What is SEO? A complete guide for beginners

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what is SEO? the expression “SEO” means “Search Engine Optimization” (optimization of search engines or what is called natural referencing). This is a practice of optimizing your web pages to rank higher on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

Search engine optimization is also a reliable and cost effective marketing strategy that allows you to drive traffic to a website and increase conversion rates.

To better understand what SEO is, this article introduces you to the basics of SEO and search engines, and explains how search algorithms work as well as the factors that influence your site’s ranking.

At the end of the article, you will also find SEO best practices and comprehensive resources to expand your SEO knowledge.

what is SEO and SEM: what's the difference?

Search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) are marketing strategies that businesses use to reach their audience through search engine results.

The main difference is that SEO focuses on optimizing pages so that they rank higher through organic traffic. These are site visitors from search engines such as Google or Bing .

For its part, the SEM uses paid strategies to increase the visibility of a website on search engines. Visitors from paid traffic click on advertisements generated on Google Ads or other platforms.

While SEO takes a while to give consistent and lasting results, SEM offers almost instant results. You will quickly see the number of clicks and conversions your ads are generating on search engines.

Although they are different, SEO and SEM work hand in hand. A good SEO foundation is necessary for a successful SEM strategy.

Optimizing your landing pages with keywords can improve Google’s quality score and increase your site’s visibility.

What factors influence SEO and which are the most important?

As a leading search engine, Google processes over 6.5 billion searches per day . Thus, a better ranking in Google search results can generate significant traffic to your site.

This is why it is essential to pay close attention to Google ranking factors. These factors are constantly changing along with Google’s search algorithms. They help deliver the most relevant content for a better user experience.

From page load times to website safety, here are the most important ranking factors you need to know:

Page speed: It defines the time taken for a web page to load. A page that loads quickly can help your site rank higher in search results. Monitor your site’s performance regularly and use speed analysis tools like Google’s PageSpeed Insights and the Pingdom Speed Test to get a feel for your site’s performance.

Mobile compatibility: Responsive design automatically adjusts website elements to accommodate different screen sizes, providing the best experience for visitors on all devices. Pages from responsive and mobile-friendly sites will appear higher in search results. Use Google’s ” mobile optimization ” test to measure the usability of your site.

High quality content: Provide relevant and factual information to answer specific queries. Google evaluates content length, structure, relevant keywords and information. Always create unique and original content to attract more visitors and increase the visibility of your site.

Backlinks: Also known as inbound links, these are links to your website placed on other sites, serving as an indicator of your site’s authority. When a website includes your link in its content, it marks your site as a relevant source. Pages with high quality backlinks from credible sites may rank higher in search engine results pages.

User experience:Google measures user experience using several criteria, including bounce rate and dwell time , also known as downtime. When visitors arrive at a site and leave it soon after, Google considers the site irrelevant. Therefore, if visitors stay for a while, it means that the site is providing valuable information.

Site security: Involves all actions aimed at protecting a website and its visitors from cyber attacks. Thus, Google gives priority to websites secured by HTTPS. A site that does not have one is considered insecure and may scare away visitors. Since security is a top priority for every Internet user, it is essential to add an SSL certificate to your site .

How does natural referencing work?

Google and other search engines make an effort to collect, organize and display relevant information to answer user queries. To do this, they go through three main processes, namely:

Crawling process: Search engines rely on a team of web crawlers (spiderbots) or simply bots (bots), to find updated content on the web. Crawlers help discover and collect the information needed to index a page.

Indexation: This is a process by which search engines store and organize the collected web pages. After web crawlers find information about a site, such as keywords and fresh content, they add the web page to the search index . When users search for relevant information, the search engine will look for the indexed website.

Ranking: The search index web pages will then be displayed in the search results, from the most relevant content to the least relevant content.

SEO improves your web presence by making your site more attractive to search engines. In other words, it’s about how well your site hits that series of stages, from crawling to ranking.

For example, well-structured internal links on your pages make it easier for crawlers to jump from page to page. This allows them to crawl your website in depth and index more of your content.

Additionally, search engine algorithms also take into account extended ranking factors, such as relevant keywords, backlink quality, and content freshness.

Thus, optimizing the content of your website taking these factors into account can dramatically improve your search results.

What are the different types of SEO?

Below is a brief overview of the four main types of SEO, along with their main targets.

On -page SEO	Off-page SEO	Technical SEO	Local SEO
Site content	Link building	Site speed	Local keywords
keyword optimization	influencer marketing	Schema markup	business profile
Title tags	Social networks	Internal links	Customer reviews
Image alt text	Forums	SSL certificate	Local content

To help you better understand SEO, the following sections outline the definitions of each type, how they work, and how they are implemented.

On-page SEO

On-page SEO refers to the process of optimizing the individual pages of a site to improve its ranking in organic search results.

This type of SEO focuses on both page content and HTML source code, including title tags, header tags, and meta description, in order to appeal to web users and bots. search engines.

On-page SEO also helps organize your page so that search engine crawlers can easily crawl your site’s content and index it for relevant search queries.

To guide you through on-page SEO optimization, we’ve rounded up some of the top practices you need to know:

Site content: Google uses a framework called EAT (expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness) to assess the quality of content, pages and sites. It favors high quality content from reliable authors and trustworthy websites. So, to rank higher in search results, you need to make sure that your page meets these criteria.

Keyword optimization: Placing keywords in your content helps the search algorithm identify the type of information it is providing. Perform keyword research using SEO tools like Semrush Keywords Explorer or Google Keyword Planner to find a target keyword and build your content around it. However, make sure the keyword allocation is natural to avoid Google’s penalty for irrelevant keywords .

Title tag: Also known as the page title , it appears as a clickable link that people see on search engine results pages. It determines the relevance of the page to the user’s search intent. A well-written title generates more clicks and more traffic to the page. Additionally, search engines like Google prefer a concise title that contains keywords, which allows it to rank higher in organic results.

Header tags: Dividing your content into chunks using header tags provides a better user experience and makes it easier for web crawlers to index your page. When users enter their search terms, the search engine searches for any relevant information using these tags as a guide. This makes your page more likely to appear higher in search results.

Alternative text for images: Alt text is an attribute that describes a specific image that the site cannot display and that is useful to visually impaired users. Screen readers use the information in the alt text to describe the image. It informs the search engine that the image is a valuable part of your page content. This provides additional ranking possibilities for your page as it may appear in Google’s image search results.

Meta description: This is the short description of pages in SERPs, which appears as snippets with the page title and URL. Meta descriptions include keywords and accurately describe the information provided by the page. A good meta description can drive more clicks and lower bounce rates if the content meets the user’s intent.

Off-page SEO

Off-page SEO refers to all activities performed outside of a website to improve the site’s ranking in search engine results pages. It gives the search engine an indication of how the audience perceives a site, business, or product.

Therefore, a well-constructed Off-page SEO strategy can help your website increase its page authority score and rank higher in search results.

Here are some Off-page SEO factors to note:

Link building: This is the process of acquiring links from other websites to your site. Google’s algorithm relies heavily on links. Every link you receive is a vote of confidence for your site. However, always prioritize quantity over quality and make sure you only get quality links from trustworthy sites.
Social media marketing: Establishing a strong social media presence is important to your business. It serves as a resource for users to check your reputation. Posting engaging content on social networking sites helps reach a wider audience. Plus, if your content is successful in attracting traffic from all over the world, the search engine will see that your site is trustworthy.
Approach to influencers: Building relationships with brands or influencers is a great way to build brand awareness. When done right, influencer marketing can help endorse your brand and bring new audiences to your site. This way you can get more traffic and recognition.
Forums: Forum pages such as Quora , Reddit, and Stack Overflow (all three links are in English) provide a great opportunity to promote your website. You can participate in real conversations between users by answering questions, which allows you to show your expertise and credibility. You can also add a link to any page on your site and drive organic search traffic.

While link building is the central aspect of this strategy, any activity that takes place outside of a site is considered Off-page SEO, and you shouldn’t neglect it.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO is the process of optimizing the technical aspects of your website to ensure that it meets the criteria of a search engine algorithm. This includes optimizing for speed , mobile compatibility, and website architecture.

Technical SEO optimization will help a search engine like Google to easily detect and index your pages. As a result, it will reward a website with well-optimized technical SEO with higher ranking in search results.

Not only does technical SEO help improve your search engine rankings, it also determines your user experience. Both users and search engines prefer a well-structured site, with fast load times and high security, which are all essential factors in technical SEO.

There are several technical SEO factors that you should take into account when optimizing your website:

Page load speed: A website whose pages take too long to load will have a higher bounce rate and rank lower. Measures such as site caching , image compression, and reduction of page redirects are some of the effective ways to optimize speed. Additionally, you can use tools like GTmetrix and PageSpeed Insights to determine which components to optimize.
Schema markup: These are tags that you can add to your HTML code to help a search engine better identify your content. Adding schema tags will improve your page’s snippets in search results. For example, add ratings or reviews in the meta description to make the page more engaging. This can generate more traffic and improve the click-through rate on your site.
Internal links: This is the process of attaching hyperlinks that point to other pages on the same website. By placing internal links, search engine crawlers will find and index more pages on your website. When implemented correctly, internal linking can also improve page authority, the browsing experience, and your page visit time.
XML sitemap: sitemaps Simply put, an XML sitemap is a collection of the URLs of your pages. It’s a kind of roadmap that allows search engine crawlers to reach important pages on your website faster. The AIOSEO plugin offers an easy way to create an XML sitemap for WordPress sites.
Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP): This web framework generates lightweight pages to optimize loading time for mobile users. When you enable AMP, Google serves your web pages through a designated cache, allowing your website to load faster, if not in an instant. Google also prioritizes websites with AMP, which makes this framework a way to separate high-quality sites.
SSL certificate: A website with an SSL certificate will enable HTTPS on its URL. It indicates that all information transferred between a website and its users is secure and encrypted. Since Google uses HTTPS as one of its ranking factors, enabling it helps your website rank higher in searches. If your hosting plan comes with an SSL certificate (Like BlueHost), be sure to activate it .

Local SEO

Local SEO is an activity of improving the visibility of local businesses in search results. It gives more visibility and allows companies to promote their brands, products and services to local communities.

When people search for “doctors near me” or “pet stores near me”, search engines identify their location by their IP address and present relevant results accordingly. To get a place in local search results, it is necessary to optimize your local SEO.

Google presents local search results with a map followed by three organic search results. For example, when a user searches for “restaurants in Paris,” the SERP shows three local businesses and a snippet of their location in Google Maps as the top results.

If you want to get your business to appear in local search results, pay special attention to different aspects of local SEO:

Google My Business Profile (GMB): The map that appears in the first results of Google’s local search is from GMB profiles. First you need to create an account . Be sure to fill in accurate and complete data, such as your name, address, and phone number, as this information will serve as ranking factors. Additionally, Google also ranks a GMB profile based on its distance, prominence, and relevance to a search query.
Local keyword research: If done right, including local keywords on your pages can improve your SERP ranking. Make a list of keywords that describe your products or services, then add location modifiers. An SEO tool like Semrush can help you identify keyword performance based on their search volume and difficulty.
Localized content: Targeting a specific audience, localized content can help your business website improve its visibility. Create locally relevant content that meets the demand of your target audience. Whether it’s blog posts, guides, case studies, or recommendations, be sure to choose the ones that match your business niche.
Customer reviews: Reviews show that customers trust your business, and Google will notice it. Therefore, start encouraging your customers to leave their reviews. You can do this by emailing them or providing them with a review page. Since Google also takes third-party reviews into account, be sure to monitor your reviews online.

SEO Best Practices: Ways to Improve Your Rank on Google

It is crucial to implement best practices, as SEO factors influence the ranking of your website in the search engines. Applying the wrong and outdated strategies will not only hurt your rankings, but can impact your traffic and conversions as well.

We’ve listed some of the best practices for improving SEO and keeping you competitive with your competition.

Targeting long tail keywords

Keyword research is essential for search engine optimization. It lets you know what people are looking for and what keywords your competitors are ranking for.

So it is important to know what SEO keyword research is and to do it effectively.

First, you need to understand the different types of SEO keywords:

Seeds keywords: The keywords that define your niche and serve as the basis for developing your content, also known as target keywords. The keyword can be as simple as “coffee” or “what is SEO”.
Synonyms keywords: Keywords with the same meaning but composed differently, attracting similar search results. For example, “how to frepair a broken headphones” can be replaced with “how to fix broken headphones”.
Long tail keywords: Longer, more specific sentences that meet a specific search query. They usually consist of three or more keywords, such as “gluten free chocolate cookie recipe“.
Semantically related keywords: These keywords are conceptually related to each other. For example, “visit Los Angeles” is semantically related to “plane tickets to LA” and “top destinations in LA”.

The key to SEO optimization through keyword research is targeting a topic that is relevant to your industry and has good traffic potential, while keeping in mind parameters such as:

Search volume: It determines the number of people looking for a specific query in a given time and this is usually measured using national data.
Difficulty of the keywords: Also called “keyword competition” this metric measures how difficult it is for a keyword to rank in Google’s organic search results.

Fortunately, SEO tools like Ahrefs , SEMrush( See the full review of Semrush HERE) , and Google Keyword Planner can easily identify these metrics.

If you want to write content that contains a cookie recipe, checking your target keywords will show that most of them are very competitive:

If your website is new and you are targeting the keyword “peanut butter cookies”, you are unlikely to rank well on Google. So it’s best to start listing long-range keywords, such as:

A high search volume keyword attracts more organic search traffic, but it is also more competitive. Targeting high search volume keywords means competing with high quality sites that have greater authority.

On the other hand, long tail keywords have less competition and allow you to create highly relevant content for your audience.

Start by improving your website traffic with long reach keywords and build your keyword SEO strategy from there.

Match your content to search intent

Search engine algorithms allow more advanced search results to be presented to users based on what they are looking for.

For example, Google’s algorithm not only provides users with relevant search results, but is also able to determine their specific search intent.

When a user searches for “how to pair a JBL Bluetooth speaker,” Google presents them with results from pages or videos with instructions.

In contrast, when a user searches for “buy a JBL Bluetooth speaker,” Google instantly displays e-commerce pages at the top of the results.

This is because search algorithms can detect the top four search intents and act on them.

Informative: These are the users who want to know or learn something. Searches matching this intention include, but are not limited to, phrases such as “how to”, “who is” and “what is”.
Navigation: Users with this intention seek to visit specific sites. Instead of typing the URL into their address bar, users choose to browse through Google. Here are some examples of searches corresponding to this intention: “Reddit Connection”, “Facebook”, “Spotify”.
Commercial: Users typically do this research before making a purchase. They study and compare several brands, products or services to find the best option. A common query for this search intent looks like “2021 gaming laptops” or “top restaurants near me”.
Transactional: These people are looking for a specific product or service to purchase. Searches typically include brand names, such as “Buy Samsung Galaxy S20” or “Air Jordan Retro For Sale”.

For example, to get rankings for a keyword like “natural facial cleansers,” you need to craft your content for informational purposes. Focus on answers to possible industry questions, write about the benefits of natural products, tips for clear skin, or do-it-yourself natural products.

However, it is different when you want to get a ranking for “best webcams for streaming”. Users with this intention just want to compare the best webcams for streaming. It is therefore a commercial intention.

With this in mind, SEO best practice is to align your content to meet different types of intent. In short, identify what your users want and provide them with answers.

Include target keyword in title tags

The title tag is essential for your website. It gives users insight into the content and helps them understand why it is relevant to their searches.

Users want to find web pages that feature keywords relevant to their queries. That’s why Google urges you to create quality headlines and snippets for search results.

When you optimize a title tag with a target keyword, it gives the search engine more opportunities to discover your website and rank it higher.

For example, the first results for “how to increase productivity in the workplace” contain a specific target keyword.

The key is to place your main keyword at the start of the title. This not only helps grab the attention of users, but also helps search engines determine the topic of the page.

However, make sure the keyword placement is natural and avoid stuffing unnecessary words.

Besides optimizing your title tags, it’s also important to craft your meta descriptions. This allows you to think about the topic of the content and get people to click on the page.

Some SEO tips should be noted: Descriptions should be around 150 characters long, use active voice, and be actionable.

If you’re using WordPress, the Yoast SEO plugin offers suggestions for title tags and descriptions, as well as a snippet editor that lets you preview how your page looks on Google.

Get authorized backlinks

Authorized backlinks refer to links from reputable websites. Google’s algorithm considers backlinks to be votes of confidence on your site and takes into account the domain authority of the source to validate them.

An adequate amount of authorized backlinks will provide more benefit than an excessive number of links from spam sites.

High quality backlinks help your search engine rankings, while low quality backlinks can hurt your site’s credibility.

Here are some SEO tips for building quality backlinks to your site:

Writing quality content: It is essential to provide comprehensive and informative content on your site. This allows other sites to judge your authority and determine if your page is worth linking.
Guest blogs: This is the practice of writing a blog post for another website. In return, they allow you to add back links in the article or in the author’s “bio” section. In addition, you benefit from your brand recognition and exposure to a wider audience, which in turn drives more organic traffic to your site.
Analysis of the backlinks of your competitors: Keeping an eye on the competition allows you to identify websites that are likely to link to your site. Tools such as Semrush Backlink Tool will allow you to monitor backlink opportunities. Once you have listed the sites that link to your competitor, contact the site owners and present your pitch.
Creating broken links: This technique involves finding HTML 404 errors on a website and notifying the site owner. It allows you to suggest your website as a resource to replace the broken link. You can use Semrush Target URL Error (Semrush Backlink Analytics) to spot and identify broken links on the web.

Prepare for the new algorithm

Google has introduced a new search algorithm called “page experience“. It is a set of signals that measure the user’s experience when interacting with a web page.

The page experience includes existing SEO factors such as mobile friendliness, website security, and page speed. It also uses Core Web Vitals , a set of parameters that measure loading, interactivity, and visual stability.

These measures include:

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): indicates the time taken to load the most important content on the page, including images and videos. The ideal charging time is 2.5 seconds.
First Input Delay (FID): measures the time that elapses between when a user first interacts with a page, such as clicking a link or pressing a button, and when the browser processes this application. The suggested DIF is less than 100 milliseconds.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): counts the total number of unexpected layout changes on a page during the load phase. It prevents visitors from clicking on items that have suddenly changed position. For the best user experience, a website should have a CLS score below 0.1.

Now that you know what comes into play in the next search algorithm update, here are some tips you can take to prepare your site for the new update:

Detect and correct usage problems: Usability refers to the ease of use of a website. Use web page heat mapping tools such as CrazyEgg and Hotjar to find out how visitors are using your site. The tool highlights the parts that get the most attention and those where visitors are likely to get blocked, allowing you to improve your page structure and provide a better user experience.
Activate navigation safety: Google eliminates potentially dangerous sites from its search results. It keeps visitors away from malicious and deceptive content. Access the Security Issues Report in Google Search Console to make sure your pages have no security issues. It can detect pirated content, malware and phishing attacks.
Optimize for mobile devices: Responsive design automatically adjusts website elements to accommodate different screen sizes. It provides the best experience for visitors on all devices, from desktops to smartphones. Some good approaches include applying a fluid layout to your design and eliminating pop-ups that launch new windows.