SEO Basics: Beginner’s Guide to SEO Success

Specifically, look out for navigation on mobile and ensure that your site menu and buttons are clear. Alt text, or alternative text, is the small description that you give to the images on your site. It is embedded into your site’s HTML and is an important SEO asset.

Shift your focus from ‘just clicks’ and maintaining a specific spot in the search results to building a strong brand and being visible on different platforms. Creating a website and leaving it at that isn’t going to cut it. With new websites popping up left and right, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to get noticed and maintain customer loyalty. We also suggest exploring a complete SEO guide that can help you understand many more SEO details and take your site to the next level. Additionally, consider these SEO tips which can help you learn how to make the necessary changes to your pages in order to give them the best chance at ranking for your desired keywords. In addition, you can check out Wix Learn SEO tutorials for more in-depth guidance.

search engine optimization

Add images to your site, and optimize them

The key is to add internal links where they make sense to your high-priority pages. That way, Google and alternate search engines can see that my page covers my topic in-depth. So in addition to using that term a handful of times on my page (more on that next), I also added a few related keywords to the page. That way, you can focus 100% on content… without having to worry about keywords, H2 tags, alt text and other on-page SEO stuff.

✅ Use Images Wisely

search engine optimization

Plus, publishing different types of helpful content helps you rank for a wider variety of keywords. Publishing helpful content that’s specific to your target audience is one of the best SEO practices because it can make Google perceive your website as more authoritative and useful. To ensure a keyword is relevant to the page you’re creating, check the top-ranking results in Google. “Administering a client’s GBP is an important skill set that a local SEO must learn. This includes optimizing the listing to be up-to-date and accurate, with relevant and compelling visuals.

search engine optimization

A search engine is a place where you can expand and promote your business. But to get your website ranked, you have to make your website SEO friendly. Then came the early 2000s, when people started gaming the system. Some BHS Links were hiding white text on white backgrounds while others were creating spammy backlinks.

Compare that to social media, where your posts lose traction over time. This matters because higher rankings often lead to more clicks and visits. While ads are a part of the internet and are meant to be seen by users, don’t let them become overly distracting or prevent your users from reading your content. For example, advertisements, or interstitial pages (pages displayed before or after the content you’re expecting) that make it difficult to use the website. However, don’t worry if you don’t anticipate every variation of how someone might seek your content.

search engine optimization

Content readability

  • In addition to describing an image, alt text can also include target keywords to help improve search rankings.
  • In addition to keeping your site maintained in terms of plugins and comment spam, you’ll also want to make sure your site is served over https, rather than just http.
  • SEO strategies are constantly evolving to keep up with the dynamic search engine algorithms.
  • According to North, you can get a strong head start on your keyword research simply by reverse engineering a few of your top competitors.

At the end of this step, you should have identified at least 4-5 main organic competitors. So if you wanted to cover that topic on your site, you’d want to note that the first page results are made up mostly of list posts. If you have a large and complex site, focus on getting the technical SEO right (or hire someone who can). People are searching for any manner of things directly related to your business. Beyond that, your prospects are also searching for all kinds of things that are only loosely related to your business. These represent even more opportunities to connect with those folks and help answer their questions, solve their problems, and become a trusted resource for them.

Make sure you don’t have “orphaned” pages – pages that aren’t linked to from anywhere else on your site. Ideally, visitors should be able to navigate from your homepage to any other page on your site with only a handful of clicks. Learn all about visual search optimization with Crystal Carter in this Whiteboard Friday episode. Favicons are little icons that appear next to your Google listing on mobile.

Join us as we equip you with the skills and knowledge to create a portfolio that takes you one step closer to your dream career. The alternative might be to hire an Adwords professional to help set up your initial campaign and to get things heading in the right direction. This may cost a little more, but if it can cut down your time and effort to winning business, it’s worth it. Google Adwords and most other SEM providers offer in-depth tutorials on how to use their SEM tools effectively, and they’re worth going through if you intend to spend money on SEM. And if all that on-page work wasn’t enough, you also need to work on off-page SEO.