The 2021 SEO Guide: SEO Basics
Stick to these SEO basics and you’ll be ranking on page one in no time!
Welcome to the Pulp Media SEO Guide for 2021! The team at Pulp have put their heads together to come up with a four-part blog series that covers everything you need to know about how to get your site ranking on Google! In this first blog, we’ll cover the basics of SEO including a link to the glossary of key SEO terms that you need to know!
What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimisation or SEO is the process of refining your websites, structure, content and authority with the goal of improving your ranking for specific keywords in the search engine results page or SERP. There are a lot of SEO magicians out there that will tell you that there are plenty of hacks and tricks to rank better, however, I’m here to tell you that all it takes is a solid strategy, common sense and patience. SEO is not keyword stuffing, and it is not just backlinks SEO focuses on three key pillars;
Technical Structure or Technical SEO
Your Website Content or Onsite SEO
Your Website Authority or Offsite SEO
That’s it! Through this guide, we will help you to develop a strong SEO strategy based on these three pillars.
If you’re struggling with some of these SEO terms check out our SEO Glossary of terms
Why is SEO important for your business?
Put simply, ranking on page one for the right keywords will provide your business with a regular stream of potential customers that are looking for your product. There are 3.5 billion Google searches per day, meaning every day your site isn’t being indexed on google you’re missing hundreds if not thousands (maybe millions?) of potential customers. This could be a missed opportunity for all of these potential visitors to engage with your content, buy your product or service and rave about how great you are to everyone else! Regularly spending time working on SEO basics, as well as more advanced techniques, will dramatically improve your website‟s ability to rank in the SERP (Search engine results page) and get found online by your potential customers.
Often the question that comes with SEO is, what about paid search? Sure, you can pay to have your website listed at the top if of the SERP for your keywords and topics. However, running paid search campaigns can be extremely expensive and unsuccessful if you don’t know what you’re doing. Not only this, paying to be at the top of page one of the SERP is addictive, and your business could soon be reliant on large AdWords spending if you’re not implementing an effective SEO strategy. According to HubSpot, about 88% of search engine users don’t click on paid search ads anyway, because they want the “real” answers that appear organically.
The sole purpose of a search engine is to provide its users with the most relevant and useful information related to the search intent. So, it’s in everyone’s interest (the search engine, the user, and you the business) to ensure that your website is ranking high up on page one in the organic search listings. I would suggest that it is probably best to stay away from paid search all together until you feel you have a firm grasp on your niche and key buyer personas so that you’re not wasting money marketing to someones who is never going to buy your product or service. If you do have strong buyer personas, it is a good idea to use paid search to supplement your site traffic while your SEO efforts are getting your site indexed in search results.
How Does SEO Work?
A Search engine like Google wants to do one thing, that is to provide the user with the most relevant results possible in relation to their search intent. By matching the user’s search intent, it creates a happy user that is more likely to use this search engine again. To have all the answers to more than 3.5 billion search queries per day, a search engine needs a plethora of information to crawl through.
All search engines have built-in Ai called crawlers that are constantly scanning the internet, indexing websites for content, and following links on each webpage they find to other webpages. If your website hasn’t been indexed or can’t be indexed due to technical issues it is literally impossible to appear in the search results. The question is, how do you get the crawler to index your site above everyone else? Well, As mentioned at the start of this guide you need to focus on three key pillars of SEO to ensure crawlers prioritize your website;
If a search engine can’t index your site due to slow page speed, complicated URL structure, duplicate content or dead links you’re never going to rank on page one. The crawler will look at the website’s back-end code for certain tags, descriptions, and other instructions to determine the health of your site compared to everyone else’s and score it accordingly. This is where Technical SEO is used. Use Googles page speed insights to get a gauge of the health of your website.
Content or “onsite SEO” is what customers want when they’re using a search engine. Regardless of what they’re looking for, it’s content that provides it, so the more you publish the higher your chance of ranking high in the SERP. Your content helps search engines to determine how to rank a page, based on it’s relevance to keywords and the users “search intent”. If your content isn’t keyword-optimized or SEO optimised you could be missing a huge opportunity to rank well, by missing a few small details including, the right long-tail keywords and internal, and external linking.
The first two areas focused on increasing relevancy, however, it’s the offsite SEO that delivers authority. That is authority through backlinks to your site. When another website uses a link to point its readers to your content, you gain a backlink to your site. Getting good backlinks is difficult, but that’s where we can help. Through good content strategy and link building techniques we can help your site increase authority and Google rankings.
That’s all for this part of the SEO guide, keep reading about technical, onsite or offsite SEO to improve your skills, or visit the glossary of terms to understand what all of these words mean. Please let us know what you love or hate about this blog in the comments below! If the thought of SEO optimisation is still giving you nightmares, don’t hesitate to reach out via our contact form and we can take care of SEO for you.