First time website creators are not expected to become SEO experts because it’s actually a whole separate field by itself but from my own personal digital marketing experience, I believe that it’s ESSENTIAL to learn SEO basics. In fact, if you don’t put the effort to LEARN SEO BASICS before creating your first website then that website is destined to fail unless you’re really lucky. So why is SEO so important? Because it will effect your website’s online presence and search engine rankings. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a marketing strategy that helps in indexing and ranking website pages/posts on popular search engines like Google or Bing in order to reach millions of people around the world for free. Google has the highest number of visitors on the world wide web and so if your website is NOT FOUND in the Google search results then you’re missing out on thousands of potential customers every month. Please read the following major points to learn SEO basics and try implementing them when creating a new website.
Keyword Research
The goal of doing keyword research is to discover the most suitable words or phrases that people search for in order to find your pages in the search results. You will use these keywords to optimize your website for on-page SEO. This means that you need to include the keyword you found for a specific topic in the title, slug, meta description and the body of the article. The keywords you select should have a search volume of at least 100 to 1000 searches per month and you should focus on ONE keyword per article. And since SEO is competitive and all short keywords are exhausted, I recommend that you use long tail keywords (4 to 6 words). For example, if you’re writing an article about losing weight then don’t use a popular keyword that thousands of bloggers have used like “weight loss”. Instead, be creative and try to rank for a longer and more specific keyword like “the best way to lose weight without exercising”. The best tool to find targeted keywords with lower SEO difficulty or lower competition is KW Finder. Please go ahead and type a keyword in the search tool below to find the best keyword ideas for your content.
Indexing a Website
After completing the content creation process, you should work on indexing your pages and posts on all major search engines. I recommend that you concentrate on Google and Bing since they are the two biggest two Search Engines in North America and Europe. Create a Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster tool accounts to verify the ownership of the website. Afterwards, you need to submit an XML Sitemap (URL that contains a list of all published pages and postes) to each account. In the WordPress Website Plugins, you can install a free SEO plugin called “Yoast SEO” which will help you verify the site’s ownership and will automatically generate an XML Sitemap for you to submit as well. This plugin is really useful as it will also guide you to optimize your pages/posts for SEO by editing the titles, slugs and meta descriptions. When you publish more content in the future, you can submit each page or post URL individually without having to submit an XML Sitemap again. In Google Search Console, you can go to the URL Inspection tab, enter the URL and press enter and then request indexing if the URL is not available on google. You can repeat the exact same thing in the URL Inspection in Bing Webmaster Tool. If you ever feel lost and need some help then hire SEO and Indexing Freelancers to do the hard work for you!
Building Backlinks
All of the steps mentioned above will only trigger search engines to detect a website and match the pages/posts to specific keywords. Pages and posts of a site may appear on the first page of Google’s search results but the chance of that happening organically is really low. This is why you need to learn and apply the most important part of SEO basics which is backlink building. A Backlink is any website on the internet that points to any page on your website through a link. For example, xyz.com writes an articles and mentions retirementprogram.org in this article using a hyperlink like this: https://www.retirementprogram.org or using an anchor text link like this: Make a Website that Makes Money. The more domains that link back to your site, the better your rankings will be as Google will start noticing that your site provides valuable information and it can be trusted since many domains are referring their audience to you. Furthermore, if the domains that link to your site have a high DA (Domain Authority) or DR (Domain Rating) then that will give your site more authority and credibility and in return, better ranking. So how can you get these backlinks? Unfortunately, It’s not an easy thing to achieve for beginners since their websites/blogs are brand new and they don’t have any reputation on the internet within their niches. One thing that I’ve personally noticed over the years with my own websites is that high quality content will attract backlinks organically without putting in any effort. There is a popular phrase that marketers use all the time: “Content is King” and so far from my own experience I believe that this saying is definitely TRUE! So I recommend new website owners to heavily promote and advertise their best pieces of content in the beginning stage and eventually this will generate tons of organic backlinks if the readers find the information provided valuable. Please watch the following video below as it will explain many important things about backlinks which I didn’t discuss in this section and it will also give you some good strategies on backlink building. If you’re interested to quickly boost your new website’s ranking on the search engines then get an SEO specialist to help you build HIGH QUALITY BACKLINKS FAST!
AI Search Optimization
I initially did not have this section as part of the SEO basics guide but since AI tools are taking over, knowing how to optimize a website for AI Search tools is becoming an essential part of SEO knowledge. Everything I mentioned in this guide so far works well for both search engines and AI search but there are a couple of important factors to consider especially if you want to generate organic traffic from ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews. The first and most important point is to generate an LLMS.TXT file for your website. LLMS stands for Large Language Models and it functions similarly to the XML sitemap file used for SEO which I explained in the indexing section above. AI tools use this file to crawl your website pages and posts so I highly recommend that you create it right away. You can easily generate it by going to the settings of Yoast SEO WordPress plugin and just enable the llms.txt file feature. This will automatically generate the file and your website will be ready to be crawled by popular AI Search tools. Keep in mind that AI search doesn’t crawl any programming languages besides HTML so if your content contains Java Script or anything other than HTML then the crawlers will ignore them totally. Please watch the video below that summarizes the other factors which you should consider while optimizing your website for AI search.
SEO Basics Summary
Preparing for SEO implementation is the key to a successful new website or blog. Investing time, effort and money into a site without considering SEO basics will lead to a major disappointment. To summarize the SEO concept for you, I have created a simple formula for you to follow and I think it’s all you need to know about SEO as a beginner:
Keywords + Quality Content + Backlinks = Free Targeted Traffic
To apply what you learned today about SEO and start earning money online, please follow my complete guide on How to make a niche website that makes money.