Digital marketing strategy can help your business grow. Samples of strategies in digital marketing are SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and PPC (Pay per Click). A very popular question that I always hear is, “What is the best option to drive traffic to my website, SEO or PPC marketing? Actually, both have plus and minus. I have explained you about PPC marketing before, now I will inform you all about SEO marketing for beginners.
What is SEO marketing?
SEO marketing is marketing activities that are performed to make your website is on page one of the search result, so that you will obtain the number of visitors to your website.
The result of search engine that display your website on the page one is called organic result. So, when people are typing particular keyword phrase on search engine, they will find the results and will click one of the result. This is natural result or unpaid result, that’s why it is referred to as an organic result.
Facts about SEO that must be known by Beginners
1. This is unpaid result.
Although you need some investment to buy several SEO tools, like keyword research tool and so on, but in general you can do it with some free tools. Therefore, SEO marketing can save your money and has a big ROI potential.
2. SEO can be implemented in several search engines.
If you have known the fundamental concept about search engine work, you can implement your SEO marketing strategy on several search engines, such as: Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. Therefore, you can reach as many people as possible.
3. Good quality SEO takes time.
If you want to get a long term success, SEO can take several times to get a good result. There are many methods of SEO, they are what we called black hat SEO and white hat SEO. You must be patient to perform SEO best practices based on proven white hat SEO. It will take time, but when it is done, it can result in consistent traffic to your website.
4. Tight competition.
It is difficult for the beginner to compete with old-player that has reached page one on search engines, if you count on SEO only for driving traffic to your website. But, it is possible to reach page one. As I mention before, it takes time. You have to perform it consistently and persistently to obtain optimal results.
5. Keep learning and practicing.
The fundamental requirement If you want to be a SEO practitioner is, keep learning and be adaptable. Then practice the knowledge you have got, analyze which one works and which one doesn’t work.
You must be know that Google algorithm always changes. Google (and another search engine also) have to improve their algorithm to produce a better result for their user.
So, you have to learn in order to get a new knowledge, new best practices, and new insights about search engine work and it’s algorithm.
Thing that must be learned for SEO beginners
1. How search engine works.
There are three main components of search engine, they are crawler, indexer, and search engine front end.
a. Crawler is the bot or engine that crawls your website. If there is a new page, this bot will crawl your page.
b. Indexer is the engine that makes your content to be indexed by search engine. If your content is already indexed by search engine, your page has an opportunity to be displayed on page one.
There are many criteria to decide which page to be displayed on page one, it is what we called a search engine algorithm. If your page has several criteria that are suitable for the algorithm, your page deserves to be displayed on page one in search result.
Some of criteria are the amount of quality inbound link to your website, social media signal, have a high quality content, have an update and fresh content, have a good web structure, and so on.
c. Search engine front end is interface for end users. It is a place where user typing a keyword phrase (information that he looks for), and place where the results are displayed.
2. Keyword research.
This is a fundamental thing that SEO practitioners must know. Mastering a keyword research determines your SEO success.
Why keyword research is important to SEO marketing? I explain you the answer below:
a. You must create content to satisfy a user.
In order to satisfy a user, you must know what he is looking for exactly. There are several types of search engine user:
– He uses a search engine to look for information. Usually the keyword phrase starts with “what is”, “when”, “who”, and so on.
– He uses a search engine to online shopping. We call it “buying keyword”, the keyword that contains “review”, “price list”, “where do I buy”, “sell”, and so forth.
When visitors are typing a query and find your website, will they be satisfied with your content?
So, you have to possess a goal, find your niche, know your audience, and satisfy them with your content.
b. You must create content that is searched by many people.
What happens if you target a keyword which is searched by few people a month? Even you are on a page one in the search result, your traffic will be low.
Therefore you have to keyword researching to know what is the keyword search volume per day or per month?
But, it is not enough my friend. If you found a big volume of a search keyword, but this keyword has a high competition, your opportunity to get big traffics still low.
The thing you must do is, find a keyword that is searched by a lot of people and has a low competition.
You know this particular keyword by doing keyword research.
What is the sample of keyword research tool?
There are two types of tools, they are free tool and paid tool. You can try free tools for learning purpose, after you comprehend the keyword research concept, you can buy the tool that is suitable for you.
You can try these tools, such as: Google keyword planner , Google trends, Wordtracker, Traffic Travis , and more.
3. On-page and Off-page SEO
You must learn both on-page optimization and off-page optimization comprehensively to improve your search engine rankings.
Some examples of on-page optimization
As a beginner, you have to know about basic on-page optimization, such as: title tag, meta description, quality content and duplicate content, semantic words, robots.txt, domain and URL, on-page factors based on search engine guidelines, etc.
Some examples of off-page optimization
After knowing on-page factors that influence your website ranking, you must learn off-page factors, such as: domain authority, inbound link, anchor text when doing link building, social media signals, utilize social media to drive traffic, page rank factors, and so on.
So, are you ready to be a SEO practitioner?
For the first phase of learning, you can learn about SEO at:
Wordtracker Academy
Learn SEO at Moz
Distilled University
You can read a related article about search engine marketing at principal of search engine marketing