Starting an SEO campaign can be a lot of pain for most business owners. Most have no idea what it is and will most times, leave their business website to fate.

Others are doing it wrongly and probably doing more harm than the intended good. 

Search Engine Optimization is a tricky thing. Play your cards right, and you’ll find your website generating an almost unlimited number of views without you paying for any ad campaign. Do nothing, and the same site will, well not show up on the first 20 pages of search engines results’ page — no views for your business website.

If you have no idea where to begin on your site SEO journey, we want you to know that you’re not alone. SEO is not the kind of topics people read at school or sit up to read for pleasure. That’s why lots of business owners today prefer hiring SEO agencies to help with their site optimization.

This post is intended for SEO beginners like you. At the end of this post, you will have learned the basics of SEO and be able to implement some of the basic principles of SEO to start ranking on search engine result page all by yourself.

Where to start with search engine optimization

Start with keywords

Keywords are the questions people are asking. When you want to find out information about something, you generally type a string of words into your search engine search space before clicking on the search button.

Those strings of queries are what we refer to as keyword here. Search engines take people’s question and look over billions of pages to find the contents that best answer the question the searcher is requesting.

As such, when you want to start your SEO campaign, the very first thing you should be concerned with is what people are searching for and how they are asking these questions.

This, in itself, is not hard to deduce. Let’s take an example. If you’re running hotel business in New York and will want more people to find your hotel through search engines, the first thing to do is to come up with a list of phrases you think people will use when they are looking for a hotel in new york.

”Hotels in New York’; ”best hotels in New York’; ”new york hotel’; ”cheap hotel in New York’ etc.

Come up with as many phrases and variation as you possibly can. You can even search these keywords on search engines and check other suggestions which the search engine will bring out.

Keyword values: are they worth it?

Not all keywords are worth ranking for. A business aims to generate sales. When you optimize your website with keywords that only brings visitors without any conversion, then you’re still in as much trouble as those without any traffic or SEO campaign in place.

The key to understanding keyword value is its volume and intent. 

Keyword volume refers to the number of searches the keyword receives per month. There are many keyword tools out there that can help you with this. Some are free with limitations, and others are paid.

Most keyword tools will offer you more than just keyword volume; they’ll let you know the level of difficulty involved in ranking for a particular keyword, some of the things your competitors are doing that you’re not and many other relevant SEO techniques.

Once you find a keyword with a reasonable monthly search volume, the next thing to analyzed is the intent behind such keyword. People generally search with either the intention of buying a product to solve their needs or find a particular website or just out of curiosity.

Check if the keyword has a good intention behind it before you move on to the next step.

Getting your website ready for users and search engines

After getting a list of favorable keywords, the next step is to get your site ready for search engines. This step addresses two things both users and search engines hate: slow loading speed and annoying pop-ups.

Users generally tend to abandon a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. Improving your website loading speed falls on the technical aspect of SEO; as such, you may want to find a developer to help you with this.

You can also make use of Google page speed matrix tool to get an idea of your site loading speed and how to improve it. Most times, it’s recommended that you use fewer plugins and compress all your images to reduce your site loading speed. 

Pop-ups are quite annoying, and you will want to avoid them as much as possible. When they become too many users tend to leave your website almost the instant they visit, this will affect your website bounce rate and consequently, its position on search engine result page.

Creating relevant contents

Content is KING. It rules all other factors of ranking web pages on the internet. Whatever you do, ensure relevant contents are given a priority. If you don’t have the money to spend on expensive tools or SEO agencies, then at least create as much helpful content as you can for your website.

Create contents that are relevant to your business niche. This could be videos, write-ups, infographics, statistics, podcasts, etc. the keywords ranking with content is to ensure they are relevant to the keywords you want to rank for.

When writing content, use keywords in places where they sound natural and do not even think of spamming your content with lots of keywords so that you can trick search engines – your site will be blacklisted faster than you can blink.

This is a basic guide to SEO campaign and some of the easiest areas of SEO you can start implementing right away.