Getting traffic to your website can be difficult especially when you’re just starting out. People create websites for a number of reasons to include;

• Making profit online by selling the products or services of others

• Giving their business an online presence

• Providing an information resource to people with the same interest as themselves

• An outlet for creative expression

• Starting up discussions and exchanging ideas and views on certain issues

Whatever your reason for creating a website or blog, no one will visit your site if it isn’t optimized for great online visibility. But how do you go about that? The answer is SEO.

Lots of times when I speak with newbie bloggers and business owners about the need to invest in digital marketing strategies that work, we get to the area of SEO and they’re always like, “what’s that?” The acronym seems strange to them, and so I have to always explain that the term stands for Search Engine Optimization.

I speak with them for a few minutes about all SEO entails and end my short lecture with the words “your blog or business website won’t thrive online without being optimized for search engines.”

If you are on the verge of creating the website or blog of your dreams or already have it set up, it is of dire importance that you hold SEO in high esteem. Not saying there are no other digital marketing strategies that work, there actually are, but none does it better than SEO.

One amazing benefit of investing in SEO is that for years to come, search engines still sends you traffic. Unlike Pay Per Click (PPC) and Social Media Marketing (SMM), the results and achievement of SEO lasts for a longer period of time.

If you use Google as much as I do, you must have noticed certain web pages on the SERP with a date that goes way back as 5 years ago. What that implies is, Google still sends that website traffic for an SEO optimized content published five years ago.

Let’s get on with it. Wish to get your website or blog ranking on Google’s search engine results pages? Here’s all you need to do:

1. Ensure You Have A Great Website
By this, what I mean is your site needs to have an amazing structure. How long does it take a user to find a page on your website? If your utmost wish is to have your site ranking high on search engines, it is imperative that every page and navigation link on your site be laid out as easy as can be.

Giving your site a good architecture not only helps users who visit your site, it also helps search engine crawlers understand your site and find other pages to index.

Your site should be easy to use and navigate through.

2. Keyword Research
Creating content for your website or blog without first doing keyword research is like starting a business without proper market research.

By doing keyword research, you are able to find out what keywords and topics are the hottest in your industry in terms of search volumes.

Identifying those keywords and creating killer articles out of them gives you the chance to both earn a place of great visibility on the SERPs and claim some of those click-throughs your competitors have been enjoying.

3. Publish High-Quality Content
Content is and will always be king. High-quality content is and will always be king. Don’t just write for the sake of writing; write to answer someone’s question or provide valuable information.

Does your content provide the answers or information a user seeks?

When someone searches for something on Google using a keyword or query, what the search engine does is that it presents the user all relevant answers to their query. These answers come in the form of informational and helpful contents ranked in terms of their relevance. Later on in this article, we’ll get to talk about how Google evaluates a content’s quality.

In order to have your website or blog performing brilliantly on search engines, it is important that you create contents that are helpful and optimized for the right keywords.

Another area to pay attention to when creating content for your website or blog is the number of words used in the piece. It’s a well-known fact that search engines favor websites with content of 500 words and above.

Poor or thin content are some of the reasons why users who click on a site immediately bounce back to the search results. And when Google notices you have a high bounce rate, it wastes no time to demote your page in its search engine ranking.

So create quality informational content that hits and exceeds 500 words, and you’ll earn your website or blog a high place on the SERPs.

4. Don’t Keyword Stuff
If there’s anything Google hates, it’s a keyword stuffed content. This is what one looks like:

"If you're looking for the best laptop bag, look no further. Our brand offers the best laptop bag that you could want for business or pleasure. With padding in our liners and a special pocket for your charger, this is the best laptop bag for travel or school."

Google sees such as an attempt to mislead search engines, and will punish your page for that.

5. Ensure Your Site Loads Fast
If you wish to up your ranking on search engines, it is important that your website and its pages load fast.

A slow page load equates a bad user experience. When a visitor has to wait for extended seconds or even minutes before a page on your site loads, the result is a demotion in your search engine ranking.

Google pays close attention to the sort experience users have when they visit your site so ensure your site provides visitors with the best possible experience.

6. Acquire Quality Backlinks From Authority Sites
Links from other sites that point to your site are referred to as backlinks. This is one way through which Google rates the quality of a website and its content. Google doesn’t understand great content, but it sure understands popular content. A content’s popularity is how Google evaluates its quality and rank-worthiness.

By building quality backlinks, you can increase your website or blog’s search engine ranking.

Trying to rank for highly competitive keywords can be difficult, but with a good number of quality backlinks, even that can be achieved.

Don’t waste your time getting backlinks from low-quality sites as that won’t do you any good. Instead, work towards getting backlinks from authoritative and relevant websites.

The question now is how does one build quality backlinks?

Powerful backlinks can be achieved by doing the following:

Creating great content – Sometimes, the content of a website is so good that authority sites can’t help but link to it.

Running link building campaigns – Guest posting

Don’t buy links, earn links.

7. Make Your Site Mobile-Friendly
We currently live in the mobile-first index age. Mobile-first indexing means Google now indexes and ranks the mobile version of a site before the desktop version.

So if you wish for your content to show up on search engine results pages, you must ensure the mobile version of your site is as responsive and optimized as the desktop version in terms of site architecture and page load time.


Doing well on search engines isn’t easy most especially when you’re just starting out, but by doing everything stated in this SEO ranking guide, you should be the proud owner of a successful website or blog in a space of time.

Please note the results of an efficient SEO endeavor won’t happen overnight. Search engine optimization is a long term investment so you should be willing to wait a bit before your good work starts paying off.



Source:
https://markandwrite.com/2019/03/04/seo-ranking-guide-for-beginners/

Thank You for this.