{"id":206773,"date":"2022-03-07T21:24:29","date_gmt":"2022-03-07T13:24:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/seo-hacker.com\/?p=206773"},"modified":"2023-02-08T11:55:44","modified_gmt":"2023-02-08T03:55:44","slug":"learn-seo-beginners","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/seo-hacker.com\/learn-seo-beginners\/","title":{"rendered":"Learn SEO: The Complete Guide for Beginners"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Ultimate<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

What should I learn first in SEO?<\/span><\/h2>\n

Quick Answers:<\/strong> If you\u2019re just starting out, you don\u2019t need to do a deep dive into all the factors and algorithms that Google uses to rank a website. However, I recommend starting with the key components of SEO, which are technical, on-page, and off-page SEO factors. I also recommend studying up on how to do keyword research, your niche, and what content is valuable and interesting for the people in your industry and your customers.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Overview<\/h2>\n

SEO is an essential skill for marketers and an essential practice for anyone trying to break into the online landscape. With SEO, you can increase the targeted traffic to your website from search engines.<\/span><\/p>\n

Here in the first part of our learn SEO series, Learn SEO: The Complete Guide for Beginners, you will be introduced to the different kinds of SEO, the most important ranking factors, notable algorithm updates, and so on. You will also learn about the different SEO tools that you can use for research and monitoring.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

What is SEO?<\/span><\/h2>\n

SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization. It is part of digital marketing, and it is the process of making your website a better-ranking site in the search engines than other websites with the same niche or market as yours.<\/span><\/p>\n

Why is SEO important?<\/span><\/h3>\n

There are two main reasons why SEO is important.<\/span><\/p>\n

Search engines matter<\/span><\/h4>\n

Search engines are a big way to get traffic to your site\u2014that is if you have the right content. People who surf the internet almost always look for information they need. If your site provides that information but it doesn\u2019t show up on the search engine results page, then your site is next to useless.<\/span><\/p>\n

Visibility is key<\/span><\/h4>\n

SEO makes your site more visible to internet users. Marketing is all about getting more people to see what you\u2019re selling or promoting. SEO is like marketing in the search engine. It is a great way to tell people who use search engines: \u201cHey, look, I\u2019ve got what you need.\u201d And mind you, Google receives about 8.5 billion<\/em><\/a> queries per day.<\/span><\/p>\n

For example, when you Google \u201cSEO Philippines,\u201d you will see that we are the #1 search result. This tells you that we are the most relevant result for your query.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"SEO<\/span><\/p>\n

And Google is far from being the only search engine out there.<\/span><\/p>\n

So, what now?<\/span><\/p>\n

Basically, that\u2019s what SEO is. SEO is making it easier for your target audience to find you. It\u2019s marketing by keyword competition in the search engines.<\/span><\/p>\n

How does SEO work?<\/span><\/h3>\n

Let us say that you needed some information on retargeting marketing, so you type in the query \u201cWhat is retargeting marketing?<\/a>\u201d on Google. There are a couple of websites that show up to answer your query, and you notice that Website A gives you the answers you need and<\/em> a pleasant user experience. Website B however, even if your user experience there is also pretty smooth, it also doesn\u2019t really answer the question you posed (in fact, it\u2019s just trying to sell you something).<\/span><\/p>\n

For Google, it would make more sense to rank Website A as it is the one that gives the user most what they need. This is the simplest way to explain it of course, as there are over 200 ranking factors<\/a> that Google uses in their algorithm.<\/span><\/p>\n

How long does it take for SEO to work?<\/span><\/h3>\n

Truthfully, SEO can take a while to work. It all depends on a lot of factors including how much content and optimization you work into your website right out of the gate. Ranking at the top of Google is no easy feat under any circumstances, but with SEO it can take around 4-6 months to feel the effects.<\/span><\/p>\n

We at SEO Hacker stand by the idea that SEO is a long-term investment, especially because SEO isn\u2019t just<\/em> about reaching the top spot at the SERPs, it\u2019s also about staying there<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n

Going back to our \u201cSEO Philippines\u201d keyword, we can proudly say that we have been ranking #1 for more than a decade. That is what you want to achieve when you do your own SEO.<\/span>
\n<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Understanding search engines<\/span><\/h2>\n

\"Google\"<\/span><\/p>\n

A search engine is a web service that searches for information online and pulls up the relevant web pages into a collection of Search Engine Results Pages or SERPs. They help to minimize efforts to find information and help to find the best ones more easily.<\/span><\/p>\n

For example, imagine if you have to learn about email marketing<\/a> for your work. Without a search engine, you would have so much difficulty finding information on the internet as there is no one service that would bring the necessary information to you immediately. Most likely there won\u2019t even be any information online about email marketing because people won\u2019t give the time and effort to create web pages that would remain stagnant due to the lack of visitors.<\/span><\/p>\n

A search engine has three main functions: index, retrieve, and rank.<\/span><\/p>\n

Index<\/span><\/h3>\n

When you own a website, you know it\u2019s all code. The web browser\u2019s function is to display those codes in a format that is friendly to human eyes. For example, here\u2019s the code version of my last blog post:<\/span><\/p>\n

\"10<\/span><\/p>\n

Read:<\/strong> 10 Types of Digital Marketing Channels to Try [In 2022]<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

That\u2019s why meta tags are actually read by search engines even if they don\u2019t appear on an HTML browser. Because it\u2019s part of the code. And the search spiders crawl the code<\/a>, not the browser display.<\/span><\/p>\n

As I mentioned earlier, one of the search engine\u2019s main functions is to index a website. Search engine spiders<\/a> do most of this work.<\/span><\/p>\n

All the code in your website has to be read in order for it to be indexed successfully. If it\u2019s not read well, it will show up distorted in Google\u2019s database which we can see through its cache on the search results.<\/span><\/p>\n

Retrieve<\/span><\/h3>\n

Retrieval is basically when the search engine gets a query, looks over its index database and regurgitates whatever is relevant to the search terms (or keywords). It is a critical function of the search engine for us end-users because this is what we use search engines for.<\/span><\/p>\n

When you make a search query, the search engine goes through all its data in its index database and looks for the keywords matching your search query. When it has found all the relevant ones, it will retrieve it out of its database and proceed to rank it before releasing it to you.<\/span><\/p>\n

Retrieval is critical because some search engines still read meta tags such as your meta description during its retrieval process\u2014though it is not used for ranking nor does it affect ranking in any way. Still, it has some bearing on the SERPs when it gives you the result.<\/span><\/p>\n

All search engines retrieve data the same way. It\u2019s the ranking where they differ.<\/span><\/p>\n

Rank<\/span><\/h3>\n

Why Google is the foremost search engine in our generation today is because of their superb ability to remove spam and unrelated results in their SERPs. They filter it out in their index and make sure that spam and other least-related websites and information are filtered out to rank last\u2014or worse, sandboxed.<\/span><\/p>\n

Note:<\/strong> Google never confirmed the existence of the Sandbox, but experience says otherwise<\/a>.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Google\u2019s ranking system is composed of algorithms that look at 200+ factors that we can put in three major categories (that we will break down later):<\/span><\/p>\n