Chapter 1: Brief Introduction to SEO
SEO, or search engine optimization, is a collection of cutting-edge strategies and techniques that work for featuring your website pages in organic search results. Using proper search engine optimization, you can significantly improve your business website's organic positions, obtain relevant traffic, promote your products or services, and increase revenue and sales.
Before learning any SEO guide for beginners, you need to understand that search engine optimization is not about a single rule or practice. On the contrary, it all about sophisticated approaches and sets of methods aiming to expand your online authority and reputation. Proper search engine optimization services that you can find on the web should be related to your website's profound and complete enhancement. Otherwise, all your efforts and money spent are in vain.
SEO can be performed on-site and off-site, and therefore search engine optimization is usually split into on-page SEO and off-page SEO. One more branch of SEO can be mentioned to help you understand the basics — technical SEO, which is related to the site's backend and its betterment.
On-Page Search Engine Optimization Explained
On-page (on-site) SEO is all about targeting keywords with the help of evergreen texts placed on your website pages. Of course, you need to conduct a comprehensive site analysis first and then define your competitors and their keyword gaps to build a valuable SEO strategy for your online business.
Once this is done, you need to select the most relevant keywords to target with your site pages and implement them within the page content wisely. Keep in mind that keyword stuffing is dangerous nowadays, as it seems suspicious to Google. That is why the methods you use to input keywords within the body content are paramount.
Indeed, in this SEO guide for beginners, we are sure that keywords are of vital importance. Nevertheless, they work only in combination with other essentials related to SEO. In our definitive guide to SEO in 2021, we want to mention the page metadata (meta title and meta description) and URL slug as other must-haves for successful SEO performance.
These essentials are important to Google as they help site crawling bots understand what your site pages are about. Page URL and metadata definitely shouldn’t be neglected as they play a meaningful role in the full on-page SEO optimization.
One more crucial thing about on-page SEO optimization that we want to highlight in this SEO guide for beginners is page headings. Yes, page headings help build the structure of the page and make it clean and organized for search engines.
Lack of headers can cause plenty of crawling issues, affecting the way Google sees your page content. Thus, if you will deal with the on-page SEO optimization yourself, pay attention to keywords, content, URL slug, page metadata, and accurate headings (H1-H6) to achieve your goals.
Off-Page SEO Explained
This new and fresh SEO guide for beginners is all about comprehensive information everyone can read and understand about SEO. That is why it is essential to explain another vital aspect of search engine optimization — off-page SEO.
The off-page SEO, or on-site SEO, is a branch of search optimization related to actions that take place outside of your business website. While you can manually adjust some core details on your site to improve the on-page SEO, the off-page optimization allows you to better your organic performance and increase your ranking by linking or promoting your website on other platforms or resources.
Beginners guide to SEO from theSEObar contains white-hat SEO techniques as we follow only honest ways for an SEO boost, and is it the central policy of our company. That is why we strongly advise you to avoid that paid link-building that refers to black hat SEO and can dramatically plunder your site reputation and even become the cause of Google penalties. You can obtain links naturally or build some manually, and both ways are entirely safe for your site authority.
Natural links are those backlinks that are given without any actions from the side of a website owner. For example, you run an online sports nutrition store and feature free effective fitness programs in your blog article by linking to a specific website. So, you just give your online audience advice to check out valuable content that is entirely related to the niche you occupy.
Manually built links can be achieved by planned activities related to link building. For example, you ask your customers to link to your site or reach out to niche bloggers for spreading your content.
To understand the principle of quality and valuable off-page SEO, imagine a massive ball with thousands of dots connected with a thread. Here the ball is the worldwide web, the dots are websites representing online businesses, and the thread declares those links essential to Google and website rankings.
If your website boasts an exceptional product, excellent service, or engaging content, plenty of other sites will feature it to provide their audiences with interactive material.
Suppose you are mentioned within tons of other resources naturally. In that case, you seem trustworthy, engaging, and useful to Google as every search engine aims to deliver the best and the most relevant search results to web users. That is why, in this SEO guide for beginners, we recommend creating superior content on your platforms so that others enjoy it and gladly share it across the web.
All You Need to Know About Technical SEO
The last but not the least branch of search engine optimization we want to mention in our SEO guide for beginners is technical SEO. It is essential in the whole SEO workflow as it influences your website indexing.
Technical SEO is the process of comprehensive site optimization to check and fix all possible issues that may delay or harm your website indexing phase. Using the best technical SEO practices, you can achieve an excellent webpage that boasts spotless code and can be easily accessed and crawled by search engines.
In this Google SEO guide for beginners from theSEObar’s seasoned specialists, we want to mention that your site’s speed and the purity of its code are the pillars of successful technical optimization. Therefore, structured data and user experience are meaningful these days. The website is up-to-date from the aspect of technical SEO in case
- it is fast and has active links;
- search engines can access and crawl it hassle-free;
- its sitemap and robots.txt are relevant and updated;
- it doesn’t have duplicate content;
- it has a secure HTTPS protocol.
Moreover, if your website has multiple languages to target different countries and markets, you need to employ hleflang for technical SEO. The hreflang helps search engines to define the country and language the particular page is meant for and resolves the possible issue with content duplicates on different site versions.
Technical SEO works only if you perform it correctly. That is why we do not recommend adjusting the geek things yourself. It is better to hire an SEO expert who will professionally implement the most suitable technical SEO strategy.
Chapter 2: SEO Fundamentals in 2021
This part of our SEO guide for beginners is devoted to essential web vitals that you should learn to succeed with SEO in 2021. Web vitals are supreme page experience metrics that are paramount for modern search engines.
Core Web Vitals to Know
The primary mission of Google is to satisfy web users by delivering the best search results for their queries. Therefore, there is a term called page experience that Google is incredibly crazy about. Although the web vitals list is broad, we would like to mention the three of them in this beginners SEO guide — page loading, page interactivity, and page visual stability. This is a big three that directly affects your online rankings and defines the way users act on your website.
How to Better Core Web Vitals on Your Website?
Let’s keep things clear. There is no single way to better these three vitals on every website as there are tons of sites with different engines in the core. Thus, WordPress-powered online platforms have an own system to improve the page loading, interactivity, and visual stability aspects. At the same time, PrestaShop or Magento sites need to use other particular methods to achieve these goals.
Anyway, keeping an eye on these essentials is pivotal as Google has switched to mobile-first indexing, and so problems with these three factors can significantly lower your organic positions. You can use a set of proven tools to define gaps in your website performance and create a blueprint for their filling. For example, take a look at PageSpeed Insights from Google to examine your site’s speed and issues or run a full site checkup using WebPageTest by Catchpoint.
In case you are new to the web world, and all these tools and terms drive you nuts, you can look for professional help — SEO specialists. They will accurately adjust your website to fit the requirements of Google and refine it to forget about any issues with core web vitals.
Chapter 3. Intro to Google Passage
This is the third chapter of the ultimate SEO guide for beginners from theSEObar experts, and it is entirely devoted to Google Passage.
What is Google Passage?
Google Passage is an innovative technology that allows the search engine to define a single page into several sections and rank each of them separately. Therefore, every website page's independent content sections matter a lot nowadays and are estimated as holistic units of content ready to be crawled and indexed.
How to Improve Your Google Passage Rankings?
In simple words, Google now extracts paragraphs from your page content and showcases them right in the search results if they are relevant to users’ queries. These “Passages” seem similar to Rich Snippets but come as a more sophisticated version of content processing.
To win the game with Google Passage, you need to optimize and structure your page content properly and put an emphasis on clear and coherent content sections with page headings. Yes, page headings help to put things in order and allow you to showcase valuable parts of content that are united by one specific topic.
Your primary mission is to transfer every paragraph of your body text into a mini web page that search engines can easily examine. If you need help processing your page content, please contact our professional SEOs after reading this SEO guide for beginners.
Chapter 4. The Power of Domain Authority
The fourth part of the Google SEO guide for beginners is devoted to domain authority and all the essentials related to this topic. Domain authority (DA) is an SEO related term that was presented by MOZ.
What is Domain Authority?
Domain authority means a predictive metric that shows a score of website credibility (from 0 to 100) to achieve confident positions in search results. This search engine ranking score helps to understand a particular website's possible ranking positions among other sites. Websites with high domain authority are likely to get top ranking positions in SERPs (search engine result pages).
Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness
Having tons of links to a website was an acceptable practice to grow domain authority before. Nevertheless, today's web says that it is all about expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness, or E-A-T.
2021's SEO will blow your mind and change the way you rank if you continue ignoring the power of E-A-T. Google wants more useful content from industry experts to deliver only proven facts based on real expertise and practice, not imagination. Therefore, hiring seasoned specialists for content production is essential as never before, especially in such sophisticated niches as healthcare and law.
It is also the right time to check if your website has valid contact information. Google encourages online entrepreneurs and educational platforms to mention persons who create all types of content. So website visitors can see that real people with genuine experience produce the material they want to read.
Chapter 5. SEO Rich Snippets
You have already explored on-page, off-page, and technical SEO, search engine optimization fundamentals, Google Passage, and other essentials in this SEO guide for beginners. So, let’s get closer to the rich snippets that have already stolen substantial traffic from websites with top-ranking positions.
What are Rich Snippets in SEO?
Rich snippets, or featured snippets, are specific search results obtained through a particular website's full structured data markup. Rich snippets look much more attractive visually and quickly grab users' attention in SERPs, getting a super high CTR (click-through rate).
Why Use Rich Snippets?
Rich snippets take the most valuable position in organic search results and so allow you to collect a considerable amount of traffic driving to your website or blog. Therefore, you can generate more leads, obtain post likes and shares, and grow your site authority on the web.
Nevertheless, making your pages ready for featured snippets is not that easy. First, you need to define keywords you already appear for and then find some great keywords that have results with rich snippets. This will help evaluate your chances of achieving a snippet for your content and prepare the most suitable material to overcome the existing snippet winners.
Also, pay attention to the way you write your content. Brief content sections are much more likely to get snippets than the bare canvas of text. There is a common practice to use 40-60 words per small block to have more opportunities to be featured in a snippet.
Chapter 6. SEO Recommendations and Summary
It is the final part of our Google SEO guide for beginners. Here we would like to highlight some useful recommendations from our SEO team and summarize all the material above.
First, 2021 is the right time to start taking SEO seriously. Inserting various keywords in a senseless copy is far from real SEO. These cheating practices harm your online reputation and can significantly spoil your ranking.
SEO is all about keyword research, valuable data, online competition evaluation, internal and external website performance, and of course, excellent content.
Secondly, keep in mind that an SEO boost in traffic can’t be achieved immediately, and the entire SEO work is always a long-term option. In this SEO guide for beginners, we want to be honest and clear. Therefore, you definitely should know that optimizing a couple of pages on a large online store website will not bring any outcome as SEO is a collection of tactics, not a single lottery ticket.
Nevertheless, search engine optimization is a game-changing thing that helps thousands of business owners worldwide to develop their companies and move forward. SEO can be an effective development strategy for small businesses and large corporations as it helps to find betterment ways for every business niche.
How Do You Like Our Easy SEO Guide for Beginners?
We hope that this Google SEO guide for beginners will help you learn more about SEO in 2021! Practices and tactics we have presented in this SEO tutorial aimed at your online boost and growth. We believe that following the right search engine optimization techniques can increase your revenue and improve the quality of traffic you receive dramatically. Please share your thoughts in the comments section below.
So, opt for good SEO and stay tuned ☺️
