Whether you’re an entrepreneur, wearing all of the hats, and researching search engine optimization for your own efforts, or you’re looking to hone your professional skills, this SEO Websites for Beginners article is for you!
We get a lot of questions about SEO from our clients, some who simply receive an email alert about something happening to their website that doesn’t make sense, or those who want to learn more about what it is and the work involved. In this article we cover the following topics to help you learn more about search engine optimization:
Table of Contents
Grab your beverage of choice, maybe a snack, or perhaps your favourite stim/fidget toy and start bookmarking these helpful SEO Websites for Beginners and learn more about SEO!
1. The Beginner’s Guide to SEO
To get you started in the wonderful world of SEO, The Beginner’s Guide to SEO by Moz is an in depth tutorial on how search engines work and covers the fundamental strategies that make websites search engine friendly.
After reviewing the basics, advanced information is broken up into chapters to help you consume the information. Moz also offers access to free SEO tools and additional resources to continue learning.
2. SEO Starter Guide
This starter guide, provided by Google, offers some basic information on SEO fundamentals, answering frequently asked questions like “how to get my site on Google”, or “how Google search works”. From there, you can move forward and read on about crawling and indexing, ranking and search appearance, and monitoring and debugging.
With Google accounting for over 80% of the search engine market share, it’s beneficial to keep up to date with what they have to say. You can also connect with Google Support to review additional documentation or seek help from the online community.
3. Content Strategy and Marketing Tips
You may find yourself reading about analytics, meta data, backlinks, and indexing but every SEO expert will tell you that “content is king”. Plainly put, keyword stuffing and throwing up a blog post that doesn’t speak to your audience, isn’t going to help your efforts.
A content strategy is like giving yourself a roadmap to what you plan to communicate to your customers and reach your business goals. From there, content marketing is put in place to help you generate leads. Read these articles from Semrush to learn more about Content Strategy vs. Content Marketing and how to start planning for each.
4. SEO Plugins for WordPress
Installing a SEO plugin on your WordPress website will give you access to optimization tools such as focus keywords, editing meta titles and keywords, previewing your search result, and connecting your website data with other tools such as Google Analytics or Google Search Console.
Most plugins will offer a free version with streamlined tools, with premium settings locked until you upgrade. We recommend trying any new tool as a free trial. You need to learn how it works, what it is reporting on, and feel comfortable interpreting the information for you to find any value in this. From there, gauge if an upgrade is good for you.
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5. How Design and SEO Work Together
Keeping SEO in mind before you start anything else can really help you when making decisions about your website copy, layout, and formatting! At this point in your learning you may have come across a reference to something called “E-A-T” or “E-E-A-T” – this is guideline that Google uses to assess whether your content is of value to readers.
Finding progress in both your bot optimization and speaking directly to your very human customers is a balancing act! Add researching both design and content in with your search engine efforts.
6. SEO and Social Media
While social media is used to generate content and engage with your audience, SEO still makes a big impact on these platforms. Take the #hashtag for example, many platforms utilize hashtags as a keyword to help users find more information about a topic they’re interested in.
Additionally, some social media post content can be found in search results, and of course, anyone sharing a link to you on social media is driving referral traffic to your website. If you use social media, it’s worth reading more about how social impacts SEO.
7. Refreshing your Content
You may already have some great content to work with if you’re willing to update and optimize it. DMI describes evergreen content as being “search-optimized content that is continually relevant and stays “fresh” for readers over a long period of time”.
While content refreshing is verging more on a marketing side, the importance of keywords and readability for search engines still remains an integral role. The supplied links offer some best practices and step-by-step strategies to refresh your website content.
As you can see, SEO is a vast world with many moving parts and changing variables. The truth is, what you learn today may not apply later. Search engines like Google can change their algorithms and their search engine results page (SERP) which means users have to stay up to date to ensure they keep their website optimized.
Many of the SEO Websites for Beginners we linked to in this article are from well-known experts. If you’re truly interested in learning more, sign-up for their newsletters or feeds to be notified of new articles, bookmark the site and make note to visit regularly. Like any industry, staying on top of current events can mean the world to your business!If you’re looking for a hand in optimizing your website, contact BE3Designs, let’s talk and see what we can do.