Search Engine Optimization (SEO) may sound like rocket science especially if you are a newbie to being online. Although it sounds like an official and technical term, but the fact is it isn’t too hard for beginners to learn and apply.

However, SEO is time consuming and needs to be continually addressed. It is something that needs patience and constant practice. But, given the right knowledge, you can understand the basics. In fact you don’t really need to understand more than the fundamentals.

A basic definition of what SEO is methods that we use to manipulate our content to make it easier for the search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing to find and rank.

The main goal of doing SEO doesn’t stop at being indexed by Google and other search engines and getting a high rank. Rankings have zero value if there’s no traffic. A good practice of SEO will give you an increase in traffic by improving your rankings and attracting users from relevant sources, so you are more likely to have quality and meaningful traffic on your site that converts.

Before we begin with strategies you need to understand something first. As a beginner, your main focus should be on creating content for people first, search engines second.

So let’s take a closer look at fundamental steps the beginner to SEO should know and understand.

Keyword Research

SEO really start with keyword research. Keyword research is all about finding the right target market for your business, a market research. It’s about understanding your niche from the inside out. As I said before, this is about getting quality traffic to your website.

You need to decide who you are targeting (clients, other businesses) and what you want to rank for. Then you have to know the phrases, keywords that those people you targeted are searching for to find products and services you are selling. At the end you’ll use those keywords to earn your audience’s trust and persuade them to convert.

Where to do keyword research? Just use Google AdWords’ Keyword Tool

Content Creation and Optimization

Every search performed at Google, Yahoo and Bing was done either to find, learn, solve, buy, fix, treat, or understand something. So you have to create content that people will want to read when they are looking for more information.

But you can’t just write a brilliant article and expect people to find it and subscribe. Instead, you need to proactively target people that might be interested in your topic.

How to do that? Use those keywords you’ve researched.

Explore your main keywords to get the topics that your targeted audience wants to read about. Make sure that you have great content that other people want to share and linked back to. Your content should be unique, well-written, and packed full of informative information. Write them so that people will come back for more.

SEO is a constantly moving target so you have to keep your content fresh. Change your content and add to it often. All kind of content can add some amount of SEO. Whether it is a news article, blog entries, page, image or video, each piece of content can be optimized for the search engines. All you need to do is to include keywords in each of them.

But don’t go overboard. Remember there are real people, not search engines, who are using your website. Don’t just using keywords in your text for the sake of using them.

Link Building

Links and back-links are very important. The number and popularity of pages linking your website are votes that represent the web’s opinion of the popularity of site and page based. Links into your website, linking outside your website and linking to other pages and posts all count, either for popularity or navigation.

Link building is maybe the most time consuming and challenging part of SEO, and it’s one reason why so many outsource their SEO efforts online.

1. Internal Link

Many people put a lot of effort in maximizing their website’s external links while never pay attention to the internal links. Internal links are links that go from one page to a different page on the same website/domain. Your website shouldn’t just have links pointing toward it from other sites. Instead, make sure all of your internal pages link to each other.

From user point of view, internal links will allow them to navigate your website but not only that. Internal links, especially within the article or post area of your page, can decrease bounce rate and increase your page views per visitor by sending your visitors to other pages.

A strong internal linking structure will help the search engines to crawl through the pathways created by your link structure, so they can record all the pages on a website. This is what they call “spreading link juice”.  This way, even the pages deep within your website can be indexed by Google and benefit from SEO and page ranking.

2. External Linking

Trustworthy sites tend to link to other trusted sites, while spammy sites receive very few links from trusted sources. Thus, it’s wise to choose those sites you link to carefully and be equally selective with the sites you attempt to earn links from. There are no better votes than those that come from others. This is how backlinks are considered in the search engine optimization world.

You can create more back links through writing a valuable, informative and entertaining articles on your blog, guest blogging, press releases, free and paid review and article directories. Participate in conversations across the web, comment on relevant high-ranked blogs, and earn listings and links from other blogs.

Don’t Set It and Forget It

SEO is a long term process and battle. It is not something you can do today and not touch for a year or two. You can’t expect your website to stay optimized when competitors are being optimized as well. The reality is some terms that you optimized a month ago may become irrelevant to your product by now. You can never know why people will come to your website in the future.

Keep evolving your content. Provide search engines with more, varied content to index and feed searchers.

Image by Jônatas Cunha, used under its Creative Commons license.