Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Starter Guide for Beginners

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Starter Guide for a person managing, monetizing, or promoting online content material via Google search, this manual is meant for you.

In order to perform SEO for any website, you must understand the rule of the SEO game and play it the right way. I have written a separate and exclusive article on How Search Engine Works. I strongly suggest you go through the article to gain the maximum knowledge in this article.

Related Article: Best SEO Training Institute in Chennai
Related Article: Digital Marketing Training in Velachery

Before we get into the free guide, If you are someone looking forward to getting personal support for learning SEO concepts, I would strongly suggest you take up my Search Engine Optimization Course. I will be offering instant and personal support for all your questions related to the Search engine topics.

Increasing the Visibility of the Website on Google and Other Search Engines

The first and foremost activity to be completed is to make your website indexed in leading search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, Yandex, and Duckduckgo. To make this happen your website must be crawlable and Indexable.

In order to make sure that your website can be indexed in search engines like Google, yahoo, Bing, Yandex and Duckduckgo, you need to ask few questions to yourself.

• Is my website showing up in the leading search engines?
• Am I offering good and high-quality content to my readers and subscribers?
• For Google, is it showing in google local business listing?
• Is the content is responsive and easily accessible by all the device types and models?
• Does my website has an SSL certificate installed? In other words, is my website secured?

I will explain the details of each and every point in more understandable and easy concepts. 

Is My Website Showing up in the Search Engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, Yandex, or Duckduckgo?

This step is very simple that anyone who uses a search engine can check it. All you need to do is just perform a search in the search engine that has the combination of your keyword or website name. If any details are shown-up, it means your website can be crawled and indexed. 

Please refer to the screenshot below for an example in Google, Yahoo, Bing, Yandex, and Duckduckgo. I am going to execute the example for my own website Amudhakumar.com in all the above-mentioned search engines. 

Google

Visit google.com and enter your website name including the ccTLD (Country Code Top Level Domain). You will get your website displayed in SERP (Search Engine Results Page). In this example, I have taken my own website. 

This is the result I got when I checked the status

Yahoo

Visit yahoo.com and enter your website name. I have shared the screenshot of the indexed content in yahoo.

Bing

Visit bing.com and enter your website name. You may get the content related to the image below.

Yandex

Visit https://www.yandex.com and enter the website name of your business. The indexed content will show up as mentioned below:

Duckduckgo

Visit duckduckgo.com and enter the website name. The indexed content will show up.

If your brand name or website name is similar to a famous name or brand, your website may not show in the top 10 results in the SERP. Hence, you will be required to navigate to the 2nd and 3rd pages to navigate.

You can also check the index status of a website by using a google operator named site: This operator gives instructions to search engine to return results containing pages from the mentioned website.

site:amudhakumar.com

The indexed pages from amudhakumar.com only will show up. You can find the details of the sample result in the link below:

Am I offering good and high-quality content to my readers and subscribers?

If you are reading information about SEO, blogging details, you would have encountered the statement

Content is the King. Do you really believe in it?

But, I do not believe Content is the King. Instead, I would love to redefine it as Quality Content is the King.

If you are not sure about what is quality content, these ideas will help you for sure.

• A unique, original, and different content
• The content must be useful to the reader or in other words, it must resolve the reader's issue
• Must have detailed answers for most of the questions your readers might have
• The content must have original research data
• Creating videos related to your content and website
• Includes How to Guide and links to useful resources

We can also define the content as quality content if it drives more social traffic, sharing, and linkbacks. This is because people will never link to low quality or substandard articles.

You can check whether your website is driving visitors and quality links using competitor analysis tools like SEMrush

Just enter your URL in the SEMrush tool and it will show you the details and performance of your website with respect to organic visitors, backlink count, paid traffic, and many more.

Now, having been said that we can not mention how many back links you need exactly to rank your content. If your website does not have enough back links, then it is the right time to concentrate on generating quality content.

The next factor to check is the popularity of your website. This means your article presence in multiple platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Linkedin and youtube.

Ubersuggest is a new tool launched by Neil Patel to audit a website for free. You can use this tool to check the social media presence of your content. For example, I have shared the screenshot of the website youtube.com below:

Pro Tip: If you are using wordpress content management system, you can install Social Metric Tracker and get the status of all your links instantly. 

The articles from your websites are not ranking better, please need not worry about it. It is because, you do not have a strong content promotion strategy in place. You can plan accordingly and start promoting your content regularly.

The immediate action you must take is to pay very close attention to your articles and update them in a way that it attracts more social shares and links.

For google, Is It Showing in Google Local Business Listing?

Note: This SEO section and idea is applicable for local seo practices only. If you are performing global SEO,  this is not applicable and you may skip this step.

Local SEO is extremely important for attracting internet users who exploring their product or service in and around their areas. The local SEO works completely different than global SEO.

You can take a look at an example given below for local business listing.

Irrespective of local SEO or global SEO, both the website types needs perfect On-Page Optimization and quality back links to rank high in search results.

One more terminology is used with local Search Engine Optimization. It is called citations.

What is a Citation?

 The citation is nothing but the reference to your Business Name, Address and Phone Number. It is represented as NAP in short. The citations plays a vital role in increasing the authority or credibility of your business listing in front of the google rank brain algorithm.

If your business is not showing up in local business listing, make sure that your business is added to google my business. You can sign up and get your business listed using the link

https://www.google.com/business/

Is The Content is Faster and Easily Accessible by All The Device Types and Models?

Creating a website which loads faster is the primary requirement. No one loves a website which is slow or does not even load. This creates a negative user experience. Google considers your website speed as an important ranking signal. Hence, an official tool from google is launched to check the speed of your website.

A website must load and display with in 3 second maximum. You can check and fix the speed issues of your website using the official Google Page Speed Insights Tool.

You may also use other page speed checking tools like GTMetrix and Pingdom.

Look at the homepage view of the GTmetrix pages speed check

The GTmetrix tool will show the below information:

• The performance score
• Website Loading Time
• The Size of the Page
• The number of requests (The number of requests made to communicate with the server to download the website content)

In general, the page must load and display with in 3 seconds. The website size must be less than 1 MB. You can concentrate on the errors and mistakes highlighted to get your above metric requirements met. You must take a web developer support for working on the performance factor.

Most common issues with page loading may be website browser cache missing, content rendering, HTTP Compression, and few more.

Google has framed a set of rules that must be met for faster website. You can check the details by clicking here

If you do not have access to a website developer or if you have a word press website, you can install the wordpress plugin named W3Total Cache. You will be able to configure your page speed requirements in few minutes.

Responsive Web Design or Mobile Friendly Website

Creating a website that fits into all types of mobile devices view port is another important factor. Due to the increase in number of mobile device users and the mobile devices are constraint by display size, it is mandatory to have a different size. The devices like phablets, tablets, desktops, game consoles, TVs, and even wearable. The major search engines like google prefers any activity that is introduced with the end user in mind.

A tool offered by google that helps you to check the mobile friendliness of a website. It is called Mobile Friendly Tester Tool. This is how the tool looks like:

If you are a website developer and keen on learning the responsive web designing concept, you may use the link below to explore more information.

https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/design-and-ux/responsive/

Does My Website has SSL Certificate Installed? In Other Words, is My Website Secured?

Security parameter is a high priority factor. Google has released an official update in 2014 that https: is considered as a ranking factor in google ranking signals. Hosting a SSL certified website is a great symbol of quality and trust.

SSL is the short form for Secured Socket Layer. It is the standard quality and security technology for information security between a web server and a browser. It is mandatory especially if your website is integrated with payment gateway process.

You can get your website secured with SSL certificate for free using services like Letsencrypt. Integrating the service with hosting services like siteground. Once the server level  installation is complete, you can use plugins like Really Simple SSL to enable it on the word press level.

Usage of Sitemaps

The best way to help the search engine to explore the right content on your website is the usage of sitemaps. The sitemap file can automatically generated in the WordPress website by using Yoast SEO Plugin. The platforms like blogger.com will automatically generate the sitemap file.

A sitemap is a file on your site that tells search engines about new or changed pages on your site.

A sitemap makes the task of a search engine spider easy to crawl and explore information like links, images, videos and other multimedia content.

For static websites, you can generate sitemap using any free sitemap generation tool. For other platforms like majento, you can add the sitemap file by navigating to Catalog > Google Sitemap > Add Sitemap.

After the successful generation of XML sitemap, you can submit sitemap file to google using search Console.

Hiring an SEO Expert for Organic Ranking

SEO is a slow and steady process. It consumes time and a lots of efforts. If you are a business man who wants to implement SEO for your business and does not have time to implement, then you may consider two things:

• Learning SEO
• Hiring an SEO expert or agency.

Learning Search Engine Optimization

Learning to understand the concepts related to SEO will help you to understand the efforts and related metrics with respect to search engine. When you are knowledgeable, you can exactly understand how the SEO team is performing and even figure out the exact activities that is suppose to be carried out.

I have connected with several business people personally and listened to lots of failure and misleading activities carried out by marketing agencies. If you are one such person, I strongly suggest you to get in touch with me via whats app number 7010638398. We will discuss the best possibilities for better opportunities.

Hiring an SEO Expert or Agency.

Google's Maile Ohye shares her advice for hiring an SEO (Search Engine Optimizer) to improve the searcher experience on your website.



You can find the important voice translation of the above video.

Hi I am Maile Ohye and i work with google search. I like to share advice to help you hire a useful and prevent hiring a bad SEO agency.  One who you might pay a lot of money without positive results were even worse one who implements shaddy practices on your website that result reduction and search rankings. SEO stands for search engine optimization.

To some SEO seems like black magic having worked with google search for over a decade what I have learned is that first it's not like black magic. Second and if you want long term success there are not any quick magical tricks than they in SEO provide so that your site ranks number one.

It's important to note that the SEOs potential is only as high as the quality of your business or website. So successful SEO helps your website put your best foot forward so it ranks appropriately.

In the spot where unbiased potential customers would expect your site to be seen. A successful also looks to improve the entire search experience from search results to clicking on our website and potentially converting. A good SEO will recomend best practices for a search friendly site.

From basic things like descriptive page titles for a blogger small business to more complex things like language markup for a multilingual global site. SEO ensure that you're serving your online customers a good experience especially those coming from a search in and that you're site is helpful whether they're using a desktop computer or a mobile phone. In most cases SEO will need four months to a year to help your business. It helps first implement improvements and then see potential benefits.

My strongest adevice when working with a SEO is to request that they corroborate their recommendation with a documented statement from Google. Either a help center article or video or google response in a forum that supports both.

SEO description of the issue that needs to be improved to help with ranking.

The approach they prescribe to accomplishing this task.

Requesting these two bits information will help prevent hiring a poor who might otherwise convince you to do useless things like and more words to the keywords meta tag or buy links because if you search for google advice on this topic you'd see blog posts and videos from us that clearly explain that adding keywords to the meta tag wouldn't help. Furthermore, while google uses link for page drank our documentation highlights that we strongly advise against the approach of buying links for the purpose of increasing page rank.

One basic rule is that in a majority of cases doing what's good for SEO is also doing what's good for your online customers. Things like having a mobile friendly website good navigation and building a great brand.

Additionally you if are a more established brand with complicated legacy systems then good search and best practices likely involves paying off some of your sites technical stuff such as updating or infrastructure so that you website is agile and able to implement features.

If you own a small local business, you can probably do the initial work yourself check out our thirty minute video series on how to build an online presence for your local business.

Now if you still believe you want to hire and SEO than here's a general process.

Conduct it two way interview with their potential. So check that they seem generally interested in new and business.

1. Check their references.
2. You're probably have to pay for a technical and search on it.
3. Decide if you want to hire.
4. Let's break this down and start with step one conduct a two way interview

In the interview here something to look for a good so just focus only on search engine ranking but how they can help your business so they ask questions. They want to know this information to make but it's highlighted on you website for your current and potential new ideas.

1. What makes your business content and our service unique and therefore valuable to customers.
2. What does your common customers look like and how do they currently find a website.
3. How does your business make money and how can which help.
4. What are channels or you using offline advertising social networks?
5. Who are your competitors? What do they do well online and potentially offline?

If it doesn't seem interested and learning about your business from a holistic standpoint look elsewhere. It's difficult to do SEO without understanding these requirements.

Optimizing Title and Meta Description

Two things that a website must satisfy for its visibility in search engines. A website content must be easily understood by the users are the readers and the search engine spider. 

Creating content exclusively for your readers experience is the best SEO technique one must use. Website content is represented based on a computer program. End of the day it is the human who is going to read the content on the other end. Hence, writing a content that is easily understood by human being is very very important.

Another important point to be noted is search engine spider or a software program must also understand your website content. But the problem here is the search engine spider will only understand national language. Because of this reason the content must be represented in machine language for search engine spider and a normal language where humans can understand in the user interface of the website.

The complete Google algorithm works based on the relevancy factor. Google assigns relevance score for each and every content by comparing the combination of keywords in Title Tag, Meta Description Tag, Content Tag, the alternative text tag and the sub heading tag.

What is Meta Title

A piece of textual content with 60 to 70 character length containing the short information about the content. It is generally defined for each content in the web page that helps the search engine to better understand the content. The search engine spider does not take the content every time. It will use the content if needed. In most of the scenario, google takes the title information from your content.

A meta title must 

• Contain your focus keyword
• The focus keyword must be added at starting of title itself.
• Your secondary keyword
• Brand name of your business

What is Meta Description?

Meta Description is a two line content created with 180 characters approximately. This detail contains the summary of the content and displayed in SERP. Google considers the meta description content some times.

As google works based on algorithm that give high priority to relevancy, the title and description in SERP is decided by the content related to user's query. Hence, creating useful and quality content containing the words searched by the users will yield better results.

Controlling the Crawled Pages in Search Engines

Search engine spiders will crawl every link inside a website. Hence, linking the content internally will increase the probability of your website being indexed completely. However, avoiding the crawling of few pages like sensitive information, login page, low quality sites are a great practice that helps search engine spiders to index only important pages.

In order to instruct the search engine to crawl and index, you can take the advantage of using robots.txt file. It is one way to instruct all search engine spider to crawl and index your website. 

As per google, using robots.txt file is not the way to avoid search engine from indexing the content. A content may be indexed, even after blocked in robots.txt file. Hence, the best practice to use no index tag for each link to make sure it is not indexed in search engine.

To learn in detail about Block search indexing with 'noindex

Using Structured Data Markup 

Google uses Snippets and Rich Snippets to render website information in the SERP. A snippet is a piece of auto generated text displayed in the Search Engine Results Pages. Google uses its smart algorithm to decide which features will be useful for the users and displays the information accordingly.

Watch the below video by Matt Cutts on understanding Snippets



Structured Data is used by google to communicate with websites to understand the structure and content in the website. Google has launched an official tool to check what structured data is implemented in a website.

Check out Google Structured Data Tester Tool to find out which schema or structured data is used in your website or competitor website.

Step 1: Visit https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool
Step 2: Enter the domain name or Specific URL (You can also enter the JSON-LD Code and validate the code)
Step 3: Click on Run Test. The detected structured data will be displayed.

Testing Structured Data Using Fetch URL Option

The Structured Data Tester Tool Results

Validating Google Structured Data Using Code Snippet

Structured data markup for a website is not a mandatory practice. Adding or implementing rich cards, schema is not a ranking signal too. However, it is one of the best practice. 

We can relate schema implementation or structured data to a make up practice of a girl. A girl generally looks beautiful. However, when she applies make up, she looks pretty good with lipstick, mascara and eye lashes. The face with full make up attracts more attention in the public compared to the other girl without makeup

The same goes with the structured data implementation in website. A normal website will have a quality content. However, it will not be represented in the rich results like Google Knowledge Graph, Top Stories, Image Results, Video Results, and Google Maps Results.

Only when the respective structured data is marked in a website, these results will show up in rich results in SERP of any search engine.

If you are planning to drive visitors from leading search engines, it is strongly suggested to use respective schema for your website. This helps each search engine better understand your content and deliver it to the user who are searching.

Few examples structured data for any website are:

• Organization Schema for home page
• Corporate Contact Schema for contact us page
• Product schema for e-commerce product
• Professional service schema for service industry
• Blog post or article schema for blog posts
• News Article schema for news content

For detailed information about Google Rich cards for developers, please refer to Google Rich Cards for Developers. By implementing the schema on your website, the results will be shown in the rich results of SERP. 

Image Optimization

Image Optimization helps the search engine spider to discover the exact details of the image content. The search engine spiders are smart enough to understand the image type by reading the image extensions like .jpeg, .jpg, .gif and .pdf. They can even crawl and index links inside the image documents. However, they can not exactly determine what is the content of the image.

As the search engine spiders can understand only machine language, search engine spider prefers the name given in the Alt tag.

An image has two attributes named Caption and Alt Tag. 

Caption 

Caption is used to display the name of the image when hovered over the image.This helps the readers to understand the title of the image.

Alt Tag

Alternative Tag is used by the search engine spider to better understand the image content. Understanding the exact content of the image is like a blind person reading the content. He can not directly understand the content. Instead he uses an alternative method to read and understand the content. 

In earlier days, the search engine was blindly dependent in alt tag only. As several websites did not mention the tag, search engine was unable to render the content to others. In recent times, if the alt tag is not given, it tries to get the information from other sources like file name, image title, and image source details.

Steps to Optimize Images for Better SEO Results

1. Never ever take images from internet sources as they be subject to copyrights
2. Compress the images using free services like compressor.io or tinypng.com or Website Planet Image PNG and JPEG Compressor
3. Use your focus keyword file name and save it in your computer hard disk
4. Upload the image to the website server and use your focus keyword as Alt tag.

For WordPress websites, there are more number of plugins that can compress your images. All you need to do is review the list of image optimization plugins and have a perfect plugin installed on your website. 

Mobile SEO for Website

The number of mobile phones users are increasing with high demand. Hence, creating a website design that is responsive and loads faster on all mobile devices is the smartest choice. The website design plays a vital role in displaying content on mobile view port.

Google has the official mobile friendly tester tool that can check weather your website is mobile friendly or not. The websites that are not mobile friendly are not given highest priority on SERP. 

What is Mobile SEO?

Mobile SEO is a practice of increasing your website position for a particular keyword in the search engine results page on a mobile platform. This practice helps us to improve the organic traffic driven from mobile devices. The 95% of visitors are from mobile phone. The statistica report will explain the data in detail.

Mobile First Indexing

Google uses mobile first indexing process to render information to the users. It means google ranks your website based on your mobile content and score associated with it. Hence, a website without mobile SEO is a great mistake.

Using smartphone is leading to the increased voice search in search engines compared to manual typing. The google analytics tool will offer you the number of visitors from mobile. Visit  Audience » Mobile to check the performance data.

AMP Implementation

AMP is the acronym for Accelerated Mobile Pages.  AMP is a mobile speed project launched by google exclusively for mobile web results. The desktop version will not show the AMP pages.

Google has a set of practices to follow to make a website a AMP version. If you are a web developer, then you have a great gift from google. A perfect and complete guide for developing AMP websites.

AMP is not a ranking signal yet. However, a website with AMP version will get more and better user experience. This will lead to high CTR (Click Through Ratio). 

Conclusion

Irrespective of which platform your website is developed, how good is your content is, if you put your heart and soul in taking care of your visitors user experience, google will rank your website better. Instead of trying to convince a search engine spider that neither has feelings nor emotions, it is a great idea to write content for the website readers and visitors.