SEO For Beginners (What Is SEO)

If you have a website, one of your primary focus should be using SEO to drive traffic to your website. 

Traffic=visitors=more sales/revenue. There are many ways you can optimize your website/blog, among them having a blog section where you create articles that are keywords rich. 

If you are wondering why you are not receiving any visitors to your website/blog, there are 2 possible answers:

1. SEO
2. No marketing

People usually assume that the work ends after getting a website, and they rarely bother to keep their website active. This results in the web pages dropping in rank, forever being forgotten by google.

You need to invest in time as well as money to market your website via other social media platforms as well as google.

Because today we are talking about SEO, we will focus on increasing visibility on google.

What is SEO? 

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Google is a search engine( a program that searches for and identifies items in a database that correspond to keywords or characters specified by the user, used especially for finding particular sites on the World Wide Web- Oxford Dictionary) and as such, ranks results for all queries received. It crawls the web for the best results and those websites that have optimized their website, appear on the first page of the results page.

There are millions of search results, and as a business owner, it is your duty to make sure you appear on the first page because, let's be honest, who even goes to page 2? I know I don't!.

There are 2 types of SEO:

1. On-page SEO
2. Off-page SEO

On-page SEO is the work you do on your website/blog. This means using Keywords in your content. These keywords should be specific to your industry. Let's take a closer look at how you should work on your content to improve On-page SEO.

• Your content should be original

Google will not rank plagiarized work! As much as blog ideas can run out, it is important to avoid copy pasting work from other websites. There are a few ways you can get content ideas: 

Buzzsumo  is a site where you will find inspiration and trending topics. Google alerts also work well in showing trending topics in your industry. You can use a free tool like h super tools to explore different topics. See image below 

• Use Keywords 

Keywords are the terms people use to search for a specific query. It can be a single term like "shoes" or a sentence such as "affordable shoes for a wedding in Nairobi". In your blog, be as specific as possible with the keywords you use. They should be specific to your business. 

You need to research on the best keywords to use, keywords that do not have a high competition rate. Again, you can do this using free keyword research tools like h super tools

Aim for keywords that have a high search volume, with low competition. 

Where To Use The Keywords? 

Use your keyword in your title, alt image, and ULR link of the page/article as well as throughout the body. Do not over indulge in the use of keywords, use them sparingly.

Read more about keywords here. 

Off-Page SEO is how you attract google to your website/blog. 

• Have backlinks. 

These are links that are referring back to your website. This shows google that your website is an important site that shares relevant information. If you are just starting out, you might not have other websites referring back to you. What you do is take the initiative and reach out to other blogs and be a guest blogger.

• The speed and bounce rate of your site is very important when it comes to ranking. If your site has a very high bounce rate, google will not rank the site

• The security of your website is crucial if you want to rank on google. If you use Chrome as your web browser, chances are you have had warnings of websites that are not safe. Chrome is the most popular web browser, and as such if your website is not safe, people will not visit it. Always make sure that your website starts with HTTPS and not HTTP. HTTPS the "s" means that your website is secure, that the data transferred between your website and your visitors is encrypted.

Here is a video on how to secure your website.

You can increase traffic to your website by investing in SEO.

Have you used SEO to increase web visitors? Let me know! Follow my blog for more.

Sophia Karanja

0716352252