SEO rankings could be daunting especially the beginners. It’s too technical of a path to take when all you wanted was to put up a website for your products or services. But to be more competitive to other brands, you must know how to optimize your website.

Search Engine Optimization or SEO, according to Search Engine Land, is “the process of getting (website) traffic from free, organic, or natural search results on search engines. Getting organic traffic on your website is a tall order, but it’s not impossible. With the proper techniques and practice, you’ll soon drive traffic to your site.

However, for beginners, you can just take things slow. Do the little things that you can start doing and up your game once you get the hang of it and go apply more complex SEO techniques.

Here are some SEO ranking tips for beginners like you who wants to drive traffic to your website organically.

Optimize Meta Tags for Search Engines

According to WordStream.com meta tags “are snippets of text that describe a page’s content; the meta tags don’t appear on the page itself, but only in the page’s code.” To put it simply, meta tags are key phrases that best describes what your webpage is all about. Search engines use these tags to determine what your website’s page is about so it’s always best to optimize and use meta tags wisely in a page.

It would be better if you do keyword research first so you’ll know which related keywords is often used by your target audience and then use these keywords on your page. It would give you more chances of getting your page as a top search result.

Also, do note that there are different meta tags that you should apply in your page. There are meta keywords attribute, title tag, meta description attribute, and meta robots attribute.

Meta keywords attribute used to be a very important thing among webpages but since it became a subject for abuse (writers/owners who stuff unrelated keywords in their page just to appear in other search results), Google didn’t put too much importance on this. But that doesn’t mean that you don’t apply this anymore. You can still use meta keywords as long as you don’t overdo it and if you use the correct and related keywords.

On the other hand, title tags are weighed to be more important. Title tags are page titles that can be seen at the top of the browser window or tab when that page is clicked. It is important that you include keywords in creating page titles and title description as this will be beneficial for search engines to determine what your page is about. This will also appear as the title in the search results page.

Prioritize User Experience

Always do a test on how user-friendly your website’s interface is – whether you optimized it for mobile version or not. Imagine if you’re the user and how many clicks would it get you to the information you want. See if it enhances user experience and, if not, do some changes to improve it.

Why is it important to prioritize user experience?

Search engines are smarter than you think. They don’t only dig up information like your content, keywords, and meta data. They also take note of the user’s behavior while visiting your website. This will give them a better idea on what to make better search results or suggestions to the users.

It’s important that your website has a user-friendly interface so search engines can properly detect and suggest your website to similar users who most likely would have the same online behavior. Just imagine if your website is too frustrating to navigate. Users would just leave without getting to the information they’re looking for and without any trace for search engines to base your rankings on.

Always think of your users when creating and dissecting pages in your website. Remember, getting straight to the point will always give you better SEO ranking.

Optimize for Voice Search

One of the predicted trends for online marketing for the year is the rise of voice search.

You should be forward-thinking and forward-looking with how you optimize your website. The future of search engine is now more inclined to voice search as virtual assistants and artificial intelligence have widely grown over the years.

So how can you optimize your website for voice search?

Learn how people ask questions or know what are the frequently asked questions that your target market you think would ask. Once you get these FAQs, adjust your content so that it would answer them, may it be on your website content or blog. That way, the AIs would easily recognize the phrases that would then lead searching customers to your website.

Mobile is the Future

Since the mobile revolution, everybody’s moving to create content or optimize their website to be mobile-friendly. This is because mobile phones are now becoming the most accessible technology for most people, especially those who are often on the go.

So it is just logical to also put effort on thinking about going mobile. There are many content management services that allows you to create content for both desktop and mobile versions of your website. To maximize this, always think of the mobile layout and imagine how your content would look like on a mobile phone.

Optimizing your website for mobile version is, in essence, the same concept with improving user experience. However, you should bear in mind that people who are on their mobile phones have a shorter attention span than those who sit in front of their desktops.

Vary Backlinks (And Outbound Links, Too)

Having backlinks is one of the best practices in trying to improve your SEO ranking. Search engines gives more weight to quality backlinks more than anything. When we say quality backlinks we mean that any page or website content (yours or other websites) that links back to your own website content. It would only be qualified as a quality backlink if your content is useful and relevant.

How do you achieve this?

Internally, you can create a blog or news page on your website that would somehow link to other pages in your website. For example, if you offer delivery services, you write a blog anything that is related to your services and link a keyword or two to your products and services page. That way, whoever is reading your blog and would be interested of your service can easily click on that backlink to read and learn about your services.

For outbound links, it could be pretty tricky. If your website content is really good, some bloggers or other content writers might find your information useful or your services interesting that they would link their content back to your website. This could also include blog and forum comments. However, be cautious of abusing these outbound links.

Some brands tend to overdo their backlinking efforts by posting too many comments that links to their website. This could be considered as spam and that’s how you make backlinking backfire on you.

Content is King… And Still Is

We may talk about keywords, optimization, and the likes… but your website wouldn’t really peak in SEO ranking if your web content doesn’t give value to your audience.

It’s always been an SEO rule that “content is king” and that is still true. Given all those suggestions above, it would still all boil down to your website content. All these suggestions would not work right for you if you don’t add value to your web copy.

Meta tags would be nothing if your content doesn’t reflect the meta tags you specified. Great web content would also result to better user experience since users would find navigating your website such a breeze if they get valuable information in every page. Optimizing for voice search and acquiring backlinks (especially outbound ones) would require good content. And your website’s mobile version needs short, simple, and understandable content for users on-the-go. Bottomline is QUALITY CONTENT should still prevail when aiming for a good SEO ranking.

How do you do this?

One, know the pain points of your users and make sure your website contains their every solution. Second, keep information straight to the point but precise. No one wants to read too much content and find no value in it. Third, keep it informative yet fun to read. Don’t make it sound so plain and boring.

This might seems too easy but it takes a lot of editing and going through the content back and forth to finally get it right. Having others read it (other than you or whoever does the writing and editing of the content) can also help. As for their opinion. Find out if they understood what you wrote or if it is informative enough. An outsider’s perspective can always come in handy.