SEO for beginners

This is a mini SEO guide for beginners: what you need to decide BEFORE creating your blog, and what you have to do WHILE working on it, to get a SEO-fantastic site. Continue reading and learn the first steps for your SEO strategy. 

Writing a blog is an exciting task and what started as a genius idea, could become a stomach-ache really soon if you do not take some previous actions before starting to write. As you select a hosting, think about a domain for your site and choose the CMS (Content Management System) you are going to use, you also should think about your SEO strategy. Furthermore, your hosting, domain and chosen CMS are going to determine how effectiveness of your SEO.

SEO is like the Holy Grail of digital marketing. Do you want to stand out in search engines without spending money? Is it possible? If only it was that easy, you would not be reading this and I wouldn’t be writing it. Like a living organism, Google evolves and become smarter. Recent updates are making everybody invest in SEO. At least you need to invest time to make your site optimized for SEO.

what do I need to do before creating my website?

• Hosting: it can affect the speed of your site, and a website that takes a lot of time uploading,  can be penalized by Google.
• Domain: including key words in your domain was considered very SEO savy, BUT now, Google does not give you extra points for that, and you should also consider if doing that could damage your business in the future (as your business evolves over time). You should also decide if you are going to use a .com or .net. It can help you with setting geographic boundaries for your business.
• CMS: ¿Blogger or WordPress? Is there anything beyond those tools ? Both are SEO optimize (Google owns Blogger), so the decision is up to you and what you want for your business in the future (is it going to evolve to an e-commerce?
• Permalink: Google takes into consideration how you build your URLs. Google hates links like  www.mywebsite.com/123-456, and loves www.mywebsite.com/example-product-name.  Make your links unambiguous and forget about writing poetry.

I have got a domain and a hosting, now what?

Before you start writing, think about the following ideas:

• On-site SEO: you need to optimize notionly the content of your site, but with HTML code. Be aware of your site architecture and your post structure.
• Site architecture: do it in a pyramidal form so from your home page you can access every category of your site, and from there, to sub-categories and your posts.
• Post structure: a consistent structure makes your posts easy to read, and your readers will know what to expect. Your SEO will benefit of coherent headings (H1-H6 tags).  You should have a Heading 1 per page.
• Sitemap: It will help you include a sitemap and a robots-txt of your site. You don’t know what I am talking about, do you? Here is an interesting reading about it.

and what about keywords?

Keywords are the terms of your search in Google. And Google is trying really hard to accurately answer those questions, making things easier to us, the users,showing us the more relevant results to our questions.  You can use Google Adwords  to find what keywords are better for you and your business. Now that you have a list of 20-25 pertinent keywords for you, start using it in your site. But WHERE? :

• URL: try to be specific.
• Heading
• Title: headings and titles do similar a job for your site, so it is easy to mix them up. Heading is the title of your post, and Title is what you can see in your browser as your page web. A little confusing, don’t you think?
• Meta description: they still matter to search engines, so learn how to create a good one here.
• First 100 words: include your key words in the first lines of your content.
• Alt text of your first picture: don’t forget to describe your image using keywords.

If you follow these steps your site will be ready for SEO. Now you just have to write amazing and original content, which Google is taking into account more and more;).

Good luck and keep on reading.

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