This SEO start guide was created from information compiled from Exposure Ninja, Wes McDowell, and some of my own experience. If you want to dive deeper into Search Engine Optimization, I highly suggest taking a look at their content, it helped me tremendously.

1. Choose your keywords

The base of your webpage’s SEO is your choice of keywords. Keywords are the words and phrases that you think potential clients and users will search for. There are many pieces of free and paid software, such as Ubersuggest, SEMrush, and Moz, that you can use to research how specific keywords perform. These types of searches will give you information such as how often the words are searched for, and how competitive they are. Choose a selection of keywords, some of which are popular and competitive, and others which are more niche and less searched-for.

I also advise figuring out who your competitors are. A quick way to do this is to search for the type of product or service you sell and see which companies are in the top search results. This data can give more tangible info about the phrases you may be competing for, and you may find some flaws in their SEO strategy that you can exploit. 

2. Organize your header tags

Once you know which keywords you want to use, you need to organize your website so that they make an impact. If you are familiar with the HTML language, which is used to build the basis of a webpage, you will recall header tags. If you don’t know HTML, I suggest you learn the basics somewhere like W3Schools or Codecademy. In terms of SEO, the hierarchy of the header tags rank the importance of the enclosed text. The <h1> tag is the most important, followed by <h2>, and so on. Text in the <p> tags provides essentially no SEO value. The most important tags, <h1-h3>, should all contain (as much as possible) your keywords and phrases. Remember to follow the hierarchy, though. Each page should have a single <h1> tag, and the lower value tags should be used on the various sub-headings and sub-sub-headings in a way that reflects the hierarchy.

3. Write a good meta description

The final task is to write your page’s meta description and title. Looking at the example above, the meta title is “Apple (Canada)” and the meta description is “Discover the innovative world…”. Both of these influence your site’s position in the results, but keep in mind it also affects the likelihood of someone clicking on it. Modern search engines can detect if you spam your meta description (or page for that matter) with keywords. But even if Google didn’t see it, would you click on a site whose name and description are just a jumble of buzzwords and search-able phrases? That would look highly unprofessional. Take the time to craft a reader-friendly title and description, while utilizing your most important keywords. 

Featured image by Pixabay, at pexels.com