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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 buildin, 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.
