What Is SEO - SEO

Guide for Beginners

This article was originally published at:

https://www.blog.duomly.com/what-is-seo/
What is SEO - intro

When you start an online business, blog

about your hobby, or job as an online
marketer, you are probably interested in
getting more knowledge about getting more
good quality traffic for a longer time,
without spending tons of money for pay-
per-click campaigns.

Online marketing is huge, and it gives a

massive amount of possibilities to
display your product, service, or content
to the world. There are many different
branches and digital marketing methods
that can be used to grab traffic and get
clients. It’s possible to use influencer
marketing, email marketing, content
marketing, or even paid campaigns. But
the most desired traffic is organic
traffic from search engines.

Why?

In this article, I’ll explain to you what

SEO is, why it’s so important for your
online business, blog, or in your job as
an online marketing specialist.
For those who prefer watching content,
feel free to join our Youtube channel,
where we always create a video version of
(almost) every article.
Let’s get into SEO!
What is SEO?

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SEO stands for search engine

optimization, and it’s the process of
optimizing your blog or website to rank
higher in search engines like Google,
Bing, Yahoo, or any other. When your page
ranks higher, they are visibly higher in
the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages),
leading to a big amount of organic
traffic on the website.
If you try to sell a product or a service
or simply have a blog where you share
some knowledge, you want people to see
it, read it, and engage with your
content. Getting traffic helps you to
generate leads and earn money or monetize
your content.

SEO is a perfect way to find good quality

leads, and it’s relatively cheap. It also
lasts longer than PPC campaigns. It’s the
first and most important strategy for
many companies to rank high on the search
engine’s results page because it allows
them to get leads that are already
interested in something related to their
product or service. Organic traffic that
you get from the search engine results
page is not paid, like the ads placed
above the search results. You can see the
difference in the image below.
Search engine optimization consists of
three different elements:


- on-page SEO

- off-page SEO

- technical SEO

And you need to take care of all three of

them to get high ranks on the search
engine results page.

In the next parts of the article, I’ll

explain to you what those three
ingredients of SEO are, so you know what
you need to do to achieve the best
results in all of them.

Right now, let me tell you how does SEO

works because this will help you learn
what you need to do to get more from your
SEO strategy.
How does SEO works?

Everyone uses search engines like Google

or Bing, but do we ever wonder how it
works to see the links in a particular
order, and almost every time, the first
page can answer our questions or give us
enough information?

Let me explain what happens when you

enter the query into the search bar.

Search engines have crawlers, which are

kind of bots that go through the internet
and gather information on different pages
and index them. Then that information is
processed by different algorithms, which
check if content responds to your query.

There are several different factors that

algorithms take into consideration when
looking for the best answer, such as
domain authority, amount of links that
lead to the website, amount of outgoing
links, content quality, loading speed,
social metrics, proper keywords usage,
adaptation to mobile devices and some
more.

Those factors change depending on the

algorithm updates because developers are
still working to provide users the best
experience and the best results. That’s
why even if your website already has a
great position on the search engine
results page, it can change while
algorithms change happens.

Thus, it’s important to constantly be

fresh with the algorithms updates and
optimize your websites to search engines
to not lose your traffic.

I hope this explanation gave you a better

overview of what happens in the
background of search engines. Now you can
understand that SEO is optimization,
which will make your website fulfill all
important factors that algorithms
consider.

Right now, I’d like to tell you why SEO

is so important and why it’s a good idea
to dive deeper into these ways of
marketing.
Why SEO is important?

As I already mention, no matter if you

are a blogger, you have an online
business, or you are working as an online
marketer, you need traffic.

SEO makes your website more visible, and

being more visible on the search engine
results page means more leads that you
can change into paying clients. This is
why people appreciate SEO so much, and
everyone would like to rank in the first
10 results.

Comparing to pay-per-click campaigns, SEO

is much cheaper in the long term because
you are losing all the money after the
clicks. If your campaign isn’t good, it
can cost you a lot, and the results would
be poor.

With SEO, you are performing your website

optimization for a longer time, and if
the competition doesn’t try to get over
you, or the algorithms won’t change
significantly, your position will be
saved, changing just a little bit, or not
changing at all.
SEO is the marketing technique which if
done correctly, will pay you off for a
long time.

Right now, let’s focus on three important

aspects of SEO.
On page SEO

On-page SEO covers the activities that

are taken on your website to optimize it
for search engines.

When you think about on-page SEO is

about:

- optimizing the content with good
keywords research, including graphics or
videos,

- optimizing meta tags, 

- internal linking,

- website performance optimization,

- user experience (UX) optimization.

Right now, search engine algorithms are

getting smarter and smarter, so it’s not
enough to provide the content with the
keyword everywhere. The content needs to
be of good quality and respond to the
query in the most user-friendly way.
For example, if the content is easier to
explain with images, like, for example,
how to make a specific node, then search
engines will more often select content
with images or videos as better results.

The other very important part of the SEO

optimization on your page is optimizing
meta tags, which can be done using tools
like the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress.
Besides the UX and content, it’s also
very important to optimize your website’s
technical aspects, and about this, let’s
talk in the next paragraph.
Technical SEO

As I already mentioned above, your

website’s technical aspect is crucial in
your search engine optimization.
Algorithms take care of mobile-
friendliness, page speed, or internal
linking, so crawlers can easily navigate
your website.

Since 2019, the most popular research

engine, Google pays attention to mobile-
friendly websites. The crawlers go
through the mobile version of the website
or blog first and start indexing there.
That’s why it’s so important that the
mobile version of your page works good,
and loads fast enough. There is even
Google’s solution to help with this
optimization, and it’s a framework call
AMP.

Another thing important during technical

optimization is page speed. Your website
needs to load in proper time. You can
check if that’s all right by Google
PageSpeed Insights, then you’ll find out
what you need to fix.

Here, you can check a few tips from us

about page speed.
It’s also important to use proper headers
for the headlines, like H1, H2, or H3,
and add meta tags for every page. If we
are talking about meta tags, it’s also
necessary to remember about alt tags for
the images.

The next thing you can do from the

technical perspective to display high in
the search result is to provide content
that can be feature snippets. Those can
be lists, tabes, or paragraphs answering
the question immediately.

It’s also good to add the sitemap to your

website, which will help crawlers crawl
your page, especially if the website is
big and has lots of internal links.
Off page SEO

Off-page SEO is the third aspect of SEO

that you need to rank higher on the
search engine results pages. The main
idea behind the off-page SEO is all you
can’t do on your website, and it doesn’t
depend straight on you, like getting good
quality backlinks. Backlinks are the
links that link to your website, and they
show the search engine that your page is
valuable and has the authority. Getting
backlinks to happen during the process
called link building, and about this, we
will talk in the next section.

There are also some other aspects of off-

page SEO that are not related to links,
like social media marketing. Search
engine robots can check how engaging your
content is for your social media audience
and is shareable. The more shares and
engagement it has, the better is its
quality according to the search engines.
Besides social media, influencer
marketing can help with off-page SEO as
well.

What also counts is brand mentions. Even

if it’s not linked, it means that your
brand is valuable for people, and they
talk about it, so it may be worth being
shown.
Let’s now focus a little bit more on link
building!
Link building in SEO

As I’ve already mentioned in the previous

paragraph, link building is the process
of gathering good quality backlinks.
Link building can involve different
techniques, and for example, you can get
links to your website with guest posts,
but you need to agree with the platform
owner if you can put the link to your
website in the guest post.

The other method can be interacting with

website owners who have broken links on
the page which can be changed for your
link.

Gathering good-quality links to your

website allows you to grow your domain’s
authority, which will help you to rank
higher.
What are SEO keywords?

When talking about SEO, you probably

often hear about keywords or keyword
research, but what’s that actually about?
Keywords are those phrases that people
are typing or dictate for the search box
to find some information about or get the
answers.

For example, if one looks for a pancakes

recipe and types into the search box „how
to do pancakes,” and this phrase is a
keyword.

A keyword can be short and long, and it

doesn’t have to be a question, it can be
just one word like „pancakes”, but it can
also be „the best pancakes with chocolate
and cream in London”.

It’s important to select your keywords

wisely and do good research to find out
what your audience can search for. But
it’s not the only thing you need to
check, as if there are already one
billion pancake recipes, it can be
difficult to become visible.

To do the proper keyword research, you

can use free Google tools, like Google
Trends or Google Keywords Planner.
SEO audit

To start optimizing your website for

search engines, you need to know what is
wrong and what can be improved. To find
out that, you need to conduct an SEO
audit for your website.

This kind of audit should go through your

website and check it on different levels
for big bugs, which are necessary to fix
to rank better, like loading speed. It
should then show you fewer major bugs
which are easy to fix. The next thing
that audit should check is an analysis of
your organic traffic to find
opportunities in your content, which
means that sometimes a piece of content
can be improved, and the position would
be much better.

The next point that an SEO audit should

go through is the backlinks analysis, and
the last thing is a content audit.
You can do an audit like this by yourself
according to the list you prepare or
using any of the available tools to help
you with this.
What is SEO - summary

In this article, you found out what SEO

is and how important it is for your
digital marketing strategy those days.
SEO helps you to get good quality organic
traffic, and it costs almost nothing,
considering its long-term validity.

To make a good search engine optimization

for your website on your own, you need to
have web development and copywriting
basic skills. It will help you to avoid
the additional cost of hiring a
freelancer for some tech and content
jobs.

If you decide to go with an SEO strategy

for your website or your client’s
website, you need to start from an SEO
audit to find out what’s actually needs
to be improved.

It’s worth remembering that your search

engine optimization results will be
visible after some time because bots need
to index your page after changes. It
could be about one month or maybe more.
You can track your ranks progress using
Google Search Console.
I hope this article helped you understand
what SEO is, why it’s worth considering
it as your marketing strategy, and how
useful it is to know SEO.

Thank you for reading,


Anna from Duomly
Table of contents:
• What is SEO - intro
• What is SEO?
• How does SEO works?
• Why SEO is important?
• On page SEO
• Technical SEO
• Off page SEO
• Link building in SEO
• What are SEO keywords?
• SEO audit
• What is SEO - summary