Source: https://www.todhost.com/blog/a-complete-guide-to-good-seo-for-beginners.html

Investing in your website design is good, it will help build a good reputation for your especially with your first time visitors. It will help conversion easy, it will help you get referrals. But all these will be difficult to achieve with a poor Search Engine Optimization. We have been dealing with lots of clients here at Todhost and one major problem they want to overcome is how to build traffic to their website. The simple answer is that you should begin to take SEO seriously. In this article, we undertake to present the essential steps you should tae to achieve good SEO for your website as a beginner.

1. Use Analytics for Monitoring

There are lots of free analytic tools. The most popular is Google Analytics(GA). With GA, you can track the performance of your website, monitor its bounce rate, now where your visitors are coming from in terms of country and city, monitor the length of time visitors spend on your website and so on.

You also need a Google Webmaster Tools account to track your traffic, view site errors, view your click through rates, check how your website is performing with various keywords and areas that need improvement like short and long metatags, short and long title tags, descriptions and so on.

GA helps you to see which pages receive the most hits, see where your traffic is coming from. Who links to your site? What keywords are people searching when they find your site? These are both important factors to help inform your future efforts.

You will also find other analytic tools very useful. One of such very useful tool is Pingdom. Pingdom will help you determine the speed of your website at ever point in time. This is very important because website speed has become a ranking factor in Google. Google's focus on user experience places a lot of importance on the speed of your website and Google simply wants websites that make users happily to be placed at the top of their search engine result pages.

Other useful analytics for SEO will include Seositecheckup, Scrubtheweb, Woorank, iwebchk and Seoptimizer.All of these analytics will provide useful guide on areas needing improvement on your website. One good thing about them is that they provide a score for your SEO efforts and tell you if you rate well or poorly.

2. Use Quality Keywords

Keywords are still relevant. Although Google has announced that it no longer use keywords to rank websites, The keywords placed in website content are still valuable to help the search engines understand what your website is all about. Keywords should appear naturally in your content, in the titles of pages, URLs, image names, and in the content itself. Don’t force keywords in there. When considering which keywords to focus on, don’t go too general. Be precise and just use the keywords naturally. If you make clots for women, then just stating that you are a "Women Cloth Designer" will just be enough to drive traffic to your site by ranking you high for people who search for "women cloth designers".

How Not to Use keywords

Google cites the following as examples of keyword stuffing - the practice of placing as many seo keywords onto a page as much as possible. These are the cases of bad use of keywords and should be avoided because Google hates it:

Listing phone numbers without substantial value to your users
Big blocks of text listing cities or states you want your webpage to rank for
Repeating the same words or phrases so often that it sounds unnatural (like in the example above)

What then, you would ask, should be the best practice?

We will recommend that you write just the way you speak. Be professional in writing, selecting your words and using them rightly within the right content. Let your use of words be natural and you will find that you have been able to put out an excellent piece of writing.

3. Other On-Page Tags

One of the most important aspects of your website SEO is your title page. The website title remains a ranking factor and should be taken seriously. It should contain the keywords you want to rank for and we recommend that it should end with your brand name.

We have used the following format for our website title:

Primary keyword - Brand Name

MOZ Recomends the following as an optimal format:

Primary Keyword- Secondary Keyword - Brand Name

In both cases, the primary keyword precedes the brand name and you should avoid placing your brand name first when writing website titles. This is not to say that websites who place rand name ahead of their primary keywords perform worse than those who place brand name behind keywords. Some evidence suggest that this is not always the case. However, Google tend to consider the words you place first as more important than those you place last.

Note: Keep title tags between 10 to 55 characters. Although we have recently tested and seen title tags as long as 63 characters in Google SERPs, we strongly recommend that your title should not be longer than 55 characters because we have also seen titles as short as 50 characters. Google tend to present about 60 characters and rarely will show more than 55 characters.

So, ensure that your title and descriptive tags contain the relevant keywords for the page. The title tag should be short and descriptive. The meta description tag should be a somewhat longer description of the content and should be kept at about 150 characters.

Heading tags should be used inside the content itself to set up separate sections. Only ever use one H1 tag, at the top of the content, for the main header of the content.

4. Use Clean Search Engine Friendly URLs

Depending on the tool with which you have designed your website, if you have used a Content Management System like WordPress or Joomla, ensure you enable search engine friendly urls in the admin section.

Always make sure your urls are like this: https://www.yourwebsite.com/university/article/avoiding-negative-and-bad-seo/
and not like this::
https://www.yourwebsite.com/university/article.php?s=115673

Search engines pull information from URLs. The first URL lays out the content precisely, the second gives no information whatsoever. Using plain language makes it very easy for search engines and browsers to understand the content of the page they’re visiting..

5. Use a sitemap
A sitemap will help search engines easily navigate your website and its content structure will be easier for human visitors also. Sitemaps includes internal links to your content, linking it together and requiring fewer clicks to get through. You will also have to submit your sitemap to the search engines especially Google and Bing.

6. Optimized the Speed of Your Website

The speed of your website is very important. A fast website is much more appealing to visitors and search engines love it and will always reward such websites with better ranking because they are appealing and provide better user experience.

Basically, to speed up a website, you need to take not of the following:

Ensure that cache is enabled on the website. If you are using a CMS, their should be a plugin to enable which will handle your caching system. You may want to check the documentation of your content management system on how to do this and you also learn more about caching here.
Ensure that you optimize your images, template CSS, JS, and disable the development mode in your template settings.
Check up your website script documentation for additional steps for caching.

Note: If visitors come to your site and it doesn’t start loading near-instantly, they’ll quickly grow frustrated and look elsewhere. Search engines take this into account and if your site loads slowly while they are crawling it, your rankings will suffer. It’s always easier to start off making sure your code, images, and other assets are optimized rather than go back and make changes later. Use tools like Pingdom or PageSpeed Insights to give you ideas on where you can improve your site’s speed. That way you will now how much improvement is required. For a simple guide, if your website loads in less than 2 seconds, then it is fast. If it loads between 2-5 seconds, then it is normal. If it loads in greater than 5 seconds, then it is not good and will require immediate attention.

Also remember, server speed could be a factor for speed. If server speed is slow, then their is probably nothing you can do to change the situation but to move to another web host.

Did we miss anything or are there things you'// want to add to this, let us know in the comment box.

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The eggheads would understand all of this. Me? I stopped at "beginner", the last word in the first paragraph

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For beginners.. Your site wont get to first page fast with this. Unless you're patient enough to wait for upto 1 year

this is the kind of thread nairalanders avoid with speed of light

SEO is king and their are very good tips.

Do you think Money hungry lazy Nigerian bloggers would understand this..

Well, I understood some part of it, although it seems that you took no pity on bloggers who are not used to big grammars...

I will take No. 1 and 2 and make some readjustments

Stay Healthy, Stay Wise

IsaacBuchi:
this is the kind of thread nairalanders avoid with speed of light

lol. there are few bloggers herein thats why

Lol,make I still Siddons for front page

uzoclinton:
lol. there are few bloggers herein thats why

try the same thing with another topic like romance or politics and we would have been on the second page by now

IsaacBuchi:


try the same thing with another topic like romance or politics and we would have been on the second page by now

or crime. nairalanders love crime.. lol

uzoclinton:
or crime. nairalanders love crime.. lol

Exactly!


So what are you doing in a thread like this btw...when u're not a blogger?

IsaacBuchi:


try the same thing with another topic like romance or politics and we would have been on the second page by now

Or Efe!

Ok

IsaacBuchi:


Exactly!


So what are you doing in a thread like this btw...when u're not a blogger?

Check my signature

virus05:
For beginners.. Your site wont get to first page fast with this. Unless you're patient enough to wait for upto 1 year

Patience is required for SEO success. Thanks for noting this. But again, for non-competitive keywords, high ranking can come quickly with quality content

Effiezynews:
Or Efe!

Lol

uzoclinton:
Check my signature

Oh, I just saw it.....cool site!
In your opinion is blogging really worth it? Does it bring in the green bulk$?

IsaacBuchi:


Oh, I just saw it.....cool site!

In your opinion is blogging really worth it? Does it bring in the green bulk$?

yes it can.. but it takes time. started mine out of boredom though and not because of the bulks

check my blog in my signature

uzoclinton:
yes it can.. but it takes time. started mine out of boredom though and not because of the bulks

Oh really,...you're already doing an impressive job at it. Kudos!


Maybe one of this days I'll send in a guest article...that'll be cool, huh?

check my signature

IsaacBuchi:


Oh really,...you're already doing an impressive job at it. Kudos!


Maybe one of this days I'll send in a guest article...that'll be cool, huh?

Of course.. would really appreciate it.

SEO here seo there. Why are am not seeing quality and actionable seo topics on nairaland?

IsaacBuchi:


try the same thing with another topic like romance or politics and we would have been on the second page by now

Hehehe. True there.

todhost:


Patience is required for SEO success. Thanks for noting this. But again, for non-competitive keywords, high ranking can come quickly with quality content

Every keyworld is becoming competitive bro. The 3rd world war would be caused by SEO nd the venue will be on Google's search engine. Up to 2 million blog posts r being published everyday across all verticals. Now tell me if there won't be war?!

IsaacBuchi:


Oh, I just saw it.....cool site!

In your opinion is blogging really worth it? Does it bring in the green bulk$?

Yes! It does. Very important will be the primary area of interest. We built a blog for Ogoninews.com and it is amazing how much traffic comes in there.

Luiz1:
Every keyworld is becoming competitive bro. The 3rd world war would be caused by SEO nd the venue will be on Google's search engine. Up to 2 million blog posts r being published everyday across all verticals. Now tell me if there won't be war?!

Interesting! I love the wars we fight without the use of weapons.

Importance of search engine optimization https://www.lekkihost.com/forum/index.php?topic=38.0

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