Did you know that the top 5 organic search results on Google spam about 67% of all the clicks? That’s a really big part of your site’s potential visitors that could go elsewhere if it’s not ranking high enough. But here’s the good news: you can do it even without being an SEO expert or spending a lot of money to boost your website’s search engine rankings. Notably, by applying a few techniques with a little elbow grease, anyone could succeed with their SEO strategy and get to the top of the search results.
Consider having your website come up first on Google’s search results for your keywords. Greater visibility will result in more organic traffic, more leads, and a higher growth rate for your company. And the best part? You aren’t required to do all this if you don’t want to. What you will need are just five steps.
This guide will help you grasp this complex phenomenon clearly and concisely. We will also provide practical tips that will be useful even for novices. This is a basic SEO guide, yet if you want to learn advanced SEO tactics, you can check the other guide linked here!
What is SEO?
SEO is about optimizing your site to improve its display and position in the search engine result pages. It is a mix of technical, on-page, and off-page strategies that help search engines recognize and rank your website. With SEO, you can increase your website’s traffic organically, attract more qualified leads, and continually grow your business.
Importance of SEO?
Today’s digital world depends on a company owning a powerful online presence irrespective of size. DIY SEO is the main tool for increasing your site performance in SERPs and driving targeted visitors. By ranking higher in search results, you can:
- Grow brand recognition and build audience trust.
- Bring more prospects with greater qualifications to your website.
- Enhance the user interface and their interaction with the technology.
- Get an edge in the competition of your field.
- Develop organic traffic with the goal of long-term sustainability
Can You Do SEO Yourself?
SEO can be demanding and sophisticated, but you can do simple DIY SEO without help. With the right skills, tools, and determination, anyone can improve their SEO and see results. SEO is a continuous process that must be adjusted to follow changing trends and maintain high rankings in the long run.
A Basic 5-Step Guide That Anyone Can Follow
Plan Your Keyword Research
Keyword research is a fundamental part of any well-optimized SEO campaign. Setting up the right keywords is the most efficient way to reach your target audience. Once you do so, you can be sure that you are attracting qualified traffic and optimizing your website’s relevance to search engines.
Keyword research is a tool to learn audience behavior in search queries and to align your website content accordingly.
How beginners can do it:
- Consider seed keywords that target your business, product, or service.
- You can use keyword research tools like Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush, and Ahrefs to find similar keywords and analyze search volume, competition, and relevance.
- Carry out the competition keywords analysis to determine the required gaps and opportunities.
- Prepare a list of keywords for your content: first- and second-level.
- Use keyword mapping techniques to use and distribute keywords better.
Rules to follow:
- Concentrate on long-tail keywords that are precise and less competitive.
- Aim for keywords that have search volumes (enough) and relevance to your business.
- Decide on keywords close to your website content that reflect user intent.
- Review and upgrade your keyword list monthly, using the performance and the trends as benchmarks.
Develop Your On-Page SEO
On-page DIY SEO is optimizing single web pages to make them more pertinent, better in quality, and more user-friendly. It includes optimizing the elements like the title tags, meta descriptions, header tags, content, and internal linking. By using the on-page SEO best practices, you can help search engines understand your content better, thus giving more opportunities to raise your website rank.
SEO-optimization of the page matters for the website’s content to be structured, optimized, informative, and convenient for users.
How beginners can do it:
- Optimize title tags and meta descriptions by using the exact keywords and interesting copy.
- Apply header tags (H1, H2, H3) to your content for better structure and emphasis.
- Generate content that is of high standards, satisfying the users’ needs, and offers interesting reading.
- Optimize images using descriptive alt tags and compressing them to speed up loading.
- Create an internal link to guide people and search engines through the site.
Rules to follow:
- Use engaging, relevant, and descriptive title tags and meta descriptions that are unique for every page.
- Feature the primary keyword you intend to rank for in the title tag, meta description, and H1 tag.
- Keep your content unique, informative, and on the topic of a keyword you want to rank for.
- Use short URLs consisting of the keyword of your choice.
- Make sure your website runs smoothly on mobile devices and loads fast.
Publish Optimized Content
Content constitutes the core element of establishing a strong DIY SEO strategy. One benefit of an optimized website is that you can easily publish articles and content that showcase your critical thinking and expertise in the field. Therefore, strive to produce informative, relevant, and SEO-optimized content for your audience.
How beginners can do it:
- Develop a content strategy that translates the keywords picked, the audience demands, and the users’ need patterns.
- Do the research and make it good, visual, and factual content.
- Use your core keywords (or phrases) strategically within the text but do not exploit them excessively.
- Along with formatting techniques like bullet points, short sentences and graphics to enhance the readability.
- Use social media, email, and outreach to get visitors and backlinks for your website.
Rules to follow:
- You must create new, original, and valuable content for your target readers to demonstrate your authority.
- Take this subject as a primary keyword and use it in one piece.
- Position the chosen key phrase within the title caption and introductory section and scatter it throughout the article.
- Increase your readability and user experience literally by focusing on them.
- Regularly release innovative content to keep the portal attractive and fascinating for users.
Build links
Link building is a marketing act in which you gain backlinks from other websites that send signals to your website. The links do this by using your website; the search engines will get signals that your website is credible, authoritative, and vital. By making essential, valuable, relevant links, your website’s engagement comes second in the search, and referral traffic from other sites increases.
How beginners can do it:
- Create excellent, linkable content that could inherently help a natural merit-based referral.
- Try to gain access to professional sites and blogs by allowing them to use your blog posts as guest articles.
- Participate in the boards and community groups by providing own helpful ideas and posting links to your website occasionally.
- Social media marketing helps spread content and gain shares from other websites, which improves your position in search engines.
- To give you some edge, look into your competitor’s backlink profiles so that you can find the spots for link building.
Rules to follow:
- Please place your bets on receiving a link from the sites with authority and related to your subject.
- Never get trapped in financial link-building tactics such as link farms, paid links, and numerous link exchanges.
- For natural link acquisition, high-quality content and outreach are point one.
- If you want to do so, it is worth using varied anchor text types, such as keywords or their variations.
- Make a habit of checking your backlinks periodically for any link bombs or junky links that might need to be removed.
Get your technical SEO in order
Technical SEO is about presenting technical aspects of your website in a way that it is easy to crawl, index, and properly perform. This means that search engines should render your web pages quite easily, get them crawled and indexed and that your visitors should have a nice experience while visiting your website.
The technical aspect of SEO is important because it makes your site’s search engine user-friendly.
How beginners can do it:
- Ensure the website has a clear structure that is created logically and a well-balanced sitemap.
- Reduce the website speed by compressing image size, minifying codes, and browser caching.
- Create a user-friendly mobile site by adapting your design for any smartphone size.
- Make sure that your website is SSL/HTTPS and this will result to a secure browsing experience and showcasing your website as a reliable one.
Rules to follow:
- Ensure your website has a neat, search engine-orientated URL structure.
- Take canonical tagging to avoid duplicate content problems
- Ensure you have proper (301) redirects for removed or moved pages.
- Make your website’s robots.txt file more precise so you can restrict search engine crawling.
- Make it a habit to check and repair any broken link, crawl error, or server problem.
Conclusion
A strong DIY SEO strategy must be found easily, appear in organic searches, and survive in the internet environment. Allow us to follow the easy five steps introduced in this guide to improve your site so that the search engines will rank it.
If you want to understand SEO activities better and need detailed SEO insights and tools, visit our AlgoSaga SEO and digital marketing suite in depth. AlgoSaga is best known for providing the most advanced technology, analyzing data, and making the best decisions to achieve the goals of any business of any size in terms of preventing bad presence and accomplishing digital marketing objectives.
