What does SEO mean?

SEO is an abbreviation that stands for Search Engine Optimization. SEO Basics is the practice of positively influencing your search engine result rankings, thereby increasing the quantity and quality of your website traffic. To put it simply, SEO gets your website in front of more people on search engines without needing to pay for ads.

Although search engine optimization sounds like you’d be making changes to the search engines themselves, the enhancements you’ll be making will be to your website, blog, or content.

What SEO tactics can I implement now? 

Here are three ways you can vastly improve your SEO Basics.

1. Write good content

• Good content pays off when it comes to search engine results rankings.

2. Keyword research

• Why is keyword research important? If you know what your desired audience is searching for, you know what words and terms to include in your content, thereby giving yourself a boost in results ranking.

3. On-page SEO

• what are the optimizable components of your individual webpages?
• Content, which we touched upon earlier.
• Title Tag

What should I avoid when getting started with SEO?

For every piece of good SEO advice out there, there are a few bad pieces floating around. No matter whose friend’s cousin’s uncle tells you it’s a good idea, avoid the following practices.

• Keyword stuffing

Search engines are constantly improving and refining their algorithms to make sure the most valuable content is surfaced first. You can’t fool them by stuffing your content full of keywords and calling it a day.

• Duplicate content

When the same piece of content appears on the internet in various places using different URLs, it’s considered duplicate content. It may seem like having your content available in more places, with different URLs, is a good idea, more ways for people to find you, right? it isn’t. Duplicate content confuses search engines. Which URL is the primary or correct one for the content? Should they split the results and show half the searchers one URL and the other half another? What page, or URL, ends up getting the credit for the traffic? Instead of dealing with all of that, chances are you’ll suffer a loss of traffic because the search engine won’t surface all of the duplicates.

• Writing for search engines instead of people

Search engines are in the business of getting the correct and best information to the people who need it, or search for it. If you’re writing choppy, keyword-stuffed sentences they’ll be pretty painful for a human to read, so they won’t. If you don’t have people reading or interested in your content, there’s no demand. No demand = poor search result rankings.

• Thin content

You should never create content for the sake of creating content. Make sure it’s quality content, relevant to your audience and at least 1000 words long, so search engines are more likely to surface it higher on SERPs.