SEO Basics - Fundamental Guide for Beginners
Table of Contents
If you have a website, you need to be able to know how to “help” people find it and how to increase your visibility online. In this guide, we’ll show you the basics of SEO and how you can lay the foundations for search engine optimization.
It is important to understand that nowadays SEO can be considered science, just like math and physics for example. Due to the fact that it would be almost impossible to cover all the points which make one website well search engine optimized, we will provide you with some basic SEO tips on how to improve your website and certain things that should be avoided during the website creation process.
Content & SEO
Whatever design you decide to make for your website the most important thing for your website will be the content itself. So, providing high-quality, useful, full and accurate information on your website will definitely make it popular and webmasters & website owners will link and refer visitors to your website which is one of the key factors of site optimization.
Most crawlers have very sophisticated algorithms and can recognize natural from unnatural links. The natural links to your website are developed when other webmasters include in their articles or comments links to your content or products and not just include you in the blogroll, for example. If a certain page is considered “important” by a search engine and there is a natural referral link to your website content most probably your page will be also crawled and marked as “important” if the content is relevant to the topic of the original page.
In addition, don’t count on AI content generators to produce quality content for you. The algorithms of Google are meant to assess the excellence and pertinence of content, and content generated with AI might not satisfy these standards at all times.
Titles
Another important subject that should be considered while creating your content is the title of your pages and articles. Note that we are not referring to your URLs and links here. You should carefully choose your posts, articles, pages, and categories titles to be more search-engine friendly. When you are creating content regarding a subject, think about what words potential visitors will use in the search engine websites when they are looking for this information and try to include them in your title.
For example, if you are writing a tutorial about how to install WordPress it will not be suitable to name it “Configuration, adjustment, and setup of WP”. That is because people who are looking for this information will use more common words to describe the information they need – “How to install Word Press”. Think about the phrases that users would use to find your pages and include them on your site – this is certainly a good SEO practice and will improve your website’s visibility in the search engines.
In addition to your title and keywords, another important part of your page is the meta tags. They are read by the search engines, but are not displayed as a part of your web page design.
In addition, you should always try to write unique titles, which best describe the page’s content with up to 60-65 characters, in order for the title to be viewed on the search engine result page (SERP) without dots at the end. If the page title is more than the above-mentioned limit, the search engine will shorten it.
Dynamic pages issues
People like eye candies, but bots do not. Yes, indeed, people do like colorful websites, flash, AJAX, javascript and so on, however, you should know that these technologies are quite difficult to be assimilated by the crawlers because they are not plain text. Furthermore, most bots can be referred to another page only by static text links which means that you should make sure that all of your pages on your website are accessible from at least one simple text link on another page. This is a very good practice and assures that all pages on your website will be crawled by search engine bots. Generally, the best way to perform this is to create a SiteMap of your website which can be easily accessed from a text link on your home page. Moreover, you should submit your sitemap to Google Search Console to boost the indexing process.
The easiest way to imagine how the search engine bot actually “sees” your website is to think of it as a text-only browser. If you are Unix/Linux user, use a text browser via your shell such as Lynx (http://www.google.com/search?q=lynx+browser). However, if you are a Windows user you will need a text-only browser or program which can visualize your website to get a general idea of how the bot “sees” your pages.
The website above works as a web proxy but provides only the text output. To use this website, however, create a simple file called delorie.htm under your public_html directory. Be advised that it can be just an empty file – it is used only to verify that you are the owner of the website and not a bot that uses the proxy service.
As soon as you have the file created type your domain name and click “View Page”. You will be displayed a text page with the text content of your website. All information that can not be seen via this proxy most probably will not be crawled by the search engine bots – this includes any flash, images, or other graphical/dynamic content.
It is important to mention that some search engine bots recognize graphical and dynamic content such as Flash, AJAX, etc.
Possible workaround
Still, it is hard to avoid using dynamic pages when you are creating a modern-looking website, thus, you will need some workaround in this matter to assure that the information is properly crawled. A possible solution is to create a text-only duplicate of your dynamic page which will be readable by the search engine bot. This page can be included in your SiteMap and in this way, all of your information will be read by the bot.
Specifically for Google, you can also disallow the dynamic page in your robots.txt file to make sure that the Google bot will not detect the dynamic page but the text-only one. This can be done by placing the following lines in your robots.txt file:
Disallow: /the-name-of-your-page
Disallow: /myExample.html
For more information on how to apply specific settings for the Google bot and further options that can be applied in the robots.txt file, you may refer to Google’s official robots.txt documentation.
SSL & HTTPS
Google officially stated that HTTPS is considered a light ranking factor. Therefore, you should consider enabling HTTPS on your website as one of the first things, that should be done in terms of basic SEO.
This can be done through the .htaccess file. If you don’t know how to enable HTTPS, you can read this article on how to enforce HTTPS.
Also, make sure that you have an SSL certificate installed on your website. If you are a SiteGround client, you have free SSL with any hosting plan and you can easily install it in a couple of clicks.
Mobile-friendly website
Most of the searches nowadays are done from mobile devices. You should make sure that your website is well-optimized for mobile devices, as well as your content.
You can test your pages with Google’s Mobile-Friendly testing tool.
Conclusion
So, there you have the SEO basics! We hope this beginner’s guide to SEO has given you a good starting point for optimizing your website and improving your online visibility. Keep in mind, that SEO may seem like a complex and technical topic, but it ultimately comes down to creating high-quality content that’s easy for both humans and search engine crawlers to understand.
By following the tips we’ve outlined in this guide – from focusing on content and titles to avoiding dynamic pages and creating a sitemap – you’ll be well on your way to improving your search engine rankings and driving more traffic to your site. And of course, don’t forget to keep up with the latest SEO trends and best practices as they evolve over time!
So now you can start optimizing your website – and let us know how it goes! We’re rooting for you.