SEO Tutorial for Beginners: On-Page, Off-Page and Technical SEO explained Step-by-Step
SEO might look extremely overwhelming at first glance with all of these rules, keywords, sophisticated ranking algorithms, and so on. But what if I told you that it's possible to learn about 80% of SEO essentials in no more than just fifteen minutes, regardless of your digital marketing background. And it doesn't matter if you're an aspiring digital marketer or a small business owner who just wants to start driving traffic and getting leads from search engines without paying a fortune to digital agencies.
In this video, I'm going to put everything down in order in a simple, understandable language so that after watching it, you will be able to start improving your website's ranking straightaway. Hit the subscribe button right now not to forget to do that later accidentally, and let's dive into it! Let's start from the very beginning and figure out what SEO is and why it's so important for every website owner. SEO stands for search engine optimization. Essentially, it's a set of measures aimed at improving a website's page positions for certain keywords in the search engine results page or SERP.
The more significant the number of keywords your website ranks for, the more organic traffic you get. When it comes to business, traffic means potential customers and sales, and that's why SEO is crucial for anyone who wants to succeed online. Besides, organic traffic has several unique features that make it more valuable than other traffic types. To begin with, it's completely free. Of course, it's worth mentioning that when it comes to high-volume key phrases, which are also known as short-tail keywords, it might require a lot of time, effort, and money to make your website rank for them. However, first of all, short tail keywords are too broad, which means it barely makes sense to try to specifically aim for them because they won't drive you any customers anyway.
Secondly, about 70% of overall search demand is represented by long-term keywords. They're much more specific and highly convertible since people who enter them usually have a clear understanding of what they are searching for. Wherein long-tail keywords are usually quite unique as they consist of three or more words. Such uniqueness makes them low-competitive and allows you to start getting traffic from the very beginning. Finally, once your website's page starts ranking for a keyword at the top of search results, it may attract new visitors for months or even years until your competitors displace you, which is highly unlikely going to happen if your page fully matches the search intent. To summarize, I would say that properly done SEO can drive to your website tons of free, consistent, and, more importantly, highly convertible traffic, so please do not underestimate its power. Of course, SEO has its own disadvantages, and probably the main one is that it's quite a long process, especially for brand new websites. On average, it takes up to six months to start getting first traffic, even if you're aiming for long-tail and, accordingly, low competitive keywords.
First of all, it strongly depends on your specific niche, keywords you're aiming at, amount of pages your website has, and some other unique factors. Secondly, it's worth remembering that search engines need to take some time to find and crawl your website, as well as determine for which search intents it should be ranked for and how high. So yes, SEO is definitely not for those who want to get tons of traffic immediately. However, if you've been doing SEO properly, after a while, your website begins to gain more and more trust from search engines, making it easier to get good rankings even for more competitive keywords.
Basically, the more trust your website has obtained, the easier it is to get better positions and increase the amount of incoming traffic. That is why it makes sense to start doing SEO as soon as you launch the website. Another fact that totally deserves attention is that you must always be engaged in SEO to hold your positions. The thing is, search engines constantly change and improve ranking algorithms to provide the best matching results. So you have nothing to do but keep abreast and adjust your approach accordingly. Besides, you should be aware that your competitors are doing SEO as well and would love to embezzle your traffic. In practice, though, I'd say that it's enough to devote just a couple of hours a week to SEO to stay at the top of the game, so it's not as time-consuming as it may seem at first glance. Considering all of the above, let's cut to the chase and find out how exactly you can optimize your website for search engines.
Essentially, this process is divided into three parts – on-page SEO, technical SEO, and, finally, off-page SEO. First things first. As the name suggests, on-page SEO is a set of measures aimed at optimizing a website's pages for specific keywords to improve search visibility and attract more traffic accordingly. Essentially, on-page SEO consists of two things – keyword research and internal linking. It's safe to say that every website's search engine optimization starts with keyword research. Basically, keywords are the search queries that people are using while searching for your products, services, or content. It's crucial to learn them because including these keywords into the page's content and meta tags allows search engines to recognize what the page consists of and how it should be ranked. Also, you have to be aware that every keyword has its own competitiveness and monthly traffic volume, so if you're just about to launch the website, it makes sense to aim for the less competitive ones to start getting traffic from the very beginning.
Of course, it might be extremely complicated to find such keywords in some particularly popular niches, but it's totally worth it. Besides, the more trust your website obtains from the search engines, the easier it is to rank for more competitive keywords, so in general, SEO is about being patient. We're going to talk about the website's trust in detail a bit further in this video, so as for now, let's continue and find out how to perform keyword research properly. Well, there are three most popular tools that I'd recommend using for that purpose – Ahrefs, Similarweb, and Semrush.
In general, all of them have a pretty similar set of features, so I'm going to talk about them as a single product so that you will not be confused. First of all, these tools are incredibly great for keyword research itself. You can find new keywords, dive deep into some particular ones, get suggested with new ideas, and so on. But what is more important, these tools allow you to spy on your competitors. Precisely, you can find out their monthly traffic, which keywords and pages are driving the biggest amount of it, how many backlinks their website got, and so much more. This is precious knowledge, at least from my point of view. Because I always say that if you want to make the best product, the only thing you have to do is take the best ideas and approaches from each of your competitors and additionally improve them.
So I do recommend giving these tools a shot, especially given that most of them provide a free trial period. Also, I can't help but mention that there is a completely free keyword research tool provided by Google called Keyword Planner. Although it was originally designed for picking keywords specifically for Google Ads campaigns, it’s still pretty useful when it comes to keyword research for SEO purposes. Of course, Keyword Planner cannot properly compete with specialized premium tools for keyword research, but it’s an excellent place to start and try your hand. Another important thing about keyword research that I can’t help but mention is that there is a huge difference between approaches for blogs and eCommerce websites. When it comes to blog articles: content uniqueness, relevancy, comprehensiveness, and even content’s format are the key ranking factors. That’s why articles from the top of SERP are usually quite long, include many keywords and infographics, are written by an expert, and have always been up to date. In the case of eCommerce websites, obviously, you can’t include a lot of text on the product’s page, and moreover, it will even look weird.
Since search engines are well aware of this, eCommerce and blog websites have different keyword ranking algorithms. Just keep in mind that fact while working on your website. However, it’s always a good idea to start a company blog and attract free traffic from search engines to the articles related to your products or services. Well, since we figured out the importance of keywords and how to properly find and use them, let’s move on to another crucial on-page SEO technique, which is internal linking.
As the name suggests, an internal link is a hyperlink between two pages on the same website. Probably, the most obvious example of internal linking is the navigation menu because pretty much every website has it. It’s important to keep all of your website’s pages linked to each other due to a couple of reasons. Firstly, links make it easier for Google and other search engines to crawl your website and understand its structure. Secondly, they make it more convenient for visitors to navigate through your website and find the content they want to find. And finally, internal links are able to pass link equity in totally the same way as the external links do. Except for such apparent examples of internal linking as the navigation menu, sitemap, posts or products feed, and so on, there is another type of internal links that we put inside the content, also known as contextual links.
They have a couple of worth mentioning features. To begin with, search engines are able to recognize a text around the link and understand if it's relevant or not. Due to this fact, contextual links have a higher SEO value than navigational ones. Besides, one of the most crucial factors in link effectiveness is click-through rate or CTR. Google considers highly clickable links as the more trustworthy ones, which makes them extremely SEO valuable. As a rule, especially in the case with blog websites, people tend to follow links within the text much more often, rather than the navigational links, so placing them is a great opportunity to additionally improve your website's positions in the search results. And probably that's all you need to know about on-page SEO for a solid start, so we're ready to get to the technical part. Technical SEO is also carried out within the website, but unlike on-page SEO, it applies to the whole website, not just particular pages. Shortly speaking, if you want your website to rank high in the search results, you have to make sure it's loading fast, correctly displayed on mobile devices, doesn't have duplicate pages, and problems with indexing.
All of these things except for loading speed optimization are quite individual, so I'm not going to dwell on them in detail because it hardly makes sense. But as for speeding up website loading, there are some versatile tools and techniques that will help you no matter what CMS or website builder you are using. Probably the easiest thing you can do to improve your website loading speed is to start compressing images before uploading them. From my experience, precisely the large weight of images is the most popular cause of slow loading websites. That is especially true for online stores, where a product's page can include a lot of its pictures or blog websites with a huge number of images on a single page. Thankfully, there are a lot of online tools using which you can reduce the image weight in just a few clicks. For example, my favorite one is TinyPNG.com. Due to smart lossy compression techniques, this tool allows you to reduce the file size of images up to 70% without noticeable loss of quality. The following website loading speed optimization measures I'd like to mention are caching and code minification.
As you probably know, essentially, a website is just a bunch of files. And every time a user loads a page, their browser downloads the files a page consists of. Caching allows browsers to store copies of these files in a cache or temporary storage location to be accessed more quickly, thereby speeding up a website's loading. As for minification, this is the process of minimizing code and markup in your web pages and script files, which allows reducing their weight.
These measures usually come all together, having a significant impact on a website's loading speed. And I have some good news for you. Most of the popular website builders either provide these features by default, or you can turn them on somewhere in the settings. The same goes for WordPress. There are a lot of free plugins you can use for this purpose, so I'm sure you won't face any problems. And the last but not least thing that can be applied to any website regardless of its platform is CDN or content delivery network. In layman's terms, this is a group of geographically distributed servers that speed up web content delivery by bringing it closer to where users are. That is why connecting your website to CDN is absolutely necessary if you have worldwide traffic, but it hardly makes sense if most of your visitors are from the same country where your hosting servers are located.
And finally, we've made it to off-page SEO. As you may have guessed, it only includes activities carried out away from your own website, and basically, all of them boil down to building backlinks. Of course, it's worth mentioning that this concept contains many different techniques such as content marketing, brand building, guest posting, and so on, but the meaning is always the same – the more quality backlinks you get, the better. But why is it so important, how to make people refer to your website, and how on earth can you measure the link's quality? First things first. Shortly speaking, if your website's pages start getting backlinks from other websites, it signals Google that people find your content valuable and it deserves to be ranked higher. As in real life, the higher the source's authority that refers to you, the more value such a link has. That's why not all backlinks have equal worth. For example, on Fiverr, you can come across many gigs where people, who are involved in so-called "Black Hat" SEO, a set of measures that includes techniques aimed at deceiving search engines, offer you to buy hundreds of backlinks for a few tens of dollars.
Please, avoid such offers. It's not only a waste of money but a straightforward way to get penalized by Google one day. The ideal backlink candidates are websites in the same niche as yours, which already obtained some trust from the search engines and have decent monthly traffic. As a rule, it's quite hard to get a backlink from such websites if you're not familiar with the popular link-building approaches, about which we'll talk a bit further. As for now, let's figure out how to measure the link's quality. First of all, I’d like to clarify that the term – "link quality" is artificial and was coined by the SEO experts themselves.
The thing is, Google uses over 200 ranking factors in their algorithm and doesn't reveal most of them, including how exactly they evaluate the quality of backlinks. Fortunately, there are some attributes by which we can determine how valuable a backlink from a specific domain will be. For example, these are such parameters as site visibility, monthly traffic, amount of referring domains, relevance, etc. Obviously, you don't want and even cannot examine every single website whether they meet these parameters or not. That's why off-page SEO is hardly imaginable without specialized backlink analysis tools. And I think it's safe to say that one of the best of them is Ahrefs.com which I've already mentioned earlier in this video. The Ahrefs toolset allows you to get a complete picture of the donor website and determine whether it's worth getting a backlink from it or not. Apart from that, using it, you can monitor your own website backlink profile and its growth over time. Finally, as I already said, Ahrefs can be used to find out what keywords your competitors are ranking for in search and how much traffic each keyword brings them.
In short, it's a must-have tool for anyone who is involved in SEO. And there is good news for beginners. Ahrefs provides a 7-day trial period for only seven dollars, so I do recommend giving it a shot and deciding whether you're ready to dive deep into off-page SEO or the time has not come yet. As usual, you can find the link to get started in the description down below. Also, I can't help but mention that there is a hidden indicator of link quality that can't be measured by third-party tools, unless it's your own link. This is the click-through rate. Links that are often followed are the most valuable in the eyes of Google because it makes clear that the link was not placed artificially, and it’s really helpful.
A typical place for a backlink that has a high CTR is the beginning or middle of a highly related article, so try to bear in mind this fact when you’re doing backlink building if you want to reach maximum efficiency. And I think this is the perfect time to talk about backlink building strategies and techniques, find out which are the best ones and how to apply them properly. But before we start, I’d like to clarify something.
Since this video is some kind of introduction to SEO, which is supposed to be brief and easy to understand as much as possible, I’m not going to provide you with specific examples of backlink profile building. It will just not make any sense because each case is quite individual, and describing them in detail would have made this tutorial much longer while less informative. Instead, I’m going to introduce you to general principles of backlink building which will clarify where to get backlinks for your particular website as well as give you some food for thought. With that being said, let’s dive into it. To begin with, you should be aware that backlink building strategies differ depending on the website’s type.
When it comes to blogs, probably the best and the only strategy is simply to create high-quality and link-worthy content. Publishing comprehensive and informative articles which are covering all the visitor’s questions will inevitably lead to getting a lot of quality backlinks from grateful readers. Besides, if you’re a recognized professional in your field and publish a lot of helpful studies and content, it’s just a matter of time when your colleagues start referring to your work. Like I said earlier, in this video, I could have mentioned some particular backlink getting methods, like guest posting, various types of collaboration, giveaways, and even begging. But my main goal is to make you understand that the process of getting backlinks to a blog depends entirely on the quality of its content. If it's poor, nobody will like to put a backlink to it.
Moreover, the blog's visitors will leave it disappointed and unsatisfied, which will surely affect the bounce rate, one of the most crucial ranking factors, making Google understand the blog doesn't deserve to get better positions. Whereas, if the content is excellent, people will genuinely share links to it, and you will not even have to ask for it! That's why, at least in my humble opinion, it makes much more sense for bloggers to focus on the quality of their content rather than to spend time looking for new opportunities to get backlinks. Things are getting slightly more complicated when it comes to business and eCommerce websites because people usually do not tend to share links to them, at least outside of messengers. However, it doesn't mean that you should sit back and do nothing. Instead, you can reach out to bloggers and suggest some kind of collaboration, for instance, to mention your website as a part of some research or even ask them to make a review of your products or services.
It will not only allow you to get high-quality backlinks but also attract some direct visits and potential customers, so it's a double benefit. Although you will obviously have to pay for these backlinks, this will not be considered by Google as the "black hat" SEO since these backlinks will still be helpful to the bloggers' audiences. Furthermore, it's always a great idea to start a blog of your own company. That is an extremely popular technique, especially among companies that provide some kind of online services and tools. The thing is, by publishing articles on your blog that are aimed at specific keywords, you can attract informational traffic, allowing you to increase brand recognition and convert some of the visitors into customers.
In addition, it's a fantastic opportunity to obtain free and high-quality backlinks since having a blog allows you to act like an expert in your niche and publish link-worthy content. Conclusion Well, that was everything that I wanted to share with you in this tutorial. Despite it was just a short squeeze of essential information, I hope that I managed to cover the most pressing questions and make it a little easier for you to get started in SEO. If anything remains confusing to you, please feel free to let me know about it in the comments below. I’m always ready to help. Have a nice day and see you next time, bye!
.
