14 SEO Principles Beginners Need To Know
Are you just getting started with SEO and need to know what the fundamentals are? We’ve got you covered.
Do you need to do keyword research? How do you use keywords you want to target? How do you know which keywords to target, and what else on your site affects SEO?
We answer all of these questions and more in this post.
The basic SEO principles you need to know
These are the principles of SEO we’re going to cover:
- Google dominates the search industry
- Site structure and navigation are important
- It’s all about search intent
- Keyword research will always matter
- Competitive research is just as important
- Write for humans first
- You should not over optimize
- Internal and external links are important
- Dofollow vs nofollow
- Performance and UX will impact your rankings
- Affiliate content needs to be genuine
- Link building is a legitimate SEO tactic
- Off-page SEO signals can impact rankings
- SEO tracking helps you measure your success
1. Google dominates the search industry
When small blog owners, big-name publishers and SEO experts alike talk about “ranking on search engines,” they’re primarily talking about ranking on Google.
This is because Google has a 91.32% market share among all search engines in the world, according to StatCounter.
Bing comes in second at a market share of 3.42%.
In the United States, Google has a market share of 87.93% while Bing’s is 7.09%.
This shouldn’t be a surprise. Android and iOS are the two most popular smartphone operating systems in the world, and they both come with Google as a search engine preinstalled by default.
However, Google dominated the search industry well before the first iPhone hit the market, and they’ll continue to dominate it even as AI-powered search becomes more popular among general consumers.
Therefore, when you perform any sort of SEO research, you should always do it with the intention of ranking on Google.
Note: Platforms like YouTube and TikTok are being used to search for information more and more these days. But we’ll stay focused on Google and traditional search engines for this post.
2. Site structure and navigation are important
Site structure refers to the way you organize your content as well as how that content interconnects.
In other words, what content groups does your content fall under, and how do you connect one piece of content to another.
If you have a woodworking blog, do you have a group of content about saws, another about wood joints and one about furniture projects?
When you publish a post about a coffee table project, do you link to a tutorial on how to craft a specific wood joint you used in the project? Do you link to a review of a tool you recommended in the post?
Building your SEO and content marketing strategy around a site structure that targets topics that relate to content that’s already on your website instead of only targeting keywords will help you keep your blog on topic, which looks great in Google’s eyes.
Site navigation is the way you link to your content in navigation menus (typically found in the header and footer of a website) as well as on directory pages.
You could have a navigation menu item for “Projects,” another one for “Reviews” and another for “Techniques.” You could even have child items, such as “Furniture Projects,” “Saw Reviews” and “Wood Joints.”
These menu items help your audience find content on your website more efficiently.
3. It’s all about search intent
The best way to think about SEO is to think about how consumers use search engines.
They’re not looking for the best-written articles or high-quality content. They’re looking for answers to their search queries. Google knows this, so they alter their algorithm in ways they think will return results that more accurately match a user’s search query.
This is why it’s so important to target the right keywords and why it’s so important to target them with search intent in mind.
Search intent refers to the type of search results a user was intending to find when they entered a search query into Google.
For example, if you type “rugby ball” into Google, you mostly get results for product listings for, you guessed it, rugby balls.
So, if you have a blog about rugby and want to write an informational post about the ball the game uses and its history, you shouldn’t use “rugby ball” as a target keyword.
You should target “what is a rugby ball” instead, or even create posts that target less competitive keywords that relate to rugby balls, such as “rugby ball dimensions,” “rugby ball sizes” and “how heavy is a rugby ball.”
In short, search intent is the practice of targeting keywords with relevant content.
4. Keyword research will always matter
As long as users are still inputting keywords into search engines to find solutions to their problems, keyword research will always be relevant.
Keyword research gives you the opportunity to see what topics are most important to your audience.
When I entered “rugby ball” into my keyword research tool, SE Ranking, “size rugby ball,” “size of rugby ball” and “rugby ball dimensions” were all listed among similar keywords with the highest search volumes.
This means learning about the size of a rugby ball is important to those interested in rugby.
Keyword research also lets you see which keywords your competitors are ignoring.
Using a more competitive niche, the food niche, as an example, search queries that are similar to “baked salmon,” such as “oven baked salmon,” “how long to bake salmon” and “what temperature to bake salmon” are quite competitive.
However, when you lower the keyword difficulty in SE Ranking to a maximum of 30, you get less competitive results, such as “baked salmon with mayonnaise,” “baked salmon roll” and “baking sockeye salmon.”
5. Competitive research is just as important
You likely have competitors in your niche who are already receiving a considerable amount of organic traffic.
In this case, there’s a lot you can learn by analyzing their websites.
Many SEO tools have a competitive research feature that enables you to see what keywords a site ranks for and what keywords other sites rank for that it doesn’t rank for.
You may also get ideas for new seed keywords.
6. Write for humans first
An SEO strategy known as keyword stuffing is, unfortunately, still used today.
This strategy involves using your target keyword as many times as you can in an article, especially in headings, SEO titles and meta descriptions.
In reality, it’s a form of over optimization that will only decrease your search engine rankings.
What you should do instead is write as naturally as possible by structuring your article in a way that’s intended to be read by humans, not search engine bots.
You’ll use related keywords naturally as you craft valuable content that’s designed to thoroughly cover the topic your keyword targets. Use synonyms for your target keyword to avoid using your target keyword too many times.
To make your article even more reader friendly, make sure the answer to your reader’s search query is located near the top of the article, not buried at the bottom.
7. You Should Not Over Optimize Your Pages
WIth that said, you should not over optimize your pages while you work on optimizing them.
The easiest way to ensure you don’t over optimize your content is to decrease the number of times you mention your target keyword, lowering it to two to five items.
This is why using synonyms for keywords is so important.
Place your target keyword in one H1 tag and one H2 tag at max. If you need to use it again in another H2 heading, use a synonym instead.
If you’re unsure whether or not you’re over optimizing your articles, use a content optimization tool like Frase, Surfer SEO and NeuronWriter. Aim for scores in the 70s and 80s to avoid over optimization.
8. Internal & external links are important
Internal links improve your site structure. They allow your readers to navigate themselves through content groups on your website.
Plus, inserting relevant internal links on pages helps search engines understand what your site is about and which pages are most important. It’ll see the pages with the most internal links as being more important than other pages.
Relevant external links give your content credibility.
They, too, help Googlebot understand what your content is about, and they make what you have to say appear more credible if you link to authoritative sources.
9. Dofollow vs nofollow
When you insert a link into a webpage, you have the opportunity to give an attribute of “dofollow” or “nofollow.”
Dofollow instructs Googlebot to follow the link and crawl the page it connects to whereas nofollow instructs Googlebot to ignore the link.
This is why when you receive backlinks, you want them to be dofollow.
For external links you insert on your own site, use dofollow for credible sources and nofollow for affiliate and sponsored links.
The latter prevents you from passing link equity, also known as “link juice,” to the company you’re an affiliate of, which Google prefers you to do for “sponsored links.”
10. Performance and UX will impact your rankings
Unless you have a domain authority as high as Forbes’, Google won’t promote your website in organic search if it has performance issues.
Metrics that indicate performance issues include page load time, bounce rate and time on site.
Scores from Google PageSpeed Insights are helpful in determining performance and user experience (UX) issues.
Google wants to deliver better results to users. It looks bad on their part if they promote sites that won’t load or lag when you click a button.
11. Affiliate content needs to be genuine
If your readers trust your affiliate-based content, Google will eventually recognize that trust and promote your affiliate-based content to improve their search rankings.
They have algorithms in place that help them understand this and they use data from Chrome in their rankings.
Ways to make your affiliate content more credible include actually testing products you recommend, including real reviews and testimonials you can link to on the web, and including sections like “My Experience with [product name],” or simply providing insights from your time with the product as you describe its features and attributes.
12. Link building is a legitimate SEO tactic
Link building refers to the practice of performing specific tasks in order to acquire backlinks.
Buying backlinks is a violation of Google’s spam policies, but acquiring them through other efforts falls in line with what Google expects from organic content.
These efforts include guest posting and outreach.
For guest posting, you provide a free blog post to a website, and they reward you by allowing you to insert a link back to your website somewhere within the post.
For outreach, you find outdated content that relates to content you’ve published on your own website. You then reach out to the site that linked to the outdated content and suggest your own up-to-date content as a suitable replacement.
These are legitimate SEO strategies that shouldn’t be ignored, especially by smaller sites looking to grow.
Note: Technically Google frowns on any tactic used to increase rankings but if you don’t do link building, you’ll struggle to rank. This is why it’s best to approach link building by asking yourself this question; “Would I want this link if Google didn’t exist?”
13. Off-page SEO signals can impact your rankings
One common way to improve the search engine ranking of your entire site is to generate more traffic from external sources.
These include social media marketing, guest posts, PR campaigns, reviews and business listings.
And yes, guest posts do more than just generate backlinks for your site. They also generate traffic, especially if you’re able to land guest posting deals on quality websites.
Over time, this increase in traffic and backlinks from credible sources will help Google recognize you as an authority in your niche, which will encourage them to promote your content more and more on SERPs.
14. SEO tracking helps you measure your success
While they may be expensive, SEO tools help you measure the success of your SEO efforts over time.
They can also help you perform experiments. For example, you can write each meta description in a certain way to see how it impacts performance.
You can also see how performing specific tasks can fix your performance, such as eliminating duplicate content on your site or optimizing content with relevant keywords.
Free tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console have metrics that can help you measure your success, but you should use a keyword tool that allows you to track your rankings over time.
Final thoughts
Understanding the basic principles of SEO can be daunting especially if you’re a beginner.
SEO is more than content that’s optimized for search engines. There’s also things like keyword research, link building, and more.
Now that you know what the fundamentals are, explore each of them in more detail and start implementing them on your own site.
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