SEO Basics: A Comprehensive Guide for Beginners

What Is SEO?

Search engine optimization is a digital marketing strategy that uses non-paid tactics to improve your website’s visibility on search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo.

By improving your search engine rankings, you can drive more traffic to your website, which can lead to more sales and revenue.

Unlike with search ads, which let businesses pay for higher rankings in paid search results, SEO helps your site appear higher in the organic search results.

 

To understand the basics of SEO, let’s look at how search engines work.

How Do Search Engines Work?

Keywords are words or phrases that users type into search engines to find information.

Search engines like Google aim to provide the most relevant information to users based on the keywords they enter in their search.

For instance, when someone searches on Google (let’s say for “on-page seo”), Google’s algorithm sifts through countless webpages to present the ones most relevant to that user’s query in the results.

For “on-page seo” query, the top two results are Semrush and Backlinko.

 

But how does Google decide which results to show?

It has a complex algorithm, which takes into account hundreds of ranking factors. They work together to determine the most useful and relevant results.

Google uses a multi-step process to discover, store, and rank web pages.

It goes like this:

• Crawling: This is how search engines discover new content and keep tabs on updated content. They deploy automated bots to scan the internet. These “crawlers” or “spiders” visit different web pages and follow links on those pages to find new and updated content.
• Indexing: This is how search engines store and organize the content found when crawling. Once a crawler visits a page, Google stores the data it collects (like text, images, and video content) in a massive database known as an index. This index contains details from all the web pages Google has explored.
• Ranking: This is how search engines determine where to place a web page in the search results for a given query. When you enter a query, Google looks through its index to find pages that match your query best. The pages that seem most relevant to your search terms appear higher in the search results.

 

With this understanding of how search engines rank pages, let’s explore how SEO works.

How Does SEO Work?

To show up in search results for relevant keywords, you need to first target those keywords on your site.

SEO involves creating and publishing helpful, reliable, and people-first content on a particular topic. And optimizing it for search engines so that when your potential customers search for relevant queries, your business can appear in front of them.

You can create different forms of content. Like blog posts, case studies, ebooks, whitepapers, and landing pages.

For example, if your company sells a project management software, you could create a blog post that targets the query “best project management tools.”

 

SEO also involves improving your site’s technical performance so that it offers a great user experience.

This includes focusing on elements like security, mobile-friendliness, accessibility, and speed.

 

The more user-friendly your website is, the better the experience for visitors. And the more likely it is to rank higher in search results.

SEO is not a one-time effort but an ongoing process.

Since search engine algorithms frequently change, tactics that are effective today might not be as effective tomorrow.

So, it’s important to consistently produce new content, update existing web pages, and continually optimize your website’s performance.