SEO Basics: Search Engine Optimization for Beginners

The primary goal of every company should be to be at the top of the relevant search systems. In order to achieve a good organic ranking in the long term, search engine optimization (SEO) is indispensable. Here are the most important SEO basics for high visibility.

What is SEO?

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is nothing else than search engine optimization. If you get it right, SEO measures will lead to your site being displayed as high up as possible in the organic search results, Search Engine Results Pages (SERP).

Here it is important to identify the search systems relevant for you, to familiarize yourself with their requirements and to optimize your content accordingly.

Search engines determine the relevance and popularity of a page based on various ranking factors. These ranking factors differ slightly from search engine to search engine. Some of them are known, others are not. However, some SEO basics can be derived from known ranking factors.

SEO measures: On-page and Off-page

SEO measures are divided into on-page and off-page measures. On-page measures include all measures taken in order to best optimize your website. This includes, for example, the adaptation of meta information (title and description), optimization of content (text, images, videos, etc.), improvement of the information structure, or technical search engine optimization.

On the other hand, off-page include measures taken outside the website. Off-page signals are generated for this purpose, for example through backlinks or mentions.

Keyword optimization

Keywords are the search terms that users use when searching online. These have to be integrated on your own website, so that search engines can recognize for which keywords the page can be displayed in the search results.

When implementing keywords, it is especially important to understand the intention of a search query and to use appropriate keywords. Keywords should be used sensibly at the right place and in the right amount. Meanwhile search engines are very good at recognizing and rewarding high quality texts, while websites with bad texts are punished.

Page architecture

It is important that you structure your website clearly. That way you can make sure that both your users and search engines find their way around and understand exactly where they can find what information — a clear navigation and suitable internal links will help you to do this.

• Do not forget to link internally from the editorial content or category texts.
• When navigating and internally linking, make sure that all relevant content is accessible from the start page with as few as possible three clicks.
• Include your keywords in your headlines, because they are considered more important than the rest of the text.

Link Building

Search engines measure the popularity of websites primarily through links. Therefore, link generation is the most important off-page measure for any website. If another website links to your site, search engines will consider this link as a direct recommendation for your domain. So the more people link to your website, the more recommendable it appears.

• Generate high-quality content that your users will want to share (expert tips, clear infographics, etc.).
• Use social media to spread your content.
• Analyse who mentions your website online without linking to it and ask the operators if they link to it afterwards.
• Write your website in your e-mail signature, on business cards and other information material. Reach can not only be generated online.

Further SEO measures

There are a lot of other SEO measures that you should also take a closer look at:

• Indexing management: This is about allowing or disallowing search engines to index certain documents (see robots.txt, Robots Meta Tags, .htaccess file).
• Load time optimization: The fast loading time of websites becomes more and more important. Avoid large files and unnecessary scripts, for example.
• Mobile optimization: Your website should be viewable on a large screen as well as on a tablet or smartphone (responsive web design).
• Snippet optimization: A snippet is the presentation of your website in the SERPs and therefore an important traffic generator. Snippets consist of the title, the URL and a description that you can customize.

If you want to be found in the various search systems, SEO is an important marketing tool. Identify the search systems that are relevant for you and optimize your content accordingly. Small changes can have a big impact, but one-off measures are not enough. SEO means that you have to work continuously on your content to achieve good rankings in the long run.