Have you ever wondered how your blog posts can be seen on search engines, even with millions of other blogs in your niche? If so, you’re not alone. In this article, I’ll explain extensively with simple details the Ultimate SEO strategy for beginners to see your blog post rank on search consoles.
Many bloggers have it difficult to get their content seen by their target audience. The key to success is SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
Sit tight and Let’s Dive Right in!
What is SEO?
SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimisation”. It entails various basics and actions to improve the fine-tuning of your content pages so as to rank well on various search consoles.
Internet users search keywords on their favorite search consoles, and the sight of your webpages on the search page drives guests and turned users to your posts. These basics and actions explain the concept of SEO.
Let me elaborate on that;
Diana has an online store and needs to generate more sales to the store
Diana gets to make blog posts to convert her visitors to customers on her store,
Despite her posts and its word count, there just weren’t any visitors to the blog posts.
Her creative post never got to the search page results
Diana never had visits of her blog post! Therefore had no sales conversions
Diana clearly has no understanding of blog post optimization
You may find yourself in the same dilemma, don’t be hard on yourself. Yeah, don’t be!
Stick around and follow the article till the end.
How Search Engines Work.
Various search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Yandex use specific algorithms which may not be well known to the public on how they work. Isn’t that right? You actually won’t want your secret strategy out of your bag.
Despite these uncertainties, experts like myself have discovered the three (3) key ways in which search engines work: Crawling, Indexing, and Ranking
Crawling
Crawling doesn’t sound creepy I guess? This is related to “spying” in simple terms, it entails the actions of the search engines’ bots getting to view various contents on a website. It takes note of relevant words- “Keywords” and stores them in its database
Indexing
Via the actions of crawling the website’s content and its storage on the database, the concept of indexing takes it further. The contents are not only stored but also sorted based on keywords (and other basics which will be further discussed) in various paragraphs of the content on the website and compared with all other websites with the same keyword.
This determines the ranking of the content pages with respect to searches made on the search console.
Ranking
Now, website content pages have been “spied”, and stored in the database by the search engines, internet users can then input their searches on the search consoles, and the search engines give results based on the sorting of keywords that may be contained or similar to the search-keywords imputed by the user.
Search engines list out the relevant content and websites based on their ranking related to the keyword. This concept is also referred to as Retrieval.
Types of SEO
We have explored the foundational aspect of SEO and how it works. It’s important that we further classify SEO into its types to ensure complete and simple understanding. There are two types of SEO:
- On-Page SEO
- Off-Page SEO
On-page SEO
On-page SEO implies the optimization of content “on the pages” of the website or blog. It is important to remember that content is king when it comes to SEO. High-quality content that is relevant to your target audience’s question is the foundation of any successful SEO strategy
For instance, what counts more in a restaurant is not just the hospitality nature of its staff nor its dish list, but the quality of dishes it serves, this not only keeps each customer but makes them want to try it all over sometimes and tell people about you.
The ingredients and cooking methods used to create delicious dishes as in the above example can be related to on-page basics and concepts to optimize your website pages for search engines (SEO).
in addition, on-page SEO entails various actions to ensure a standard webpage for each visitor, It involves a variety of factors, including page design, content value and structure, and keywords.
A search engine crawling program is like a priority audience, what it takes off our content pages speaks loud to others
Page Design
Users’ experience on the website or blog should be of much consideration. Studies have shown, a lesser percentage of visitors get to stay long on a blog page due to its template or design.
Each page design is to be tested for responsiveness and checked for its mobile and desktop version. Most internet users make use of their mobile to do quick research, this makes the concept of page designs and easy navigation for mobile users important.
furthermore, Page design also entails the texting formats, the use of titles, headers, and subsections helps to give the user an easy breakdown and easy navigation while reading or going through the site.
The use of optimized images is critical too, it helps the reader to have a picture of what is being discussed.
Every image on each content page is expected to have a description, which helps the search engines to analyze the image and display them in the “image” sections of the searched keyword
Content Value and Structure
Yeah, the webpage themes and design can be very good, with nice responsiveness to both mobile and desktop devices, however, that isn’t the user’s only interest. The visitor is on the page to get vital pieces of information!
There must be good and valuable content that goes into detail on what the topic is really about. Always ensure to give the real value content to each visitor, it would make them want to come back and learn from the site. This would build the search engine’s reliability on the website. This will help to increase the ranking for such topics or keywords on various search engines.
I explained a bit of content structure in “page design”. The content must be well aligned, and easy to read with nice transitions within the content to make it easier to read. This is done by using the correct titles, headings, sub-headings, and optimized images.
Besides, Research has shown that internet users get to visit content pages with page titles that have parenthesis “( )” in them, yeah! you may want to adopt that in your next blog post.
Keywords
Keywords are search input words internet users use to make research on search engines.
The use of relevant keywords in the title and the body of the content help to improve the page on search engine ranking. You’d have to use these keywords naturally in the content to make search engines get a precise understanding of the content.
You may be confused. How do I get relevant keywords to write about? Well, this part is often tricky and confusing, errors made here have the potential to undermine or render futile the time invested in content creation.
There are various SEO tools that help in keyword research: Promoter’s Kit, Ubersuggest, Semrush, ahrefs
Example of keyword research on “ Keywords” using Semrush
These tools do not only help to pick the right keywords to create content on. But also helps to unearth keywords your audiences are craving for.
How these tools are used would be extensively discussed in other aspects of this SEO ultimate strategy series.
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Off-page SEO
Off-page SEO refers to activities that are done externally from the web pages, they include actions of Social media, link building, and so on.
Engaging in this activity aids in building the trust of both search engines and users with specific intentions. It simply tells search engines like google what to think about your site.
in addition, Off-page SEO ensures the promotion of positive signals to search engines which could be in the form of reviews from third-party sites, or social media mentions, and also help build relevance and authority in the long term
Off-page SEO activities include: Link Building, Social Media Mentions, Directory Submission
Link Building
Link building is an off-page SEO concept that describes the action of having numerous website links to your web pages, attracting audiences from other blogs, and helping in search engine rankings. The links are referred to as Backlinks.
Top-ranking sites in specific niches all have a good number of backlinks on them. This does not just portray the presence of backlinks as time goes on but also an increase in backlinks as the website grows.
Acquiring backlinks for web pages can prove to be quite challenging and doesn’t happen overnight. There is however a conventional method to increase backlinks on the site which is referred to as Outreaching
Outreaching
Outreaching is the act of getting across to external website owners, and content creators (via various means such as email, and social media) to include your links in their content thereby having a link to your site on their page.
As simple as it sounds, this strategy is often unproductive and just does not work as it sounds. would you have done that if someone reached out to you on that?
Top-ranking blogs in various niches have the outreach method go their way. It can be very frustrating for new blog sites to get responses from other website owners. It often takes a long time to hear back, and even then, the response may be negative.
So if outreach doesn’t work effectively, what works?
Remember I made mention of a characteristic of sites with numerous backlinks- Growth. You just need to keep growing, keep getting better with content, not just in the number of contents but also in the quality of content.
Bloggers and content creators need to stay up-to-date on the latest trends and information in their respective subject matters by reading about them on the internet right? This means visiting various sites to find the best content to share with their audience. No one ever wants to link to an average content page, every content creator would always want to link to a better website.
Ultimately, the best way to build links to your website is to create high-quality content that people want to read and share.
Trust me it works well, I understand that you’re eager to see results, just give things time
Social Media Mentions
Social media mentions have a ripple effect on search engine optimization. While they do not have a direct impact on a web page’s ranking, they can directly increase brand mentions, which can lead to links to the site, increased traffic, and improved search engine rankings.
Social media mentions or posts have longer lifespans on various social media pages. This means that a social media post can continue to be seen by new users for months or even years after it was originally posted. Although various social media sites have a lifespan for their posts. The majority of social media sites have a longer life and use algorithms to show users content that they are likely to be interested in. Posts that are high-quality, relevant, and engaging are more likely to be seen by more people and have a longer lifespan.
furthermore, It is interesting to note that search engines may rank some posts on social media sites higher than other blogs due to the optimization of the social media site itself. This is a goldmine!
Social media platforms that aid brand awareness and help improve search engine optimization include:
Directory Submission
Directory submission is an off-page SEO basic that involves submitting web pages to specific web directories. Web directories are composed of catalogs of similar websites. They are specific to niches.
This off-page SEO strategy aids the generation of backlinks as similar users view the contents of the directory and may link to the content, thereby leading to its optimization. In addition, this strategy may however be stressful if done manually. Submission to low-quality directories may however have no visible effect
Conclusion
Remember, SEO is an ongoing process, hence this SEO guide for beginners. You’ll need to regularly update your content, optimize your pages, and build links to your website in order to maintain your rankings. But if you’re willing to put in the work, SEO can be a powerful tool for driving traffic to your website and growing your business.
Now, I’d like to hear which tip from today’s post you want to try out first.
Let me know in the comment section
