SEO For Beginners

Starting out in blog or website-owning brings the immediate worry about where your traffic is going to flow from. It’s a headache with a vast number of solutions, among them link-building, social media pimping and self promotion. Beyond all that stuff, at ground level, you’ll find that the better your site is stacked with content primed for search engines, the better dividends Google will reap for you.

Google is your friend, and the way sites manage themselves these days is a process which essentially involves making content appeal to Google spiders that roam the web, looking for stuff on behalf of its users. Getting your content in the right format for Google to pick up on leads to more traffic from the Daddy of all sources, so if you don’t have SEO habits already, it’s a good idea to start learning and implementing them fast.

It’s highly probable that all the above is obvious. You know you need to improve the SEO factor in your content and you just need a handful of methods to bump up your Google ranking. So, without further ado, let’s grab the basics.

URLs and Page Headers

Google spiders, like most human beings, tend to look at headers and URLs first. It’s pretty important then to be as blatant about your page’s content as you can be within the topic header. It’s often tempting to make a tabloidy pun or play with words for maximum effect, but sadly the only real way to turn heads and drive traffic is to write about content with high relevance or topicality and then signpost it as clearly as you possibly can.

Get Tagging

Within your BaseKit site you have the ‘Manage’ option. Go the the ‘site settings’ option and you’ll find a section marked SEO settings. This gives you the option to tweak what Google sees on your site. Probably the most important element is the SEO title. This will be the first thing the Google spiders read. Remember that the first thing that google reads will be most important. And remember that very few people will be searching for your brand name, but will be searching for what you do. So, if the site is for ‘Dave Examples Building Supplies’ – based in Dorset go with ‘Building Supplies Dorset – Dave Examples Building Supplies’ not ‘Dave Examples’s Building Supplies’

Next is the description – in here, describe your site and what it does. Make this readable to people as well as to those Google spiders. Use the same principals as above and put what you do first. Follow this up with location if relevant. Think about what you would be searching for to find your site and use these words.

Finally there are the keywords. Here just write a list – comma separated – of the most relevant words to your site. Simple!

Sitemap Your Site

A sitemap looks, to the untrained eye, like a marginal tool for readers to navigate your site. Really, it’s much more useful than that. It’s not only your visitors who might cling to it for coherence – those all important search engine spiders will immediately default to using your sitemap to crawl for keywords. Get one set up – only takes a couple of hours to sort and offers clear instructions for the internet monkeys to show off your wares.

Google Loves Keywords

We’ve mentioned them above, but it can’t really be stressed enough. The more your content contains searchable terms, the more searchers will find it. Stuffing a page with arbitrary keywords is against the accepted code of web etiquette and ends up with your site actually being ignored by Google, so use keywords carefully, contextually, but abundantly for maximum effect.

Keyword Linking

Following on from that, when linking to outside content or a post that’s within your site, be sure to make the actual link – the text in underlined blue –contain the keywords describing the thing you’re linking to. If your links are all associated with keywords, they’ll prick up the ears of search engines to a much greater effect.

Get Linked

One thing that is guaranteed to push you towards the summit of a keyword search engine listing is your online popularity. Google and other search engines judge this on a number of terms, but the one you can really get a handle on is ensuring that you’re linked all over the web. There’s no real need to do this in a spammy way either. The key is to find your competitors or sites on topics similar to yours, then ask for a link. Chances are they’ll respond in the positive – and that means you’ve climbed a listing rung on the ladder of search.

Track Your Findings

If you work on the above, then things will start off on the right foot. But the only way to be sure that you’re improving over time is to actually track your stats. I use Google Analytics – possibly the most infuriatingly addictive tracker available and easy to set up on BaseKit  – to judge which keywords prove popular and which keywords are redundant for my audience. It’s an invaluable tool, because it essentially acts as a memo on exactly what your readers want to see, and what they couldn’t care less about. It’s also incredibly important as a keyword valuation tool – where you can easily figure out what will draw further traffic to your site.

Be Patient

Sadly, just as Rome wasn’t built in a day, your web empire won’t necessarily be a smash hit from day one. Unless you’ve got the budget for a TV ad campaign and have hijacked billlboards across the land, you’re going to need time before all these effects kick in and you see your product rise in the hit parade. Have patience, and in the meantime, get on with the task of bumping up your keywords, writing great content and finding yourself link partners. Keep yourself busy and it will take care of itself.

Write Good Content

Good content is the key to good traffic, and search engines notice good traffic. It’s the most tired phrase in SEO instruction, but quality content is the deal-breaker. People won’t read content that isn’t new, vibrant, funny or informative. They’ll go somewhere else. So spend the majority of your time writing good stuff. It’s only fair on the casual visitor.

Constantly Read Up

We’ve only scratched the surface here, but the good news is that one Google search will summon you a million articles on SEO methods (as well as ads for dud SEO engines that’ll never work). Read all the free content you can from reliable sources and keep up with the new developments in SEO. If your interest in driving traffic starts to slip, you’re standing on the edge of a rocky road. Keep motivated, keep informed, and – most importantly – keep writing great stuff. The internet depends on great stuff.

This post was written by Liam Tucker of the excellent Watch With Mothers. He writes great stuff. – Want to write for the BaseKit Blog? – Drop us an email.