The online search scenario indeed has changed a lot since Google have rolled out Panda and Penguin updates to nail web spam and bring in quality search results to its users. Moreover, the importance of SEO has indeed increased manifold. The onsite and offsite SEO has always been a topic of debate among the different SEO professionals who have different experiences and results. This post explains in detail about SEO basics for beginners to achieve more website traffic.
Keyword selection
Keywords play an important role in any SEO activity. One should choose keywords relevant to the website niche while drafting the articles for the site. Having extra or bogus keywords would do more harm than good. In fact, recent Google updates have punished websites involved in practices like keyword stuffing.
301 redirect
The 301 Redirect is used to redirect any query “domain.com” to “www.domain.com”. Most of SEO plugins and CMS have this redirect by default but this is one of the factors that you might consider. This redirect can provide both kind of access to your website which is better than having only either of them.
Optimized page title
The title of the page is an important part of any SEO campaign. The titles appear in the search engine results and the title must contain the keywords for your webpage.
Optimized headings
The headings on your page must be optimized. Using tag for the main title of the page and and tag for the sub title of the page can be beneficial. The big bold heading must contain the keywords so that the search engine spiders and crawlers can easily optimize and index them easily into the search engines. Also make sure that you publish only original content on your website.
XML sitemaps
XML Sitemaps are the by default standard that is used by all the major search engines today. There are a number of plugins and other external services which would help you in generating the sitemaps easily. When you generate a sitemap, don’t forget to ping Google, Yahoo and other search engines.
Image alt tags
As we say the picture speak more than a thousand words. The pictures cannot be indexed as is on search engines so the way to correctly index them is to introduce the Alt tags for the images. The Alt tag must have some important keyword which would describe the image better. This is also helpful in those case where you website is rendered for visually impaired persons where these Alt tags are used instead of the image.
Robots.txt
The robots.txt file is a special file which has all the permission for the search engine bots on what to index and what to leave out. This special text file must allow only the public parts of your website and leave out the private parts of your website.
In addition to these aspects, SEO basics for beginners also include social media strategies and backlinking. If you can make your posts viral on social media, it can result in heavy traffic and good user engagement. Similarly, backlinks help you achieve higher search engine rankings. Again, there are SEO plugins to automate some of the above mentioned tasks like heading optimization. Finally, it is also important to choose a professional website hosting company so as to ensure good up time and fast loading speed.
