the day, business is about solving problems, and you can’t solve a problem without knowing what that problem is.

In order to determine what problems you’ll be solving, you need to find out what problems your target customers are experiencing.

By getting super specific about the type of person you want to help, you can then do market research to find out what keywords they’re likely using to look for solutions.

Search Intent

What Is Search Intent?

Search intent is about what the user hopes to achieve when using a search engine.

While doing your market research, it’s important to understand your customer persona’s search intent.

Why?

Because search intent will affect not just the keywords they’ll use, but also what search engine results would be best to show them.

Remember, we want to be helpful. And to do that, we need to make sure that the search results we show are relevant.

Types of Search Intent

According to Semrush, there are 4 types of search intent.

1. Informational Intent: Wanting to learn. e.g. SEO Guide

2. Navigational Intent: Wanting to find. e.g. Sushi Nearby

3. Commercial Intent: Wanting to shop. e.g. Mac vs PC

4. Transactional Intent: Wanting to buy. e.g. Cats For Sale

Again, depending on search intent, a user may want to solve a different type of problem — and thus word things differently.

For example, see how the SERP changes when we change our search intent from informational to commericial just by adding the word service after seo:

Bounce Rate & Dwell Time

Ideally, you want to minimize bounce rate and maximize dwell time, because this will improve your search engine rankings.

Bounce Rate: This is the rate at which visitors are arriving to your webpage and immediately clicking the back button to return to the search results page.

Dwell Time: This is the amount of time a visitor spends on your webpage.

You can improve your bounce rate and dwell time by making sure that when visitors arrive at your website, you’re giving them a clear reason to stay — providing them with exactly what they’re looking for or capturing their attention with something very relevant to them.

Keyword Research

Once you know who your audience is, why they are searching, what they’re searching for, and how you can help them, you now have the context you need to do the next important step: keyword research.

What is keyword research?

Keyword research is about figuring what keywords your customer persona would possibly type into a search engine.

Based on your research, you can make a calculated guess as to what words or terms they might use.

Or, even better, if you can find out where your customer persona hangs out (e.g. specific online communities), you can read their comments or questions directly, and use that information to help you choose keywords.

Types of Keywords

There are many types of keywords, but based on multiple authoritative sources, I believe the most important ones to focus on would be: Primary, Secondary, and Long-Tail.

Primary Keywords: These keywords would identify the topic you want to optimize for. e.g. what is ppc?

Secondary Keywords: These keywords would be closely related to your original topic. e.g. types of ppc

Long-Tail Keywords: These keywords would be very specific and relevant to a more specific audience. e.g. best type of ppc for ecom

Those keywords would be a good starting point for getting clear on who you want to help and what type of information you want to provide.

Bonus Tip: When writing an article, you can use primary keywords for main topics and secondary keywords for subtopics.

Keyword Difficulty

Before finalizing the keywords you want to use, it’s important to note that SEO is a competitive landscape.

You know the whole small fish in a big pond vs big fish in a small pond thing?

That applies here.

Research Your Competitors

When you type a particular set of keywords into a search engine and press enter, every result that you see is a potential competitor of yours.

Which means that if they outrank you, you’ll be bumped down a rank.

If you outrank them, they’ll be bumped down a rank.

And everyone is competing to be on the 1st page of search results.

So, when you type out keywords and press enter, look at your competition and ask yourself if your website or content is better than what you see on that 1st page.

If yes, great work! You could be the new big fish in this small pond.

If not, you may want to reconsider your choice of keywords and perhaps get more specific, so you’re not a small fish in a big pond.

Keyword Difficulty Score

Luckily for you, there are both free and paid tools you can use to see how fierce the competition is for particular keywords.

You can choose your keywords based on Keyword Difficulty scores to create a more competitive advantage.

Ideally, you want to choose keywords with a difficulty score under 30.

In my case, I chose a very hard primary keyword — as you can see here with Ahref's Free Keyword Difficulty Checker:

But for me, this is fine, because I'm not competing with marketing companies. I help marketing companies (and other B2B businesses) by writing SEO-boosting content for them to add to their existing blogs. :)

Keyword Research Tools

Free Tools

1. Google Keyword Planner (Google)
2. Keyword Difficulty Checker (ahrefs)
3. Free Keyword Tool (Backlinko)
4. KWFinder (Mangools)
5. Moz Keyword Explorer (Moz)

Bonus Tip: Google Search and Google Suggest can be used as well!

You can type in part of your keyword and see a drop-down list appear that shows the top entries that other users have searched for.
After entering your search prompt, you can also scroll to the bottom of the page and find other related keywords that may potentially be great secondary keywords.

Paid Tools

1. SEMrush
2. Ahrefs
3. Moz Pro
4. Mangools

(NOTE: These are in no particular order but these 4 seem to be the most recommended options after assessing many online reviews.)

3 Types of SEO Application

Now that we’ve done our keyword research, it’s time to implement those keywords.

For application, there’s 3 big categories to optimize: Technical SEO, On-Page SEO, and Off-Page SEO.

Technical SEO

Remember when I talked about crawlers?

Good technical SEO is what will ensure that these crawlers can find your webpage, understand how things are organized, and index your webpage appropriately.

This is what makes your website crawlable and indexable.

Do this right and you’ll improve your search engine rankings.

Do this wrong and you might not even appear in search results.

There’s so much to technical SEO but let’s start with some basics.

Meta Title

You know when you enter a search query and see all the search results?

Meta Titles are the all the headlines that you see for each search result, often displayed with large bluish text.

It’s important to configure your website settings to make sure that your Meta Title contains the primary keyword that you want to rank for.

Ideally, you want your Meta Title to also be an effective attention-grabbing headline if possible, so apply copywriting principles if you can.

Also, keep in mind that Meta Titles have a character limit. e.g. Google will actually cut your Meta Title short if it exceeds about 60 characters.

Bonus Tip: Including the YEAR of your publication in your Meta Title can also improve SEO rankings since more recency typically means more relevancy in the eyes of both users and crawlers.

Meta Description

The Meta Description is simply a description of a URL's destination.

On a search engine results page (SERP), you can see these right under the Meta Titles as a brief paragraph description.

Just like with Meta Titles, you want to adjust your settings to ensure that you include the primary keyword you want to rank for.

Lastly, you want to apply copywriting principles as well here, making sure that your meta description will hook your customer persona’s attention and entice them to click — assuming the content inside is NOT clickbait and is actually an accurate reflection of the Meta Title and Meta Description.

Remember, you want to lower your average bounce rate and raise your average dwell time.

URL Optimization

The URL of a webpage can affect search engine rankings as well.

Remember, search engines want to be helpful, and relevancy is a big part of that.

So if your URL contains relevant keywords, crawlers will notice that and give your ranking a boost.

Here's an a great example of a super relevant URL from Moz's article, What Is A URL And Why Do They Matter For SEO?

Notice how well the title of the article and the URL correspond.

Also, you can understand the website architecture just from looking at the URL, which brings us to our next topic.

Website Architecture

Related to URL optimization is website architecture.

Having this optimized will help crawlers easily find and assess your website.

Ideally, you want all your URLs to make sense categorically. e.g. website.com/category/subcategory

Keeping this neatly organized helps prevent crawlers from getting confused and allows them to crawl and index your website efficiently.

Website Speed

Having faster website speed also improves your SEO.

As to how this is done, that requires a whole separate guide to really dive into.

Semrush published a guide called What Is Page Speed & How to Improve It that covers this well though!

How To Block Indexing

The noindex tag can be used to prevent certain webpages from appearing in search results.

This doesn’t actually affect your SEO but it's good to know about if you don’t want certain pages to accidentally appear in search results. e.g. A thank-you page or anything that’s supposed to be behind a paywall.

Applying these tags can easily be done within a website builder, but Google has a useful guide on how to block search indexing, if you want to do it manually.

So Much More

Technical SEO (as you would expect) is the most technical part of SEO and deserves an entire article of its own to cover in depth.

If you want a deeper dive, I encourage you to check out Brian Dean’s post called Technical SEO: The Definitive Guide.

On-Page SEO

If technical SEO is the backend, on-page SEO is the frontend — comprising everything you can see on a webpage.

Headings & Subheadings

Remember how crawlers can only see in code?

On any webpage, your main headline should have the H1 tag (seen in your HTML code) and contain the primary keyword that you want to rank for.

<h1>Primary Keyword</h1>

After this, you can use your secondary keywords for your H2-H6 tags.

<h2>Secondary Keyword</h2>

<h3>Secondary Keyword</h3>

<h4>Secondary Keyword</h4>

<h5>Secondary Keyword</h5>

<h6>Secondary Keyword</h6>

If you’d rather not code, you can also plug H1-H6 tags into your webpages with a click by using website-builders like Squarespace.

H1 would be your main topic, H2 would be for subtopics, H3 would be subtopics within subtopics, and so on.

Doing this makes it easy for crawlers to understand the structure of your website and content, which helps them easily assess relevancy and index appropriately — which can help your ranking.

External Linking

External linking is when you have links on your webpage directing traffic to external webpages — bringing users from one domain to another.

If you’re linking to authoritative websites, this will actually help boost your SEO.

The opposite applies as well — linking to spam, irrelevant websites, or low-quality content can hurt your SEO.

Affiliate Links

This overlaps with technical SEO but I wanted to place it here because it’s important information directly related to external/outbound links.

Affiliate links or any links that are commercial in nature should have a rel value that says either “sponsored” or “nofollow”

Doing otherwise is a violation of Google’s Terms of Service.

I’d say “sponsored” makes the most sense to apply to external/outbound links that can actually earn you money, while “nofollow” makes the most sense to use if you have no affiliate or commercial partnership with the product/service you’re linking to.

To apply these rel values, you can use a website builder or follow Google’s guide here on qualifying your outbound links.

One More Thing About Nofollow

You can also apply the nofollow rel value if you have an external/outbound link to a website you’re discussing about but don’t want to endorse. e.g. A news website spreading false information.

By using nofollow, the final destination will not get an SEO boost from any traffic you send over.

Internal Linking

Internal linking is when you’re using links from one page within your website to direct traffic to another page within your website — the domain isn’t changing, only the last part of the URLs.

Let’s say you have Article-A and Article-B both within your website.

If Article-A is getting a lot of traffic, you could use internal linking to send traffic from Article-A to Article-B.

This increase of inbound traffic would help Article-B improve its ranking.

Anchor Text

Anchor Text (aka Link Text) is the hyperlinked text you’re using for any external or internal links.

Using relevant keywords in your anchor text helps crawlers see that you’re providing relevant information and linking to a relevant destination.

For example, here you see I used black hat SEO as the anchor text and keyword in an earlier section of this article:

SEO For Images

Every image on a webpage has a file name and accompanying alt text (aka alternative text).

Alt text is concise descriptive text you can add to an image through HTML code or a website builder.

Crawlers can’t see images but they can see the file names of images and its corresponding alt text:

<img src="file-name.jpg" alt="alternative-text" />

This all plays into improving the perceived relevancy of your content, which will in turn improve your SEO.

Off-Page SEO

Off-page SEO is all about how others can affect your SEO.

Let’s start with a BIG one — backlinks.

Backlinks

Backlinks are external links from other webpages directing their traffic to your webpage.

It’s inbound traffic from other websites to your own.

As long as these backlinks are from relevant websites with good content, your SEO will only improve.

If a website provides a backlink and is extra authoritative, then it’ll have extra SEO-boosting power.

This is called link juice.
If for example Apple were to link an Apple product review from their official website to your website, that backlink would have a lot of link juice and boost your ranking significantly.

But, if there are a lot of backlinks from spammy irrelevant websites, crawlers will associate you with them, and your SEO will worsen.

An SEO attack is when someone purposely uses a lot of spammy webpages to link to your webpage which creates low-quality backlinks that pull down your rank on SERPs.

This happens rarely, but if it does happen, Backlinko published a super helpful article on how to remove bad backlinks.

Link Building

To put simply, link-building is accumulating a lot of good backlinks.

The more good backlinks you have, the better you’ll rank.

I’d say the most important part of link-building is making sure your webpage is very helpful to begin with — because people will then naturally want to share it.

After that’s accomplished, there are many ways to go about link-building.

I believe one of the best methods of link-building is helping others with their broken links — aka Broken Link Building.

Nobody likes to have links on their websites that don’t work.

Broken links are unhelpful to them and unhelpful to their visitors.

This is where you can come in.

If the broken link was supposed to direct readers to a helpful guide on X topic and if you have a helpful guide on X topic, here's what you can do.

Reach out to the author and let them know what you enjoyed about their post.
Let them know that you noticed a broken link.
Share the helpful guide you wrote, letting them know how it covers X topic, and if they want to, they can use it to replace their broken link.
Finish your outreach with zero attachment to the outcome (zero pressure and genuine altruism).
You’ll find that many will decide to give you a backlink.

This method is great because you’re not just sharing a helpful article you wrote, but you’re offering a helpful service — creating a true win-win.

Content Marketing & Social Media

Sharing helpful content on different platforms is a great way to bring awareness to your website, your content, and your brand.

With a strong content marketing strategy, you can generate a lot of traffic from social media to your website.

If you have great content on your website that’s worth sticking around for, your average dwell time is going to increase and you’ll earn a nice SEO boost.

Not only that, but those that like your content enough may even share your content, producing backlinks, and helping your SEO even more.

Combining content marketing, SEO, and social media is a very potent recipe for synergistic success.