Beginner's guide to SEO

If you’ve recently built a new website, or you’re still tossing around the idea, there’s one topic you should definitely brush up on: SEO. In a nutshell, search engine optimisation is the process of making certain changes and optimisations to your website to help it rank higher in search results. It’s certainly not a simple task, but this quick beginner’s guide should help you hit the ground running.

Part 1: On-page SEO

The first step in optimising your website for search should always happen on your website itself. This is known as 'on-page' SEO and refers to all the things you can control and tweak in order to boost your site’s visibility on search engines such as Google and Bing. There are many different types of on-page SEO, but here are the big-hitters you should work on first:

Page titles. Each of the pages on your website should have a title that reflects your target keywords.
On-page content. The words on your website are all-important when it comes to SEO. Not only should they tell your brand’s story and appeal to your visitors, but you should also make sure they’re optimised towards your core keywords.
Title tags. The content on your website should be broken down into sections with headings, all of which are strong SEO signals for Google. Again, these should be optimised towards your target keywords.

Part 2: Off-page SEO

Once your on-page SEO is done and dusted, you’ll need to consider “off-page” SEO. As the name suggests, this refers to things you can do to enhance your search visibility outside of the website itself.

The most common form of off-page SEO is probably backlinks, which refers to the idea of other websites linking to your content. Google will see these links and thus give your site more authority and bump it up the rankings. Backlinks aren’t easy to build organically, but that’s where the next step comes in.

Part 3: Your long-term SEO roadmap

The golden rule of SEO is that it’s not a one-and-done solution – it’s an ongoing process of tweaking and monitoring. As part of this, you’ll want to build an SEO roadmap or content strategy which will help you stay on track.

Google loves fresh content, and will always give a rankings boost to sites which publish regularly, so having new blog posts and other forms of website content added regularly is always a smart idea. You should also plan to monitor what’s working (and what’s not) using a free tool like Google Search Console.

As you can see, there’s a lot to think about when it comes to SEO. Thankfully, if you create your website with our Website Builder, handy SEO features such as site and page-level tagging are available out of the box. So what are you waiting for?