SEO for Dummies: An Extensive Guide to Get Started

Apart from producing top-quality products and offering a flawless customer experience, you will need to appear as high as possible in search engines to be truly visible. This means that you will need keywords and relevant information for your target audience –plus you’ll need to optimize your online content and pay attention to online algorithms to increase your chances of being found by people online.

All these actions are part of search engine optimization (SEO) strategy, which has become a must in order to develop a successful business.

Want to find out more on how to effectively use SEO in your marketing strategy? Keep reading.

Use relevant keywords

If you want to successfully implement an SEO strategy for your business, start by developing a buyer persona. This means creating a portrait of your target customer, defining who he/she is, where he/she comes from, what is his/her major problem, and what his/her interests are.

Once you have set these parameters and you know what your ideal customers look like, the next step is to research and create a list of keywords. They will help you increase your website’s visibility and describe the essence of your products or services. Once you have selected those keywords, you need to use them strategically and include them naturally in your text.

Count on backlinks

The more people you are engaging with and the more you’re encouraging them to talk about your business, the more success you’ll have. Of course, not all backlinks have this incredible power. For instance, if you use backlinks from highly reputable websites, which have thousands of daily readers, your website will most likely benefit. Why? Because this means that your content has gone through a thorough process of checking and validation.

This makes your customers trust your website and brand –and trusted websites are better optimized from an SEO point of view.

Offer a unique experience for users

Creating a website that appears at the top first in search engines is one thing. However, SEO means more than keywords and visibility. If you really want to strengthen your position on the market, you will need to create a meaningful website for your real customers. What’s the secret for this? First of all, your content needs to be unique –This means expressing unique ideas but also not falling into the trap of copying content from other sources.

If you do, potential customers will assume you are not able to have any ideas of your own and they will abandon your website. In addition, even though keywords are very efficient, you should stay away from keyword stuffing. People should feel that you create the content to answer to their needs and not to gain visibility on search engines.

Your content should be shareable

Even though the shares you receive on social media don’t necessarily influence your rankings, social media is strongly correlated with SEO. How are these connected? When you have a strong and large group of people sharing your content, there’s a higher possibility that other people will discover your content and link to it.

The easier to share you make your content, the more people you will have sharing it is to install social share buttons on your blogs.

Keep an eye on your competitors

When you decide to optimize your content online, keep in mind that you are not the only one who is implementing SEO for his website. Your competitors are doing it too — Which means you can keep an eye on your competition and discover what they are doing well and what their weaknesses might be.

For example, you can analyze what are the results of the backlinks your competitors are using. Studying these results will help you decide whether you should focus on the same backlinks or you should adopt a different strategy for your niche.

This is a process that shouldn’t be done just once. You should constantly check what your competition is doing and take immediate action when you discover an SEO strategy that seems to be working well for them.

Keep track of your results

How do you know if your SEO strategy is working? When you are just starting out, you should keep your metrics very simple. You can focus on a few metrics, which you should constantly analyze to understand whether you are on the right track or not. For example, you can track on a monthly basis the number of new backlinks you get. If your number of backlinks doesn’t increase month after month, you should probably make some changes to your SEO strategy.

Next, you should track the number of unique visitors per month. A successful SEO strategy should show an increasing number of unique visitors from one month to the next.

Finally, you should track how much time your visitors spend on your website. If they spend just a few seconds, this means something is not working. An average of 30 seconds spent on your website is a good sign for your SEO efforts.

Just like with other marketing trends, SEO is permanently evolving and changing. Therefore, you may find that what mattered yesterday won’t be interesting at all tomorrow. In addition, you should also keep in mind that your audience evolves as well. As they become more educated, customers change their preferences too. Therefore, you will need to keep up and pay attention to their needs.

Once you have discovered the newest trends, the next step is placing your focus on SEO and deliver high-quality content with relevant information for your readers. Your main goal should be to educate your audience and offer them immediate solutions to their problems. You will be surprised to discover how this simple strategy can have a tremendous effect on your popularity and visibility online.

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**About the Author: Melanie Sovann is a seasoned writer and blogger, passionate about a broad spectrum of topics, ranging from technology to sociology. She is an avid contributor to TrustMyPaper and 3to5marketing.com, blog that has amassed a sizable following over the years.