SEO: A Crash Course for Beginners in 2023

Hi. Welcome to the SEO crash course for beginners in 2023.

In this actionable course, you are going to learn how to get your website to rank high in Google search results.

The best part is you’ll learn everything from scratch step-by-step.

Whether you are new to SEO or feel confused due to random information spread on the internet or just need a step-by-step plan to grow your visibility in the Google search engine then this crash course is for you.

Let’s get started.

Introduction to Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

First of all, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. SEO is all about optimizing your website pages to rank high in Google’s organic (non-paid) results.

You must be wondering why should I care about SEO.

Well, SEO can help rank you high in search engine result pages (SERPs). And that in turn gives you a tremendous amount of traffic, leads, and then sales.

To prove this here is a chart showing the sources of traffic on the internet.

As you can see Search accounts for 60% of the traffic on the internet.

This shows that for almost every website there is a potential for traffic in the search engines like Google.

If you compare it with social media, you’ll see the potential is 10 times extra.

In short, traffic from search engines provides better ROI. And do you know the reason?

Well, it’s quite straightforward.

People type their problems or need in search engines. And search engines want to cater to their users’ inquiries. If you optimize your website using SEO strategies, you’ll be on top to solve people’s problems/inquiries/needs or whatever you want to say.

This way you’ll be able to help people solve their problems. This means you can generate revenue and establish your business.

Let’s now see what you’ll be learning in this crash course.

First, you’ll learn the fundamentals of SEO and how search engines work behind the scene. You’ll learn the important ranking factors too that Google uses to rank your website.

Next, you’ll learn the first actionable step of every SEO campaign – keyword research. You’ll learn various techniques to find profitable keywords.

Next, you’ll learn how to use the keywords to write world-class content that search engines would love to rank high.

Next, you’ll learn a very important concept in SEO – link building. You’ll see practical actionable techniques to build links for your website.

Finally, you’ll learn how to track and monitor your efforts to see whether your efforts are producing any results or not.

Ready to dive in?

Let’s get started.

How SEO works behind the scene?

Let’s first learn the big picture – how SEO works at a high level.

If you are following any random articles/videos to do hacky tricks to gain ranking, please stop. Just learn the basics and you’ll see how easy it is to rank your website high in search engines.

So, here’s how SEO works.

When you search for something on any search engine, say for example Google, an algorithm processes your search query in real-time to provide you with the best possible results.

Yes – that’s it. Simple and straightforward. Here’s what it looks like.

Now the question arises. How does Google know which is the best result? How would Google rank the results from best to worst?

Well, you may have heard about 200 ranking factors Google uses to rank the results.

Fortunately, you don’t need to optimize your website for all 200 ranking factors.

Why?

Simply because only three main ranking factors define how best your webpage is.

These are:

1. Relevance.
2. Authority.
3. Usefulness.

Let’s learn these ranking factors one by one.

First, Relevance.

Relevancy defines that a search engine would provide you with results that are closely relevant to your search query.

Let’s learn what relevance is by example.

If you are searching for “chocolate cake” then you don’t want to see results for the insurance policy.

Therefore, any search engine, for example, Google, would first look into its index to find the pages that are closely relevant to what you (the user) searched for – chocolate cake.

Alright! Now that Google has found the web pages relevant to your search term. Would it simply rank based on relevancy?

Nope. Because there would be thousands or even millions of results for almost all search terms.

Now, Google’s algorithm will apply another ranking factor – authority.

Now, what is authority?

It’s Google’s way of determining that a webpage is trustworthy and accurate i.e. the page provides the best possible relevant information to the user for the search term.

Now you must be wondering how would Google determine the authority.

Well, here comes link building.

Google will check how many pages on the internet links back to your page.

Each link will be a vote. The more votes you have the better.

In SEO, these links are called backlinks. You’ll learn more about it later in this article.

After determining your webpage authority, Google will check how useful your webpage is for the search terms related to the user’s query.

Your content can be relevant or authoritative, however, if it’s not useful for the user then Google won’t rank your webpage high.

Let’s learn this by an example.

Let’s say you run a blog for personal finance. And you are an expert on this topic.

Now if your articles are filled with jargon or complex words, it’ll make it harder for your readers to digest your content.

Which means you’ll get a poor ranking for the usefulness factor. This will hurt your relevancy and authoritative ranking factors too.

So, the bottom line is to make your content relevant and authoritative but don’t forget to make it easier for people to digest.

So, how can you do that?

Well, you can divide up your content into sections, use bullet points, lists, etc.

Remember there is a difference between “high-quality content” and “useful content”.

Google uses something called “user experience signals” to measure the usefulness of a webpage.

Write your content for humans first then for crawlers, bots, or search engines. Because if people like your content, it’ll get a significant ranking boost.

Throughout this crash course, you’ll learn several techniques to optimize your website for these ranking factors.

Now that you are familiar with the SEO basics and the 3 important ranking factors to optimize your website. Let’s learn one of the most important topics in SEO – keyword research.

Keyword Research in SEO.

Alright! Now that you are familiar with the basics of how search engines work and the key factors they consider while ranking web pages.

Let’s now learn the first actionable and important step in SEO – Keyword Research.

Keyword Research is a process of finding the words and phrases that people type in search engines to find what they are looking for.

Now, why is keyword research an important step in SEO?

Let’s answer that.

Keyword research impacts every aspect of the SEO process. For example, keywords will dictate the topics you’ll select to write about.

Your on-page SEO efforts such as meta title, meta description, URL, etc. will be purely dependent on keywords.

Think of keyword research like this.

Keyword research is to SEO as ingredients are to a recipe. You can’t make a delicious dish without the right ingredients, just like you can’t have an effective SEO strategy without conducting thorough keyword research.

And that’s where most beginners make the mistake of overlooking the keyword research process.

Another important benefit of keyword research is you get to know your target audience better.

Why?

Because people tell search engines exactly what they what. And if you analyze these keywords, you’ll understand your target audience and their needs better.

Let’s now learn about how to find these keywords.

Before that let’s talk a little bit about the commonly used approach to find keywords by most people and why that approach is not effective.

Most people just select a keyword research tool and enter the most common term(s) of their business and pick a few random keywords from the tool.

For example, let’s say you run a website to sell meal plans. Using this approach you would enter “meal plan” in any keyword research tool of your choice. The tool will give you a bunch of keyword ideas and you’ll pick 5-10 keywords based on your knowledge.

Now, you must be wondering what’s wrong with this approach.

Well, this approach tends to give you highly competitive keywords. These are the keywords that almost everyone is targeting.

Therefore, you will need to go one step further and select your seed keywords strategically.

Side note: Seed keywords are the words or phrases that you enter in your keyword research tool to find relevant keywords.

The best way to find good seed keywords is to brainstorm or research relevant phrases. For example, “keto diet snacks” is relevant to a “meal plan”.

Therefore, targeting “keto diet snacks” is much better than targeting the “meal plan” keyword.

Alright! Let’s now discuss the step-by-step strategy to find profitable keywords.

The first step is to find relevant seed keywords.

So, how do you do that?

Here are the ways to find good seed keywords.

1. Brainstorm the words and phrases related to your business. For example, let’s say you are doing SEO to improve the ranking of a marketing & web agency. So, what terms would be relevant? Digital marketing, social media, web design, blogging, content marketing, etc.
2. Now go to Google. Enter any relevant search term, for example, “web design”. Now go to the bottom of the search result page and find the “Searches related to” section. Here, you’ll find keywords people are searching related to what you’ve just entered. Without any doubt, these are popular keywords because Google itself is recommending you.
3. If you are a SEMrush user, then you can use the keyword magic tool in SEMrush. This tool gives you a lot of keyword ideas that would be tough to find just by brainstorming. If you use any other tool then that tool may have its specific keyword research tool. Check your software’s documentation for more details.
4. You can find creative keyword ideas on Wikipedia and Reddit as well. Simply head over to the respective sites and enter any broad term related to your business. You’ll find curated content on these sites which will present you with many keyword ideas. On Reddit, focus on posts with a lot of comments and interactions. It’ll help you find what people are saying regarding the products/services that you want to market.

Note that you don’t have to follow all of these strategies. Just pick and apply those that you think are good for your business. If you are a beginner, I would recommend just following the first two strategies.

Once you’ve 10-20 seed keywords, the second step is to find keyword ideas based on your seed keywords.

Fire up your keyword research tool and enter one of your seed keywords.

This will present you with many variations of your seed keyword.

Now go to the Related tab of your keyword research tool and filter the keyword so you are only left with easy keywords. After this reverse-sort your keywords by the search volume.

Now, select and note down around 5-10 keyword ideas.

At this point, we are just collecting keyword ideas for each of your seed keywords. So, ignore metrics and just note down the easy keyword ideas.

Remember, nothing is set in stone. Everything is changeable. SEO is an ongoing and iterative process. So, you can always repeat these steps later down the road to improve your strategy.

Here are some tips to select better keyword ideas for your seed keywords.

Although there are several factors to consider while selecting keywords. The important three are:

1. Competition.
2. Search volume.
3. Revenue potential.

First, let’s discuss the competition. If your site is new then your best bet is to go with easy keywords. Every keyword research tool gives you the ability to filter keyword ideas based on competition or difficulty to rank in Google.

If your keyword research tool doesn’t have this functionality, simply move to another tool.

Just focus on easy keywords, to begin with, and slowly start targeting competitive keywords over time.

Second, search volume. The more search volume the better. After filtering easy keywords pick the keywords with as high a search volume as possible.

Third, revenue potential. Now, you may have easy keywords with high search volume, however, still possible they’ll bring no leads.

Why?

Meet keyword intent.

Keyword intent defines the intention of the searchers. Now your target is to focus on the keyword with buying intent. That is, where people show that they want to buy or are at least interested in buying what you are selling.

The easiest way to figure this out is to check for the CPC given in your keyword research tool.

CPC stands for Cost per Click. That means the amount an advertiser is ready to pay for one click for that keyword.

If advertisers are paying money to rank for a particular keyword it means that the keyword is bringing them revenue.

So, the higher the CPC the better.

As I outlined above, keyword research is an iterative process. Nothing is set in stone. Just create your first 5-10 articles and then repeat these steps to improve those and create new articles.

You can use tools like MS Word or MS Excel to gather all your research in one place so you have a single source of truth going forward. With keyword research out of the way, let’s discuss another important concept in SEO – link building or backlinks.

Link Building in SEO

In this section of the article, you are going to learn one of the most important aspects of SEO – Link Building.

Now, what is link building?

Link building is a process of building backlinks for your website to improve its SEO.

Now, what is a backlink?

A backlink is a link from another website pointing to your website. One backlink is considered one vote in the eyes of the search engine.

To clearly understand this concept, let’s talk a little bit about the history the search engines.

Back in the day, popular search engines like Yahoo used to rank webpages purely based on page content. They simply check for relevance and rank pages accordingly.

Then came Google.

They changed the game. They started using links as votes to determine the authority and usefulness of the webpage content. Yes – they were checking the relevance too. However, analyzing links was their unique approach.

In fact, their approach to using links as votes set them apart from other popular search engines.

Even today, links are an important part of the Google PageRank algorithm to check a webpage’s content quality and to decide its ranking.

Although more links mean more votes which in turn means higher ranking, however, due to numerous changes in Google’s algorithm, they now focus on link quality rather than link quantity.

Now, the question is how does Google decide a link’s quality?

Well, there are 3 features to decide whether a link is a quality link or just a random link.

1. Authority.
2. Relevance.
3. Link place.

Let’s discuss all these features one by one.

The authority of a webpage and website is very important when building links for your SEO strategy.

If you are getting a link from an authoritative website then Google will see it as a positive thing for your website.

For example, if you get a link from a popular national news website then it’ll pass more SEO value to your website.

You must be wondering how to check the authority of a website.

Just use any SEO tool like SEMrush and enter the domain in it. It’ll show you the domain’s authority score.

The higher the number the better.

Now let’s talk about relevance.

Sure, a website’s authority pointing to your website matters. However, that website should be relevant too.

For example, if you are selling mobile phone cases and you’ve got a link from a website that sells pet supplies. This link is not relevant. Maybe the pet supplies site’s authority is high but the link from it wouldn’t bring as much SEO value to your website.

So, the bottom line is the links to your website should come from the websites in your industry.

To check a website’s industry you can use an SEO tool like SEMrush. Just enter any domain in SEMrush and check the backlink analysis report to see which category the website falls under.

It’s not wrong to get a few links from unrelated authoritative websites. However, focus on getting links from relevant authoritative websites.

Finally, let’s talk about the place of the link.

Whether the link is placed on top of the page or in the middle or at the bottom – the position of the link doesn’t matter.

All that matters is that the link should be placed editorially. The link should be in the content naturally.

When you get a link just ask this one simple question to yourself.

Was this link placed naturally or editorially?

If yes then you are all good.

Always make sure that the link’s anchor text should be relevant to your website.

Alright! Now that you know what backlinks are.

Let’s now learn how to get such backlinks to grow your site’s authority.

There are several link-building strategies. We are going to show you some of the popular beginner-friendly strategies here.

First is the sky-scrapper strategy.

In the sky-scrapper strategy, you’ll write a piece of content that answers pretty much all the questions to your user’s query.

Here’s a step-by-step process to apply this strategy.

1. Find an article or blog post in your niche that is ranking high in Google.
2. Just go to Google and type any keywords related to your niche. For example, enter digital marketing for beginners.
3. Read the first few articles and try to come up with an article that covers all the topics in more depth.

This is the best strategy to start with because it allows you to package your information in one blog post which will help you further down the road in your career.

You can improve posts by adding some meaningful visuals, illustrations, industry study references, etc.

The next strategy is broken links.

It’s quite straightforward.

Just find a webpage from which you want to get a link.

Use any tool to find broken links in it. Once you find it. Ask the website author to correct the link and if possible point it to you.

This strategy works in most situations because here you are helping someone to rectify an error from their website. So, people will happy to link to you.

Another popular strategy is to publish case studies.

This strategy involves a lot of effort and is time-consuming.

However, it can generate a good amount of quality links. Why?

A case study gives bloggers and media outlets what they want. The data. So, they’ll happily reference your blog post about the case study of any industry.

The last strategy is analyzing the backlink profiles of your competitors.

This will help you find the source which your competitors are getting a link from.

Just use an SEO tool like SEMrush and in the backlink analysis reports enter that competitor’s domain name.

Analyze the links and try to find opportunities from where you can get some links for your website. This approach will give you a head start in the right direction because your competitors are already getting links from these sources.