I love search engine optimisation (SEO) and I know I am good at it.
Having created over 1 million monthly organic traffic to site, across the websites I have worked with over the last decade. I can say I know a thing or two about SEO.
It’s rather ironic that as an SEO I know that the number of people wanting to learn SEO is a lot. In fact, it’s around three hundred thousand people searching how to SEO around the world in all its 10,000 plus variations.
There is only one true way of learning SEO yourself. That is simply by starting your own website.
Of course, understanding SEO best practices and creating content that ranks is probably just as important. BUT!! You need somewhere to practice.
I’m not sure how, but for some reason, SEO has a reputation for being some form of digital marketing dark arts. I’m here to tell you it’s not. I’m also here to tell you it’s easy. Don’t confuse the ease of execution with ease of getting results. They are two very different things.
Here is EVERYTHING you need to know about SEO as someone who has never done it before.
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**The Website platform matters**
Remember earlier. I was talking about when you start a website and the different options? Well, this is where the bonus of starting on Medium matters. Medium as a website has plenty of authority as a domain. Search engines like Google already give Medium a big tick of approval as a trustworthy website. Whereas if you start your own website with a fresh domain, you are starting with zero authority and it will take you much longer to rank in search engines. Although this shouldn’t deter you because the upside to having your own domain is that you own all your content unlike with Medium.
**Quality over quantity**
Gone are the days when you can smash out 100’s of 500-word content pieces and rank for them. In some cases it works. But this is rare. While volume of content creation is important in the long term. You are better to have 50 quality content pieces that 300 low-quality content pieces. Quality content also means well researched, with links to research in content to help search engines understand where you have sourced your information from. As for length. How long? Well, a good way to gauge this is to search your designated keyword (if unsure what this is, it’s coming up). Check out the top 3 pages that rank and scan how long they are. Design and formatting to aid in the user experience. The easier your content is to read, the more engagement you will get with your content. From an SEO perspective how you segment your content through headlines is extremely important. It is the basis for how you structure your individual content pieces. Lastly grammar and spelling. Make sure your content is written well, free of any spelling or grammatical errors.
**Topical Authority**
If you are starting a website from scratch. If you want to start ranking in search engines it’s best to work on a specific topic or category to focus on (this is referred to as a ‘niche’ in many parts of the web). You will have more success in writing content that ranks in search engines if you focus on a specific topic area and build up relevant and thoughtful content focussed on this topic. When you decide on a topic, you should also segment this topic down another layer. This is a framework that I have used over the last few years. I learned this method from my friends at Hubspot. Known as the pillar and cluster method. For example, if you choose your website to be about dogs. Your next layer of topics could be, dogs by size, dogs by breed, dogs by colour.
Example:
Dogs > Mini | Small | Medium | Large | Giant
This will help feed into your internal linking framework (more later).
A final note here. If you are wanting to learn how to SEO on a new website it is best that you choose a topic that is not as competitive. If you choose something like the above example such as dogs. At such a high-level competitive term you will most likely never rank for that primary term of dog. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but it will take a lot of time and effort.
How do you know if something is too competitive? Read on.
**Keywords and search intent**
Search intent is understanding the why behind the search and also understanding how search engines interpret the search. For the example I have given, it is rather clear that people are wanting to learn SEO. To validate this, simply search your keyword in Google and confirm search intent by viewing the results Google serves. This will help you understand how Google itself thinks about the search term. Google’s algorithm knows more than most about what people want to read when they search for something. So use search results as a guide for the type of content for your keyword of choice.
**Keyword Research**
In the traditional sense, this is using a tool such as SEMRush or Ahrefs to research a topic that you want to write about. Alternatively, you can use Google Keyword Planner but it lacks the difficulty factor to understand how hard it is to rank. These tools, while not perfect will give you the best indication of how much volume (searches per month) as well as difficulty in ranking for said keyword. Keyword research is something that the tools make easier BUT learning how to use the tools effectively to find things to write about is where the magic is. I also love doing manual keyword research. Which is simply using Google and dancing with it to find keyword opportunities.
A couple of methods in manual keyword research:
Auto-suggest alphabet soup: Taking a primary keyword and cycling through the next letter or common search terms (what, why, that etc) to see what Google auto-suggest tells you what people are searching.
**Content Plan**
The last part of creating your website is your content plan. This is basically putting your keyword research into a plan of attack of what pages you want to create for your website.
A basic content plan should have:
* Primary keyword — what search term you are targeting for the page
* Page Title
* Word length
* Topic pillar
How to write content that will rank in search engines?
You have your website and you have your content plan.
Let’s look at how to write content that’s going to rank.
All good content starts with a great content brief. Whether you are getting someone else to write it or you are writing it yourself.
The content brief should knock off all things that should be included in your page’s content so that it is search engine optimised.
This process can also be performed on current live web pages to do “SEO” as the layman may refer to it.
Let’s start by looking at the most important parts of SEO.
**SEO Meta Tags**
These are the tags within your website that search engines use to work out what your content is about initially.
Most of these tags can be defined on your website. If you are using WordPress or a similar content management system there are usually plugins that allow you to specify these.
Website builders such as Squarespace and Wix also have these built-in. Medium on the other hand does all the magic for you.
*Title Tag*: Also referred to as the page title. Probably the most important 60 characters of your content. It’s a simple descriptor of your content. In the case of this content: “The **best way to learn SEO** is by starting your own website”
*Meta description tag*: This is a longer description of your content. It gives a more in-depth preview of what your content is about. Usually about 155 characters.
*Alt text tag*: These are descriptions of the images you are including with your content. Typically you have a featured image along with other images within your content. These can all be designated an **alt text** tag.
*Heading Tags*: Earlier I spoke about content design and how you segment a piece of written content for the web. Heading tags H1, H2, H3 and so on is how you label the headings of your written content.
The sections of your written piece should be split up by these heading tags. These tags are the next level of information for search engines to understand your content.
Most CMSs do the hard work on heading tags during the formatting stage of creating content.
Lastly, there is your body content, all the chunks of content between headings. The meat and potatoes of your written content.
**Now that you have read through all of this article. This is all you need to know about SEO. All the things I described above. “How do you do SEO?” It is simply by placing your primary keyword into these areas. There you go, that’s it. Easy right?**
It goes a little deeper but if you do the above in your efforts to do SEO you are way ahead of most people who spin out content on the web. This should not be exhaustive but it’s the first part of creating a search engine optimised website.
Bonus SEO Tips Section
I can’t create a “best way to learn SEO” without mentioning a few extra things that will help you be a few steps ahead of the pack.
**Internal Linking**
Linking between content on your website is super important. The most important thing to know about linking within your website is the term **anchor text**.
The two main types of internal links are navigation and content links.
**Navigation links** are basically your website menu. Your website menu is supposed to act as an easy way to navigate to the most important parts of your website quickly.
The important thing to remember is the words you use in your menu basically tell search engines the core of what your website is about. Remember this link is located on every page on your website.
When designing your menu structure remember the above. Selecting the right anchor text in your many could be what makes or breaks your website’s SEO.
**Content links** are the second part and also very important as they can send contextual linking from one page on your site to another. Sending contextual links from one page to another is at the basis of the Pillar and Cluster method I spoke of earlier.
The aim is to create a pillar content piece and all the cluster topics link to this important pillar post. You can also interlink the cluster posts to each other. See the diagram below to demonstrate the concept.
**DM me if you need any help with SEO. I do full audits for free.**
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