Quick SEO Tips for Beginners

Post date: Aug 25, 2017 12:40:48 PM

Easy Seo Checks (SEO 102)

Are you doing it right? Are you doing it wrong? Does anyone really know for sure? I'm going to let you in on a little SEO secret. Before I knew anything about easy SEO, Elance considered me an SEO expert. They let me in the elite SEO clubs. I haven't bothered to check in with Upwork's testing options. There's no need. I'm a top rated freelancer on Upwork. I know all I need to know about quick SEO tips for beginners. Most people naturally do well with SEO without even knowing a thing about it. Just in case, let's discuss some easy SEO checks you can do right now.

Quick SEO Tips for Beginners

First, lots of old school and new school SEOS disagree about they way things should go. These quick SEO tips for beginners are very basic for the newbie. If you use WordPress, you can add a plugin like Yoast (any SEO pack will do.) Don't fret if you don't always get the green light. Those SEO plugins are a little testy. But, Blogspot, Google Sites, and other website platforms don't make SEO as simple. You have to go it on your own, and if you don't have the the right tags turned on in settings- you're going to get very frustrated. Do you need to pay and SEO expert to help you? No way, you can totally do it on your own. Starting fresh is kind of fun! Editing old SEO errors and updating hundreds of website pages is a TOTAL DRAG. For this reason, I say, don't do it! 

What's that you say? Don't do it? You don't need to panic and update all of your old pages at once. Start small. It might not be necessary to do all of that work. I mean, I'm sure every single one of your pages is getting like a million hits a day, right? Not. The only reason you might want to update all pages on your site, is if you have product pages. Even then, I'd start with just a few. For those who don't, we're going to focus on your top 10 most popular posts/pages. How do you know what are the top 10 most popular pages? There are several ways to figure this out, but the best way is to add Google Analytics to your site. 

If you don't have Analytics, you'll have to find another way to discover your top 10 posts. Google Analytics is the most accurate way, and the results may surprise you.  A landing page is the first page people landed on when visiting your site - either through referral traffic, social media, etc. The same post may appear several times- to get the top 10, you may have to click through the list using the arrows at the bottom of the table. Once you've compiled your list, you're ready to update that SEO!

SEO for Blogpsot/Blogger Sites

If you read other pages about easy SEO tips or simple SEO for beginners and you have a blogspot blog, your mind might become boggled. That was my first experience. Every site told me to insert keywords into my meta tags, meta descriptions, alt tags, and title tags. I did a search to find out what the heck a meta tag and meta description was. I discovered that a meta description was simply a search description. Um, okay... I couldn't find that anywhere. When I asked other blogspot (Blogger) bloggers, they said- it's in your post. It's your post description. Still stumped. Know what I found out? Some Blogger templates don't have it turned on! You have to go into settings and turn it on. Here's how:

SEO for Blogger Blogspot
META TAGS for SEO Blogger

Search Description Tip: Copy  and paste the portion of your opening paragraph that includes the H1 Title of your post. For me, that's usually the last two sentences of my first paragraph:

'I know all I need to know about quick SEO tips for beginners. Most people naturally do well with SEO without even knowing a thing about it. Just in case, let's discuss some easy SEO checks you can do right now.'

SEO For WordPress

Add an SEO pack plugin. Most of them are fine. Use it, it will walk you through the key tags needed for SEO. However, it's still a good idea to learn SEO basics.

Quick SEO Basic Tips for Everyone

Ready to roll? Do a quick check on your 10 top posts of all time and update them accordingly. From this day forward, use these basic SEO checks to ensure you're hitting all the right places for SEO site optimization.

Use HEADING TAGS appropriately.

Quick SEO Tips

How do you know what keywords to use? There are many technical, time consuming ways to find keywords for SEO. I hate complicated things, don't you? If it seems too complicated, I keep procrastinating and may never get it around to it. That's why I use this secret,  a simple keyword tool. Okay, it's not really a tool. It's my best friend. You've met her. Google! Google it. But, not all of it. Start typing the main word or the first few letters of the word you want to use as a keyword for your website. Don't complete the phrase! Also, if you've Googled the phrase a lot - it won't work for you unless you clear your history. You can also ask your human friends to Google it for you. 

Google Keyword Tool for SEO

SEO FOR SITE CONTENT (Body Text)

In your first paragraph, as early as possible, you should repeat your title verbatim (word for word.) The title that you Googled for SEO, 'Quick SEO Tips for Beginners.' The Title that is your H1 tag. I don't always do that. The Wordpress SEO packs get mad and don't give me a green light. It's the best practice, but as long as all of the words appear in the first 150 or so characters, (as close to the beginning as possible) the search bots will find them. Let the search engines know it's super important to you by making it bold - or even better hyperlinked (clickable.) Tip: If you're hyperlinking it - make sure it goes to another page on your site that uses those same keywords. Don't send people away in the first paragraph of your content, they won't come back!

Side note:  I sprinkled in lots of SEO phrases in my first paragraph.

IMAGES: Add ALT TAG and/or TITLE TAGS to at least one image in every page. I add them to all images and change them up based on the Heading tags that they are closest too. Meaning, I copy a heading tag, 'Easy SEO Checks' and paste it into the title tag or ALT tag on the image. On most website platforms, you'll click to edit the image and the tag boxes appear. For Blogger/Blogspot (it loves to be difficult) click on the image, click on properties and the boxes appear. This helps people find your images. I've noticed (especially in Yahoo) that these tags help my images rank top in image searches- often when the posts don't. Yeah, go do that!

Under another keyword phrase with a title tag, write about your topic and sprinkle in all of those suggestion that Google shared with you. Continue to write your content. At the end of your post content, write a brief summary using your title again. Ta da! That's it. Use the SEO quick check below to make sure you hit it out of the park. You can use this post as a template. Just don't confuse bold words or phrases as H tags. Use 'inspect element' to see where I placed my H tags. Highlight a title, hover, right click, scroll down and click 'inspect' on the box that pops up- bet you always wondered what that was, huh. It shows the html code. This is also how brands discover if you made a link no-follow or do-follow (more on that in another post.)

Easy SEO Tips

SEO QUICK CHECK OPTIMIZATION LIST  (Edit your 10 most popular posts and write posts this way starting today.)

Final Note, this website isn't really a website at all. It's a product of Google Sites for Business. Basically, it is an SEO's worst nightmare, but I do what I can with it. My other site, Kids Creative Chaos, ranks on the first page of Google for many keyword phrases. Hopefully, this one will too. I've only recently started using it as a blog. 

Join me on Instagram  or follow this site on Facebook.

Let us do it for you: SEO Optimization Marketing