SEO Tips For Beginners – 14 Things You Need To Know

SEO tips for beginners. Do you know, what is SEO? This term has bought massive revenue for a lot of early-stage online businesses that grew into billion-dollar businesses in a short time.

We call it ”search engine optimization” and a lot of beginners start their career being an SEO expert and scaling these online businesses to tremendous growth graphs.

To all those, reading this, we are going to share these billion-dollar SEO tips for beginners, that are going to make you the best expert in this niche. Shall we?

Wait, before you scroll down, you must know that an SEO expert average salary in the United States is [According to Glassdoor]

That’s just how a beginner in SEO can start in The US.

Does that excite you? Well, we still believe that you should give a good start in this field of SEO and you will make more than the above figure.

An SEO expert can do way more than just a 9 to 5 lifestyle and get the revenue model setup for personal growth.

We have been into the SEO business for quite a long time now and as a return to this community, we are sharing some of the best SEO tips for beginners in this blog. These are completely unique SEO tips that you will never find anywhere.

Don’t stop here and learn them all that’s explained below and we assure you that you have got a lot to learn down this blog.

1. Keep Basic SEO practices on fingertips

You will hear a lot of buzz across the internet forums and grows that the algorithm update happens regularly by different search engines.

People take it as bad news in general but let us inform you, an honest content creator should always be happy with algorithm updates. Why?

Let’s talk about google algorithms. Do you know how many times google updates its algorithm?

Now tell me, is this something to be worried about and discussed in forums? You are already wasting your time on such a discussion. So what you should do as a beginner? Here are SEO tips for beginners that we want to share.

1. Understand how to optimize your content that google crawlers can understand. [ Learn schema and implement it ]
2. Keep basic points like metadata and URL structure always in your mind while setting up online infrastructure.
3. Always submit your website sitemap after your on-page optimization is completed.
4. Prefer creating engaging content with media instead of writing boring paragraphs.
5. Understand the keywords game [ Explained in detail in coming next tip. ]

The above 5 important basics are the pillar of SEO. They will never change. They may be seen in a new format but the core principles hardly change.

That being said, let’s dive down into some more SEO tips for beginners that will help you to remove the tag of beginners in your career path.

Quick Checklist of Good SEO practices to follow.

We are sharing a quick checklist of SEO rules that you should keep in mind while executing your SEO practices.

1. Add keywords to your meta title and meta descriptions.
2. Prefer adding the keyword in the early paragraphs of your content.
3. Try adding keywords in your subheadings.
4. Sprinkle keywords throughout your content but don’t overdo that.
5. Use keywords in your alt text o images.
6. Prefer creating more engaging content by writing content in short paragraphs and use list-based points.
7. Add more graphics and media to your content.
8. Use a proper internal linking structure.
9. Always give external links only to a trusted site.
10. Add a no-follow link to external sites if you don’t trust them.
11. Don’t post plag content. It has to be unique and value-adding.
12. Never spin content while doing off-page SEO.
13. Always build backlinks from high-quality websites.
14. Never build backlinks on the same anchor everywhere. Diversify the link building on different variations of keywords else it will look unnatural.
15. Host your website on reliable hosting to keep site speed fast.
16. Secure your website with SSL Certificate.
17. While writing content, be more conversational as if two people are talking to each other. One is you [Writer] other is the reader of your blog.
18. Keep your blog and page URL short.
19. Prefer writing long-form content but that should be valuable and not written just for the sake of increasing word count.

The above 19 points should be at your fingertips. If you follow the above practice, your on-page will always have good potential to scaleup.

2. Understand Your Purpose of Doing SEO

We just now read in the first point of SEO tips for beginners that basic SEO practices should be at fingertips but knowing the practices and implementing the same has a difference.

You must know some important information about the business for which you are planning to start an SEO campaign. We are sharing with you a checklist here that you must note down before doing your SEO strategy building.

1. What is your business niche?
2. Who all are your top competitors [ Competitor analysis tip explained later in this blog ]
3. Segment the type of content, people prefer in your niche.
4. Build an AIDA Model of your content plan. [AIDA Stands for Awareness, Intent, decision, and action]
5. Find all platforms where your customers are hanging out.

The above 5 pillars will help you identify the why and what before starting your SEO strategy building.

Just to give a glance of what is AIDA model of content, you must segment your keyword according to AIDA Model as following [ We will take shoe buying as an example to example AIDA ]

1. Awareness Phase.

In this phase of the content plan, keep those keywords in your strategy that help a new user to understand your business, product, or service. Here keyword example will be like – Why shoe wearing is healthy

2. Interest Phase

In this phase, you need to segment those keywords where users are now already aware of your product and they are showing interest in your business by generating leads like signup for your newsletter or abandoned cart, etc. Some examples of keywords in this segment. Top 10 shoe trends.

3. Decision Phase.

In this phase, the user is ready to buy a product or service from a business like yours so your keyword plan should be segmented accordingly. Eg, the Best brands to buy shoes.

4. Action phase.

In this phase, your customer is ready to convert and buy your product or service. Here the keyword segmentation should have terms like buy, get offers, etc. Eg, Buy Black shoes under 100 Dollars.

Once you have understood the above two SEO tips for beginners, it’s time to get into some real-time core practices that we shall share in the next tip.

3. Master the Magic of Keyword Research.

You are dead in SEO if you are not a smart researcher of keywords. Since we are sharing SEO tips for beginners hence we take it as a responsibility to first explain to you what is keyword and then we will share this tip in detail.

What is a keyword?

Keywords are the search queries that are generated by users on the search engines [ Like Google ] in order to get answers for their queries. These keywords can be searched either by typing them in the search bar or speaking the query [ Called voice search ] or scanning the image [ Called as image search.

In SEO, you need to understand the magic of doing the best keyword research so that your content can reach the user who is either making a text search or voice or image search.

Let’s again share a checklist in this SEO tips for beginners blog that you must note while building a smart keyword research-based content plan.

1. Create List – Always create a list of keywords that you are targeting in two categories. One as your focus keyword and the other as your LSI keyword or long-tail keyword. [ you can use these LSI as an anchor text for off-page link building ]
2. Identify Intent – After segmenting, identify the intent of those keywords from the SERP results. For example, if a particular keyword’s top 10 SERP results show company pages ranking on that keyword then don’t dare to write a blog and rank it as the algorithm intent to show company websites instead of a blog.
3. Find Questions – Once you have identified the intent, also do the research on finding the questions that people are asking around those keywords. Use Quora, Reddit or answerthepublic to find the best question.
4. Create Content Tree – Once your keywords are ready, group the same topic keyword together, and prepare a content plan to build internally linked quality contents together.

To execute the above keyword research magic, as a beginner, you should know some keyword research tools like

• Google Keyword Planner.
• Semrush
• Ahref
• Keywordtool.io

Out of all the tools above, Google keyword planner is the best tool for doing this research as they have real data. Rest all other tools use API to extract data and improve the report presentation, to show you the analysis in a more understandable format.

4. Study Your Competitors

In this SEO tips for beginners, we are sharing with you the tip on how to do your competitor analysis. This will ease your SEO as your competitors build half the path of your success journey.

Yes, you read that right, your competitor builds your path to success. How? Let us understand that.

To do competitor analysis, you must know how to use some tools like semrush or ahrefs. We need to obtain the following data while doing competitor analysis.

1. Find the top 10 organic competitors.
2. Use SEO tools to scrape all their backlinks.
3. Find the top-ranking pages and blogs of your competitors.
4. Scrape all keywords that are ranking their blogs and pages high.
5. Find their traffic sources.
6. Identify which social media is giving them more traffic.

The above six analysis will give you an understanding of

• What should be your content strategy?
• Design of highly converting UI/UX for your landing pages.
• It will tell you potential places to build backlinks.
• Find opportunities for business collaborations.
• Kind of social media strategy to follow.

Competitor analysis will give you a lot of data which will easily improve your website authority if you just follow their path of content strategy and page structure. Once you have reached good visibility, you can implement more strategies from your end and outrank them.

That’s how competitor analysis can help you in SEO and make your business, a market leader.

5. Be A Good Analytics and Data Reader

We all know data is the new oil. The same is the value of this oil in the SEO industry as well. For all beginners in SEO, we would advise you to fall in love with data reading and manipulating.

With every bit of data that you get from analytical tools of SEO, you can multiply your growth, if done right.

You must accustom yourself with few data analytics tools for SEO which are also used for the purpose of monitoring like

1. Google Analytics.
2. Google search console.
3. Bing webmaster.
4. Google optimize.

There are some basic tools that helps you identify

• Your website performance.
• Your search engine ranking.
• The reason why your online business is growing or falling.
• Who all are talking about you over the internet.
• Why your website is working good or bad

and a lot of associated data that will help you give the right direction to your ongoing SEO strategy.

6. Learn WordPress

A lot of you will be confused about why you should learn WordPress when you are focusing on being an SEO Expert? Ok so, you must go beyond and read this ahead as we have shared important SEO tips for Beginners underneath this section on WordPress relations with SEO.

When you learn WordPress, It will help you in building website designs without being a coder or a graphic designer. In the meantime, you will also learn how website codes, website structure, and page content plays an important role in optimizing for search engine. You will learn.

1. How to set your website permalinks that are SEO friendly. [ You can experiment with long and short URLs and see what ranks better. ]
2. Understand the concept of managing website CSS without affecting the ranking.
3. You will learn how to collaborate with web developers to build responsive yet SEO friendly landing pages.
4. Understand how to implement Metadata and schema on a website that gives a boost to rankings.
5. Learning WordPress will also help you to integrate SEO monitoring tools and user behavior to improve on-page content that’s good for both SEO and for potential customers of that website.
6. Almost 40 percent of the world’s website is built on WordPress. This will help you to be industry ready to do SEO for any such websites.

On a personal note, we highly recommend all SEO beginners to learn building SEO friendly websites on WordPress. It doesn’t even need you to learn to code but you can prefer learning languages like HTML, CSS, and PHP if you want.

7. Understand the Ethics Of Outreaching and Networking.

People call SEO as search engine optimization. This is valid only for On-page SEO. When we talk about Off-page SEO, more than content optimization, you need to focus on building quality links from an authoritative website.

This is only possible when you master the skill of outreaching and networking with fellow people in your industry. For this, we again got you some essential SEO tips for beginners to begin an outreach campaign for SEO.

1. Create 5-6 outreach templates for email.
2. Keep your email not too long to read.
3. Be polite and try sharing the ideas that you wish to share as a contributor.
4. Never pitch for reciprocal link exchange. [ Bad practice ]
5. Do have a follow-up with webmasters at least 4-5 times to get a response. [ Sometimes they are too busy ]
6. Don’t waste time with webmasters who give no-follow links.
7. Share them value-adding content ideas according to the kind of content that they are publishing.

if you follow the above tips, we are quite sure that you will be able to get good quality backlinks for your website and boost your organic visibility.

8. International SEO

More than half of the world is not following this great SEO strategy. In this SEO tips for beginners, we want to appeal to all SEO beginners to always consider practicing International SEO strategy.

What is International SEO?

International SEO is a strategy or practice followed by SEO Experts to target multilingual countries and places to increase their business to reach worldwide.

A lot of people are targeting only high ticket countries like the US, UK, Australia, etc to get more business from these locations. This has made SEO to be very competitive in these regions. But if you look at the languages that are spoken worldwide you will find the data given below.

In the earlier tips, we already told that data is the oil. If you see the above data, you will realize that everyone is targeting English speakers. Meanwhile, google, Bing and other search engine is being used by people from different language and search queries are also in existence with large volume.

Our tip and recommendation is to get RTL Support and multilanguage setup done for Spanish, Arabic, and other languages [ At least 4 ] and only focus on on-page SEO for these different languages.

As your domain authority will improve, your traffic will double with the least effort.

We recommend all SEO beginner to always keep the multilingual SEO strategy in your pocket if your SEO budget allows you to do so.

9. Be A True Writer.

No, We never consider an SEO expert to skip the writing skill and call themselves pro SEO experts. To all the SEO beginners, We want you to understand this by heart.

If you are a poor writer or hate writing, SEO is not a cup of your tea.

Why SEO Experts should be a good writer?

In this SEO tips for beginners, we are going to encourage you to be a good writer. The reasons being.

1. You need to have proofreading and writing skills so that you can share good content while doing outreach.
2. You will have the power to be independent on producing the content that will genuinely rank like we know the current blog that we are writing for you, we rank on top for sure because we are writing it naturally from experience and sharing values.
3. SEO experts are more involved in content marketing, if you have a good flair in writing content, you are already winning the half game.
4. You can identify the best content structure and prepare better value-adding content for readers which will outrank your competitors.
5. The search engine is dynamic. If you are a good writer, you can update your content according to the trends.

We always recommend all SEO beginners to start practicing the habits of writing. If you are a good content writer, you will increase your possibility of being a good content marketer.

10. Believe in Responsive SEO

We have seen a lot of SEO beginners who learn how to optimize on-page but forget to do the same for other responsive designs of the website and landing pages.

In this SEO Tips for beginners, we are sharing some tips to improve your SEO for responsive designs also.

1. Work on your readability score to give a better experience for mobile users by improving fonts and their spacing.
2. Prefer having amp pages for your webpages or blogpost. It loads fast on mobile.
3. Collaborate with your developer to optimize and minify HTML, CSS. Ask your developer, not to set too many .important in CSS file as it affect your SEO because that increases your load time.
4. Check if there is no redirection. Also, make sure all your external links are going to HTTP websites. Sometimes people miss this while optimizing on-page.
5. You can also consider setting a subdomain for your mobile view on m.yoursite.com

Following a proper responsive SEO strategy will improve your ranking further.

11. Avoid Black Hat SEO techniques.

We want to recommend all SEO beginners to follow these SEO tips for beginner strictly. Any blackhat method can give you some instant results but they don’t sustain for a long time.

In the earlier tip, we shared that Google updates its algorithm 500-600 times in a year. That means there are minor to major changes being done on daily basis.

With black hat SEO, you will eventually fall under the trap of search engine algorithm updates leading to penalties and deindexing.

As a good SEO practitioner, you should always believe in giving value to the readers and the growth will itself follow your efforts.

12. Practice LOCAL SEO in your strategy.

Again, a reward giving strategy that a lot of businesses aren’t following. We see a lot of knowledge graph coming in the SERP that are unclaimed. This is a blunder mistake done by SEO experts of such businesses.

You must Learn and implement LOCAL SEO to improve your presence in your region. In this SEO tips for beginner blog, we are sharing some good tips to follow for local SEO.

1. Register your business on Google my business.
2. Prefer adding the keyword in your business name.
3. Optimize your address by sharing all your business details.
4. List the kind of service or product that you are offering.
5. Add your social media links.
6. Add your website links or create a free website with google site and link that.
7. Try using local keywords in your descriptions like nearby etc.

With a Local SEO strategy, you will again add an extra edge of adding more visitors and potential customers for your business.

13. Use the Best Tools for SEO.

We recommend using following tools for SEO if you are a beginner.

• For On page Optimization.

If you are using WordPress, you can consider using plugins like rank math and Yoast SEO to improve your SEO.

• For Keyword Research.

We already recommended the tool for this before, prefer using google keyword planner than anything else.

• For Keyword Suggestion

When you don’t have an idea about the keywords that are being searched in your niche, then prefer using tools that can generate all such keyword suggestions to get an idea to start. Some tools are keywordshitter, Google keyword planner again, google auto suggest, ubersuggest.

• For Analytics

Google analytics and google webmaster tools.

• For A/B testing

Hotjar or google optimize.

• For Email outreach

You can use mixmax which is a good tool to automate your email follow-up for outreaching.

• For content Idea

You can use answerthepublic or Quora for finding what questions people are asking in your niche. You can also use buzz sumo to find what kind of content is being loved more for your keyword or niche. Ahref also works awesome in finding content ideas.

There are abundant SEO tools that you can try but the above-mentioned tools are some best SEO tools that every beginner should learn to use.

14. Learn The Skill of ASO [ App Store Optimization ]

Every SEO expert is only talking about website optimization. But, do you know the kind of growing trends in mobile app based business?

That’s how the trend in mobile app business is growing massively. Every mobile app business wants to be on top in play store of google or iTunes.

We strongly recommend you to have the App store optimization skill and implement the same.

In ASO also, the title and keyword rules remains the same but their are secondary factors also which you must know.

Final Thought

Above all the SEO tips for beginners, there is only one rule for all SEO beginners and that is, to be honest in creating and marketing your content. If you follow good practices, your content can bring a positive impact on your reader’s life or situation and this will prove you to be the best SEO expert.

If you slip from the natural facts of SEO, you will take your online business to a dark world, and coming out of it is difficult as you will be penalized and deindexed permanently. All your efforts would die overnight and you won’t be able to restart the same thing again. So, being honest in your SEO practice is the only tip that you should keep in your mind in the end.