There are so many terms, rules and practices to learn and implement and if you haven\u2019t done this before, it\u2019s a nightmare.<\/p>\n
Open up Google and search for \u2018SEO tutorial\u2019 or \u2018DIY SEO\u2019, what do you see? Probably a number of guides each of them taking a different approach to SEO and this makes things even more complicated.<\/p>\n
What to expect from this SEO Tutorial?<\/strong><\/p>\n I\u2019ve been doing SEO for more than 18 years now and I\u2019ve learned through a lot of studying, trial and error how to get a website to the top positions of Google. I have done this for my websites and many client websites over and over again.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not an easy job, it\u2019s a lot of work but it\u2019s also rewarding.<\/p>\n I wrote this SEO tutorial to help you get into the right mindset and understand how to approach SEO correctly. It starts from the beginning and takes you step-by-step through the most important aspects of SEO.<\/p>\n After you are done reading this guide, you will have a deep understanding of how to optimize your website for Google and other search engines<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n So, if you are new to SEO and don\u2019t know from where to start or where to spend your time and energy, get a cup of coffee, take a deep breath and get ready to teach yourself SEO!<\/p>\n Obviously the first thing you need to understand is what is SEO and why all the fuss about it.<\/p>\n Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a framework you can follow in order to make your website more visible to search engines. Like other frameworks, it has a set of rules, processes, and guidelines.<\/p>\n SEO has two main objectives:<\/p>\n That\u2019s the basic definition of SEO, which is clear and straightforward.<\/p>\n Now consider this:<\/strong> what happens if all websites are properly optimized according to best SEO practices? How do search engines decide which one to show first, second, third, etc. in their search results?<\/p>\n This is where the fun part begins. For any search term<\/strong><\/a>, you can think of, there are hundreds of websites competing for a top place in the results. The websites that are built on a solid SEO foundation win the race.<\/p>\n A solid SEO foundation is based on what is known in the industry as \u2018white hat SEO\u2019.<\/p>\n White hat SEO is a term used to describe the process of optimizing your website without violating any rules.<\/p>\n To be more precise, Google has a set of guidelines<\/strong><\/a> for what you can do and what you shouldn\u2019t do in order to make your website Google friendly.<\/p>\n If you violate any of those guidelines either intentionally or even because you didn\u2019t know about them, you risk getting a \u2018Google penalty\u2019 and this means your website will either be removed from Google or your rankings will dramatically drop.<\/p>\n What is black hat SEO?<\/strong><\/p>\n Black hat SEO, on the other hand, is a term used to describe actions that are not according to acceptable standards and practices.<\/p>\n The purpose of black hat SEO is to manipulate search engine algorithms using various techniques that can trick search engines into ranking a page higher in the results using false signals.<\/p>\n Which way to go?<\/strong><\/p>\n White hat SEO is the only way to go. Search engines have very intelligent algorithms, spam detection techniques that can track and penalize any websites that are using black hat SEO techniques to achieve higher rankings.<\/p>\n Don\u2019t believe everything you read on the Internet and especially those guides or SEO tutorials that promise you results in a short amount of time. SEO takes time to generate good results and after you do a lot of work.<\/p>\n If you are looking for a fast way to get traffic to your website, get into Google ads, Facebook ads or other paid methods but if you want to build a successful online business<\/strong><\/a>, then SEO can guarantee your long term success.<\/p>\n SEO is important<\/strong><\/a> for many reasons but the primary reason is that it can help you achieve higher rankings which means more organic traffic<\/strong><\/a> to your website.<\/p>\n Search engine traffic is the most valuable source of traffic for any website and this can lead to more conversions (if you are not sure what a conversion is, read this definition<\/strong><\/a> by Wikipedia)<\/p>\n According to statistics, Google receives over three trillion searches per year. Take a moment and think what this number means and how it can change your business if you manage to get your tiny share of traffic from the billions of monthly searches.<\/p>\n Why does it matter to rank high in the search results?<\/strong><\/p>\n The majority of Google\u2019s organic traffic is distributed among the websites that appear on the first page of Google.<\/p>\n As you can see in the graph below, more than 73% of the clicks go to the first page, and the rest goes to the second and third pages.<\/p>\n So, if you want to get traffic from Google, you have to rank in one of the top positions or at least on the first page.<\/p>\n Now that you have a clear idea of what is SEO and why it is of great importance for your online success, let\u2019s see in more detail how SEO works.<\/p>\n Since Google is the biggest and most valuable search engine, I will use it in the examples below. But, anything that you do to optimize your website for Google is also applicable to the other big search engines.<\/p>\n How does Google Search Works?<\/strong><\/p>\n Google has a very nice tutorial<\/strong><\/a> on how Google works, and if you have never seen this before, I suggest reading it first.<\/p>\n Of course, they don\u2019t reveal all the details of the algorithm but you can get a very good idea of how search works, and this will help you understand the contents of this SEO tutorial better.<\/p>\n In simple words, Google crawlers search the web to find webpages and add them to their index. When a user types in a search query in Google, their algorithms try to find the best possible match and present those pages in the search results.<\/p>\n If there were only a few pages available per search query, then that would not be an issue, Google would show those in the first 10 positions. But, as mentioned above, there are thousands of pages about a particular topic so their algorithm has to decide which is the best match and show those to the user.<\/p>\n There are many factors taken into account by the algorithm but some<\/strong><\/a> are much more important than others.<\/p>\n If you are a beginner to SEO, you don\u2019t have to understand all the theory now, it\u2019s too much information and I know that it gets confusing.<\/p>\n What you need to understand is this:<\/p>\n Before getting deeper into SEO, it\u2019s necessary to understand the impact your website\u2019s domain can have on your SEO efforts.<\/p>\n I know that some of you already have a domain so I\u2019ve separated this section into two parts. The first part is for those who don\u2019t have a domain yet and the second part possible solutions if you already have a website and want to change your domain.<\/p>\n When choosing a domain name for your website, consider the following:<\/p>\n What if I already have a domain and want to change it?<\/strong><\/p>\n If you already have a domain, content, and website with traffic, it is possible to do a rebranding and change your domain without losing your rankings and traffic but you have to follow the migration procedure correctly.<\/p>\n Resources to Learn More<\/strong><\/p>\n Should you buy an old domain?<\/strong><\/p>\n You can buy an old domain and gain the advantage of the \u2018age of the domain\u2019 but you have to be careful not to buy a domain that was previously penalized by Google.<\/p>\n Can I merge one or more domains to make them stronger?<\/strong><\/p>\n Yes, you can. If the domains are related and \u2018clean\u2019 from Google penalties, you can safely merge them together and create a \u2018stronger\u2019 website.<\/p>\n After you select a good domain for your website, the next step is to choose a platform i.e. the software to use to develop your website and a server (hosting provider) to host it.<\/p>\n This is not an area to spend too much time or effort, once you make a good selection from the beginning then you don\u2019t have to worry about it and you can concentrate on other more important tasks.<\/p>\n While there are many options available, the best website platform in terms of SEO is WordPress.<\/p>\n WordPress now powers more than 35% of all available websites on the Internet and has a number of features that can help you build an SEO Friendly website.<\/p>\n It is easy to use and with a few tweaks, you can make it even better.<\/p>\n You can read my best SEO practices for WordPress<\/strong><\/a> article for more details and step-by-step guides.<\/p>\n In terms of hosting, not all providers are equal when it comes to SEO awareness, the wrong choice of web hosting provider<\/strong><\/a> can negatively impact your SEO efforts.<\/p>\n Make sure that you choose an SEO friendly hosting<\/strong><\/a> such as Bluehost or KnownHost.<\/p>\n The best way to approach SEO is step-by-step. The whole process can be broken down into 3 main types<\/strong><\/a>:<\/p>\n For best results, you should follow the steps in the order outlined above i.e. start technical SEO, then On-Page SEO and then Off-Page SEO.<\/p>\n Technical SEO has one purpose, to make sure that search engines can discover the important webpages of a website and be able to access them without any issues.<\/p>\n To achieve this, you need to optimize a number of things, the most important are:<\/p>\n The structure of your website is very important. A good and simple site structure will make the job of search engines and users easier and this has many benefits for SEO and usability.<\/p>\n To make an SEO friendly site structure<\/strong><\/a>, consider the following:<\/p>\n Group your content into logical categories that make sense. <\/strong>Everything starts with the home page but after that, you should think of a logical hierarchical structure<\/em> for the rest of your content.<\/p>\n Don\u2019t over-engineer but keep it as simple as possible.<\/strong> Avoid having too many categories or subcategories since SEO wise, these don\u2019t offer much value because of duplicate content issues (we will talk about this later).<\/p>\n Don\u2019t use more than three levels when creating your site hierarchy.<\/strong> Don\u2019t hide your content from search engines and users but make discovery easy.<\/p>\n Use<\/strong> SEO Friendly URLs<\/strong><\/a>.<\/strong> Your URLs can contain \u201c-\u201d but not underscores or any other unnecessary information. Keep them clean and easy to understand.<\/p>\n For example, let\u2019s assume that you have a blog about Digital Marketing<\/strong><\/a>. Your blog posts can be grouped into one of these categories: SEO, Social Media, PPC, Content Marketing.<\/p>\n Your Website structure can look like this:<\/p>\n and the URLs like this:<\/p>\n Google recommends that you provide users with a simple sitemap page that will contain links to all the important pages of your website (or to all pages if it\u2019s possible). You can add this to your main menu or footer.<\/p>\n Besides helping with user navigation a sitemap page is also used by Google during the crawl process to discover more pages from your website.<\/p>\n Another better way to inform search engines about your website pages and structure is to create an XML sitemap and submit it to Google and Bing.<\/p>\n An optimized XML sitemap<\/strong><\/a> should list all pages that search engines should know about and not pages that have duplicate content or provide no value to their users.<\/p>\n One of the ways to check what search engines know about your website is through webmaster tools. Both Google and Bing have made these tools available to their users and they are free to use.<\/p>\n You can access Google Search Console here<\/strong><\/a> and Bing webmaster tools here<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n Webmaster tools can give you a lot of valuable information regarding your website. You can see your ranking position for different keywords, how many links point to your website, how many pages you have in the index if there are any errors during the crawl process and many more.<\/p>\n Resources to Learn More<\/strong><\/p>\n Robots.txt is a file that exists on the root directory of every website and can be used to give instructions to search engines on which directories\/files of the website they can crawl and include in their index.<\/p>\n Normally you will need to deal with robots.txt once and if everything is ok you don\u2019t have to change it again.<\/p>\n To make things easier for you, there is a robots.txt tester function in Google Search Console which you can use to ensure that you don\u2019t accidentally block search engines from accessing your website\u2019s pages.<\/p>\n What is a 404 page<\/strong><\/a>? The 404 page is shown to the users if they click a link on your website that leads to a non-existent page.<\/p>\n What is the importance of a 404 page for SEO? Remember that SEO is about usability and giving users a dead end is not the best approach.<\/p>\n Your 404 page needs to be useful<\/strong><\/a> and provide users with alternative ways to find what they are looking for.<\/p>\n One of the ranking signals that is not kept a secret by Google is website speed. Websites that load fast have a competitive advantage over websites that are not so fast.<\/p>\n This means that if everything else is the same, Google will rank higher websites that are faster than slower.<\/p>\n So, even if page speed is a comparative signal and not a direct signal, there are many business benefits from having a fast loading website.<\/p>\n Numerous statistics show that users are not willing to wait for a website to load for more than 3-5 seconds (especially on mobile) and there is also a direct coloration between website speed and conversions.<\/p>\n To cut a long story short, part of your optimization process should be to improve the loading speed of your website as much as possible.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a technical topic and you might need the help of a developer to do the necessary changes but consider this as an investment you have to do.<\/p>\n If you want to get your hands dirty, here is the guide to follow: How to increase your pagespeed.<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n Last but not least, your technical SEO checklist should also include how good or bad your website performs on mobile.<\/p>\n Google confirmed that mobile searches are now more than desktop and this simply means that if you are not mobile, you cannot reach a large percentage of your potential users.<\/p>\n What is a mobile-friendly website?<\/strong><\/p>\n A website is considered mobile-friendly when:<\/p>\n To ensure that their mobile users are happy, Google introduced a mobile-friendly algorithm change in April 2015 (also known as mobilegeddon<\/strong><\/a>), that excludes from their mobile index websites that are not mobile-friendly.<\/p>\n Once you\u2019re done with optimizing for technical SEO, the next step is to start working on your on-Page SEO.<\/p>\n On-Page includes the following tasks:<\/p>\n A page title (<title>) is the first element that both users and search engines \u2018see\u2019 when reading or crawling a page.<\/p>\n Best practices for SEO friendly page titles<\/strong><\/a>:<\/p>\n How to SEO Optimize your page titles?<\/strong><\/p>\n While the above best practices are all related to SEO, there is one more step to take to further optimize your page titles and this has to do with the use of keywords.<\/p>\n Keywords in the page title are important for both users and search engines. Users can easily spot the keywords in the title (sometimes they are even made bold by search engines) and this encourages them to click the link and visit the page.<\/p>\n Search engines \u2018read\u2019 the title and try to figure out if this is a page that can potentially satisfy the \u2018intent of the user\u2019. If this is the case, then they continue to examine the page content and other factors before they return the results to the user.<\/p>\n What you should do to win both users and bots is to ensure that your page titles include the keywords you are targeting.<\/p>\n For example, if you are writing a post targeting the keyword \u2018SEO Tutorial\u2019, then your page title should include this keyword, hence the title of this post.<\/p>\n As an additional note, there is no need to add your website name in the title, this is added automatically by Google (if it does not exist).<\/p>\n If you feel that you need to have your website name as part of the title, then move it at the end and not the beginning.<\/p>\n In the first parts of the title include the important elements (i.e. keywords).<\/p>\n Have a look below at how Google SEO\u2019s optimized the title of Google AdSense. Notice how they blend keywords (make money online) in the page title.<\/p>\n The page meta description (<meta name=”description” content=\u201cyour description goes here\u201d), is equally important. All of your website pages (including the homepage), should have a unique description that accurately summarizes the page\u2019s actual content.<\/p>\n Best practices for crafting good meta descriptions:<\/p>\n Pro Tip:<\/strong> Unlike the page titles, meta descriptions are something you can safely change after a page is indexed.<\/p>\n What you can do is check the description displayed by Google for several terms related to your page and make any changes to the text to make it more appealing to the user. While doing this, you can also \u2018spy\u2019 on your competitor\u2019s descriptions and see what kind of message they try to pass to their users.<\/p>\n As a side note, have in mind that Google may decide not to show your description in their results but they may show text from the page if they believe that this is a better match to the user\u2019s query.<\/p>\n The description from the Google AdSense page (see image above), is a great example of how you can merge keywords and page summary together.<\/p>\n Resources to Learn More<\/strong><\/p>\n Besides the titles and descriptions that are seen by bots and shown in the search results, other factors that directly impact SEO are heading tags and page formatting.<\/p>\n As a general rule, headings should be used to guide users on the important sections of a page and thus make a page easier to read and user-friendlier.<\/p>\n Headings can also help search engines understand the content of a page. When reading the HTML of a page they can identify tags like H1 and H2 and use the text within those tags to figure out the meaning of the page\u2019s content.<\/p>\n Headings should include keywords and have a hierarchical structure. For example, the first heading on the page should be the H1 tag<\/strong><\/a> (this is usually used for the page title) and the subsequent headings can be H2 or H3.<\/p>\n\n
What is Search Engine Optimization?<\/h2>\n
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Black hat VS White hat SEO: Which way to go?<\/h3>\n
Why is SEO so important?<\/h3>\n
![\"SEO](\"https:\/\/www.reliablesoft.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/02\/seo-rankings-CTR.jpg\")
How to do SEO on your Own (DIY SEO)<\/h2>\n
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Understand How Search Engines work<\/h3>\n
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\nHow search engines work <\/strong><\/a>– A detailed explanation (with a video) on how search engines work.<\/div>\nDomain Names and SEO<\/h3>\n
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\nHow to start a WordPress Blog<\/strong><\/a> – Includes specific guidelines on how to choose the right domain for your website.<\/div>\n\n
Website Platforms and SEO<\/h3>\n
Learn How to Approach the SEO Learning Process<\/h3>\n
![\"Different](\"https:\/\/www.reliablesoft.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/01\/seo-types.png\")
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Work on Your Technical SEO<\/h3>\n
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SEO Friendly Site Structure<\/h4>\n
![\"SEO](\"https:\/\/www.reliablesoft.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/website-structure-example.png\")
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User and XML Sitemap<\/h4>\n
\nSubmit Sitemap to Google <\/strong><\/a>\u00a0– Three ways you can use to submit your XML to Google.<\/div>\nBing Webmaster Tools and Google Search Console<\/h4>\n
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Robots.txt Optimization<\/h4>\n
404 Page Optimization<\/h4>\n
\nSEO Tips for beginners<\/strong><\/a> – Includes examples of SEO optimized 404 pages.<\/div>\nPageSpeed and SEO<\/h4>\n
![\"Website](\"https:\/\/www.reliablesoft.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/01\/mobile-page-speed-studies-google.png\")
Mobile-Friendly Websites and SEO<\/h4>\n
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Work on your On-Page SEO<\/h3>\n
![\"On-Page](\"https:\/\/www.reliablesoft.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/on-page-seo.png\")
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Page Title Optimization<\/h4>\n
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![\"SEO](\"https:\/\/www.reliablesoft.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/seo-page-titles-example.jpg\")
\nDifference between a page title and H1 Tag<\/strong><\/a> – Beginners to SEO tend to confuse the title with the H1 tag and this guide will explain all the differences.<\/div>\nMeta Description Optimization<\/h4>\n
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Heading Tags and Page Formatting<\/h4>\n