What is SEO for Beginners?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is the method by which your website competes with other websites on a search engine's result page. Hence, each website owner has to ensure that their website is visible to the search engines by optimizing their website.

Search Engine Optimization is main method used to drive traffic to a website. The traffic is normally organic and free. It is delivered from the search engine results pages such as Google, Bing and Yahoo. SEO requires a lot of work and dedication in order for websites to stay competitive within cyberspace.

Let's break it down a bit more in order to make sure everyone grasps the concept.

These are the steps you take whenever you are searching for something in a search engine.

1. You type in the search term SEO into google and click the search icon.
2. Google presents a list of search results from top to bottom. (as seen in picture below)
3. You click on the one that seems more appropriate to what you're looking for.
4. Then you arrive on a SEO'ed website

All the websites that came up in the search results got placed there by the search engine because they did some SEO work. I will list some of the basic SEO methods for beginners and young hubbers.

• Keyword Usage
• Great Content
• Authority
• User Experience
• Performance

Search engine results pages are competitive. Therefore, each website has to master each one of these techniques in order to appear higher in the search engine results. This will increase traffic significantly for the website. I will give a basic explanation on each method used in SEO for beginners.

A great example is this article. I use the keyword ( SEO for beginners ) a couple time during the article. Then whenever someone searches for my keyword, my article will show up in the search engine results. This article may not show up on the first page of the results (more like on the 25th page) but it will be listed as one of the entries in the search engine results.

The next step is having great content. I am talking about content that readers are looking for and find useful. This is something that a reader will share, bookmark or save because your content was so awesome and really helped the user/reader. If one person likes it, they are going to share it and then other people are going to share it. Great content always go viral.

Having great content automatically leads to authority. This is especially important if most of your content covers a niche. One of the reasons other websites will appear higher in the search engine results is because they have been doing it for a longer time and have hundreds of other articles in regards to SEO for beginners. In order to compete, I would need to start to build my authority on SEO. At this moment I have to link to those SEO websites as references (to the right) which gives me some credibility but increases their authority.

User experience refers to how people respond to your website while consuming your content. This is another science within itself and is very important. This is because the user's experience can be measured and calculated. Search engines use this data to determine whether the user found your website useful.

How long a user stays on your webpage tells the search engine if your content is really useful. If everyone that visits your website spends only 10 seconds but when they visit my site, they spend 10 minutes, the search engines would conclude my website is much better optimized. Therefore, my site would appear much higher in the search engine rankings which would give me more traffic. Other data is used such as Facebook likes, retweets, comments, RSS subscriptions and back-links (links leading back to your site).

How fast your page loads is very important. This is because in this modern age, people are not going to wait 30 seconds for your page to load to read your content. They are going to click the back button and check out another website. Therefore, search engines show preference to those sites that delivers content efficiently. The speed of your web page is dependent on the software design of a website. If your downtime is too high or throws errors regularly, then that is poor optimization.

Those who are more advanced at search engine optimization may be wondering why am I leaving out some important points like black hat SEO, off page optimization or link wheels. Do not worry, I will step up the pace and do some advanced SEO topics. Information overload is one of the big problems in the SEO world. The information provided is all that is needed to get ranked by search engines. In order to compete for the number one spot is another story.

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