Five SEO Actions For Beginners

If you want people to find your website in the search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing, you need to be doing SEO, which stands for 'search engine optimization'. SEO is a set of methods and techniques that that can help your website rank better in the search engine results pages. A higher ranking means that more people will see your website when they use the search engines, which in turn leads to more visitors to your website.

SEO can be a complicated subject, which is why there are so many freelance consultants and digital marketing agencies offering SEO services. However, if you are running on a tight budget and can't afford to hire a professional, there is a lot of SEO you can do yourself. Here are five SEO actions for beginners that you should be using on your website.

1. Choose your keywords wisely. When you are planning your website's content, you should do some research about which keywords to use. Keywords are the search terms that people use to find websites in search engines. Think carefully about your target audience and consider what they might type into a search engine when they are looking for websites like yours. You can use tools like the Google AdWords Keyword Tool to help you with your research. When you are starting out, aim to have a list of no more than ten keywords that you will optimize your website for. Once you are ranking well for these ten, you can add more keywords to the list.

2. Use your keywords in the title tags of your web pages. Most SEO experts agree that a web page's title tag is one of the most important factors for how that page will rank in the search engines. You should always ensure that your title tag includes at least one of your keywords. The title tag should also describe the content of the page in a concise and accurate manner. This helps the search engines to decide how relevant the page is to a particular search term. The more relevant a page is, the higher it will rank in the results for that search term.

3. Use your keywords in the HTML heading tags. Heading tags (e.g. H1, H2, H3, etc.) also give the search engines a big clue about how relevant the web page is to certain search terms. So, as with title tags, you should ensure your heading tags contain your keywords. As a bare minimum, every web page should have one H1 tag that includes the same keywords that are in the title tag.

4. Check the keyword density in your website text. The frequency at which your keywords appear in your website's body text (known as keyword density) also helps search engines to match your web pages to relevant search terms. How often keywords should be used is rather a moot point among SEO experts. Some believe that stuffing a page with keywords is beneficial to search engine rankings, while others think that 'keyword stuffing' is viewed as a form of spam by the search engines. As a general rule, for a web page that has about 400-600 words of body content, use the main keyword once in the first paragraph, once in the last paragraph, and once somewhere in between.

5. Use your keywords in 'alt' tags. Every image on your website should have an alternate text, or 'alt' tag. This is not only important for accessibility but it also provides you with another opportunity to let the search engines see your keywords. Alt tags should describe what the image is. Make sure you include your keywords in these image descriptions.

If you follow these five SEO actions for beginners, your website should stand a better chance of ranking well in the search engines.

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