Beginner SEO Tips
S. E. O. Three letters every small business owner lives in fear of! Everyone is talking about SEO; they’re telling you it’s essential, you have to learn and it will “transform your business”. But, the thing is, you declared yourself “not-techy” some time ago. You’ve been sticking with that and seem to be doing just fine without this dreaded SEO nonsense, so you’ll just ignore it a while longer. Sound familiar?
Well I’m sorry to decline the invitation to your pity party my friend because you CANNOT ignore it any longer! It IS essential, and it WILL transform your business BUT, and really hear me on this, you don’t have to be a tech wizard to implement meaningful SEO into your website. Trust me; I’m a yoga teacher and wellness educator, I had NO interest in techy nonsense like SEO. Pffft! But since I applied these small changes to my blog posts and webpages my website has started to rank on the first page of Google for certain searches (this never fails to amuse me!) and Google searches now account for up to 30% of my monthly website traffic. So, don’t click away just yet! These are so easy - ANYONE can do them!
My top 4 Beginner SEO Tips that anyone can implement
Pick relevant SEO key words or key phrases
Think about what you search for when you’re on Google to get your keywords or phrases. Then use these in:
your heading & subheading
your page description
at least 3 times spread throughout your text on each webpage in the beginning, middle and end.
This article is all about “Beginner SEO Tips” - see if you can spot where I’ve scattered my keywords in here! And if you aren’t sure what keywords or key phrases to use try Neil Patel’s Uber Suggest to get your creative juices flowing.
Use your key phrase in at least one image on your page.
An easy way to do this, if your subject matter isn’t that visual (E.G. talking about SEO!), is by creating a Pinable graphic with an image and bold title. This serves your SEO and people can easily pin your article or webpage to Pinterest if they want to share it. Double win! You’ll title your image with dashes, like this; “beginner-seo-tips” so that Google gives you all the heart eyes!
Link build.
You want to have at least one link on your page to a relevant webpage with a great google ranking (even better - they link back to you!). You can also create inbound links from social media and blog sharing sites like MIX and Bloglovin. The more websites that are pointing to your website the more Google is going to trust your content and the higher you are going to rank.
When I started my website about three years ago I did absolutely no work on my SEO, so when I decided to take it a little more seriously I had, I’m not exaggerating here, THIRTY 500 - 800 word blog posts already published with extremely poor SEO. I spent about an hour each day for a couple of weeks going back over old content and rewriting my posts to make them more SEO friendly. It was honestly as painful as it sounds! But this did two important things: firstly, it made my website rank better, obviously and, secondly, it was great practice! Now, writing SEO-friendly articles is second nature to me.
See, that wasn’t too hard to sit through, was it? I hope you’ve enjoyed (I’ll take “tolerated”) reading your way through my go-to beginner SEO tricks and tips list, and if you’ve got this far then I know that you know that you’re ready to level up your website game. Go go go!
Kat x
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If you are a freelancer making your living from this kind of work, one of the major things you will always need to be aware of is how you can hope to have enough clients to keep your operation afloat as long as possible, and to make as much money as you can.