On-Page SEO: Step by Step Guide for Beginner

Let us start with a simple example from our daily life. You are planning for your friend’s birthday party, and the idea is to host an escape room game event. You start with searching for some of the best escape room games to enjoy with family at home, and the web pages associated with your search pop up on your screen. It might be trivial or not something out of the ordinary for a standard user.

But for many entrepreneurs and business people, it is necessary to stay connected and close to the users, especially those customers who want to indulge in their brands and products.

And by tracking the user activity, the companies can find out which consumers are showing interest in their services and subsequently stay right in front of their eyes when they are exploring a product related to their business. It helps generate more links and easy clicks for their titles and websites, which in turn aids them to rank higher on the organic search page and Google rankings. So, what does that ultimately mean? Steady marketing benefits and an increase in revenue for their company.

And how does one achieve all of these? That’s right, through understanding and implementing SEO.

About SEO

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and it is the strategic method through which you can optimize the visibility rate of your website on the search engine result pages (SERPs). You can get the best from the SEO strategies by deploying suitable keywords and phrases in your website posts and titles. They help you rank higher on the organic search page and be more visible to the viewers.

Here are some ways in which SEO is advantageous for your business:

• It brings more customers looking for services from your company or enterprises similar to yours.
• It helps you rank higher on the organic search result page and makes you more visible on the browsers.
• Your customers get a trustworthy and user-friendly web experience.
• It strengthens the customer-retailer relationship by improving the trust and reliability of the consumers.
• It helps you focus on improving the user experience in your company, thus expanding your customer base in the market.
• It allows you to connect with other marketers and rank higher among your competitors.
• You can establish your business as a brand and promote its services on a larger scale.
• It increases your brand awareness and keeps you informed in the commercial market.
• It’s a better initiative than many other marketing strategies because you can track your progress and record it.
• It is easy to work on and monetarily affordable for anyone.

SEO works in an assortment of different methods and is of two categories, the external and the internal SEO method. While the internal SEO focuses on the backbone, the structural theme, and the content uniqueness of your website, the external SEO is more about utilizing the art of communication to connect with other web owners and bloggers to associate links with them and gain more backlinks.

To further understand SEO, let us see the process behind the working of the search engines in terms of ranking and displaying titles on the SERP. They are responsible for showing your website links, post titles, and web pages on the front search section of the web. Users mostly stay to look for results on the first five pages on the internet and toggle between the relevant titles provided there.

Therefore, to gain more traffic and revenue, you should start by planning to reach higher on the search page. Luckily, it is possible to do so once you learn how the Google search algorithm works when crawling over links and pages to display them on the web, depending on the keywords and phrases.

• The Panda and Penguin algorithm by Google focuses on removing the black hat SEO websites and content that are low in quality and do little to provide for a good user experience.
• The more backlinks a website has, the more reliable it is found by the search browser and given more visibility on the web.
• Google gives low ranks to the websites having more bounce backs and thin content.
• It prioritizes articles and posts that are informative and unique, rich in data and content, and have suitable infographics and links.

Contrary to the notion that SEO is dead and doesn’t help much for Google, it isn’t true. You can gain tremendously from SEO strategies and use them to take your business to new heights of success. So, let us dive into our step-by-step SEO guide for beginners that will help you understand it in simple and easy steps as a newcomer in the industry:

1. Internal or On-Page SEO

Internal SEO refers to the theme and content links of your website. Search engines will only know what your website is about if you are clear with its topic and have unique content work to display. And the easier it is for the viewers to navigate through your web pages and find well-organized links, graphics, and other interlinked data, the higher the chance for you to rank higher on the SERPs and get good SEO results from the search engine.

In simple words, there are 4 key processes in terms of On-Page SEO that define its working and influence. Let us look at them:

Organizing Site Structure

Organizing your site structure lets you create a lasting impression on your viewers and allow them to revisit your links. Let us take a small example to showcase this situation. Suppose you are planning to build a new escape room, and your target is to create multi-themed room games for your company. And to make it easier to play and understand, you have divided your breakout game genres into different levels, like a few escape rooms are for beginners, while some are on the intermediate level, and some come under the category of the most difficult ones.

And you will similarly design your site to showcase the organized work of your company for attracting more customers without cluttering too much data. So that’s where search engines like Google and Yahoo come into action. They give more preference to websites and pages that are well-organized and categorized into different themes and have levels of content established on their web page. It allows them to target the user query and display content relevant to the searches.

Keyword Research

Once you have decided about the central theme of your website and have created your pages as per its requirements, the next step involves researching new keywords. You can create unique and high-quality content for your website. Initially, you might want to check out the long-tail keywords that are easier to rank when compared to fewer keywords. They are more specific to the user’s search query and help you expand your list of keywords for your website. And you can also make use of the Google Keyword Planner to benefit your SEO keyword research.

Constructing Content

It is necessary that while constructing your content, you design a reliable and well-working landing page. They are the links which the user can utilize to land directly to your company’s pages. An unappealing landing page that lacks the power to capture the audience’s attention will make them feel unsatisfied and drive them to go back to the search page.

And it will eventually lower your SEO ranking. To avoid such a scenario for yourself, try to include relevant keywords in your content at suitable places. Frame your articles keeping the main keyword and theme in mind, and use fitting pictures, image alt tags, subheadings, etc., in your work.

Internal Optimization

The final step in on-page SEO relies heavily on how you internalize your optimization for the website. From the loading speed of your website to the interlinked articles and keywords, everything affects your SERP ranking, and ultimately the internal SEO process. These are the few things you should keep in mind while creating internal  SEO optimization for your articles:

• Ensure that the keywords are present in URL, meta description, title tags, subheadings, image heading and alt image tags, and the body of the content.
• Use synonyms of the keywords at a space of around 125 words in your content body.
• Provide links to relevant sources.
• Have interlinked articles.

2. External or Off-Page SEO

The external or off-page SEO refers to the marketing and link developing strategies and steps. There is no point in having a well-developed website with all the best factors when nobody on the internet can find it. That’s right. If people or other bloggers or website owners won’t find and link to your work, chances are, you will end up staying in the dark, and your organic search page ranking will keep falling every day.

To be relevant in the market and face to face with your business competitors, you need to focus on building your off-page SEO strategy and generating traffic for your website. And you can accomplish it through backlink creation. To have a profile that appears both natural and diverse, you need to design assertive and white hat backlinks.

The benefit of such backlinks are tremendous, and they help in skyrocketing the rank of your web page. Google focuses on the websites having interlinked articles and backlinks created for them. It acts as a benchmark for your content being reliable and user-friendly, for the readers will suggest about your website and share your links only if you have good content that doesn’t shy away from providing unique and high-quality information in a captivating format to its audience.

Here’s a list of the requirements of a typical authoritative backlink:

• Higher domain authority.
• The topic and the theme are relevant.
• Suitable keywords are in the content body.
• Captivating page title.
• Good PageRank and TrustRank.
• Co-citations at the vital spots.
• Timeline of the backlinks and the web page.
• Dofollow links.

3. Technical SEO

Often overlooked, technical SEO is also a crucial part of optimizing your website. It is solely associated with the features not related to the main content of your website and focuses on optimizing the infrastructure and the technical aspect of your web pages to have more crawling and indexing of the search engines across your content and titles. There are various companies like online shopping sites, escape room games, and online food ordering delivery sites that deploy the tips and steps of technical SEO to get higher page rankings on various browsers.

Below is a referential index that talks about how you can use technical SEO for your website:

• Optimize your 404 error page frequently.
• Update and work on the structure and navigation of your website.
• Have structured or listed data in your content.
• Know the loading speed of your web pages, the cross-linked articles, and guest posts.
• Analyze all your official URLs.
• Verify if your website and its content are mobile-friendly.
• Introduce your XML sitemaps to different search engines.
• Optimize your image alt texts and URLs.
• Specify a domain in the Google search console (and WordPress, depending on the user).
• Have a schema markup for your website and an optimized robots.txt page.

Conclusion

We hope that by the end of this guidepost, the step-by-step details above have helped you grasp the concepts of on-page and off-page SEO and all the benefits related to it and how it works in your favor. Many factors come into consideration while implementing SEO in your web pages. And while there are raging advantages, there are also some drawbacks of using them, which might affect your page ranking and web display if you don’t keep watch of the proper SEO conducting ethics.

The best way to avoid committing this overlooked error is to know the Google Webmaster Rules for websites and pages and abide by their guidelines for posting your content. And as long as you are delivering good quality content and working on improvising your services, you are halfway done with making your business successful. Just remember to keep working hard, and you will be on top one day.