When you first enter the world of search engine optimization (SEO), you may experience fear from a huge amount of things you need to learn. You understand that many professional optimizers have been participating in this game for more than ten years, constantly tracking updates of search engine algorithms.
Obviously, you first need to catch up with all these “SEO monsters,” and the realization of this makes you disheartened.
But before you feel too depressed, we will calm you down. Although SEO includes many components, each component itself is not too complex. If you decompose SEO to its basic fundamentals, then everything will become clear.
So, what SEO basics should you learn first?
1. The overall picture
Before you begin to understand the individual "chips", read the definition of SEO, its goals.
The goal of SEO is to optimize your site so that it ranks higher in search queries related to your industry. There are many ways to do this, but almost everything comes down to increasing your relevance and credibility. Relevance is an indicator of how your content matches an incoming request (and can be customized by selecting a keyword and creating content), and your credibility is an indicator of how reliable your site is in Google and Yandex search engines (which can be improved using links, mentioning brand, high-quality content and user interface).
2. Authority of the domain and page
The authority of the domain and pages affect the ranking of your site in search networks. They are calculated based on the quantity and quality of incoming links to your site. The higher the score, the higher all your pages will be ranked in the results of a normal search.
3. General internal site optimization
Internal optimization is a set of tactics, most of which are easy to implement, focused on making your site more visible and indexable for search engines. These tactics include such things as the optimization of your titles and meta descriptions, the inclusion of basic targeted key phrases in them, the provision of sufficient, relevant content on each page. More about this, we wrote here.
4. Content Marketing
Although content marketing can be viewed as a separate strategy, it’s best to consider it as a necessary element of the SEO process. Only by developing high-quality content over time can you optimize keywords for your goals, create credibility for your site, and enlist the support of a loyal audience. You should know the basics of content marketing before proceeding with other SEO items.