As a newbie to SEO, you feel like there’s so much to learn, especially with Google’s algorithm using over 200 ranking factors. But focusing on the basics of SEO will help you build a solid foundation and make you an SEO guru.
That’s why we’ve created the ultimate list of SEO tips for newbies—to help you get the most out of your strategy, no matter what level you’re at.
Get started with the basics of SEO with these 21 SEO tips for newbies!
1. Claim (and complete) your Google Business Profile
First on our list of SEO tips for newbies is to claim your Google Business Profile. Before you start researching keywords or writing title tags, you need to set up this listing so those other features can show up in search results.
A Google Business Profile is a free public profile or listing that shows up in search results on Google. You’ve probably seen Google Business Profiles when researching a brand, searching for a place to eat, or finding directions to a specific location.
Claiming (or creating) your Google Business Profile listing allows you to give Google and nearby customers instant information about your business. It’s quick and easy to claim your account too, so make this one of your first SEO to-dos’s.
Once you have control of your profile, optimise it by adding the following:
- Name, address and phone number (NAP)
- Opening hours
- Website URL
- Relevant categories, like “Restaurant,”
- a brief description of what your business does and why it’s unique
- Photos
If you have any upcoming events, you can add them to your Google Business Profile too.
For best results with Google Business Profile, stay active on it. Respond to customer reviews, share posts about company happenings and offerings, enable text messaging, update company hours for holidays, and more.
2. Long-Tail Keywords vs Short-Tail Keywords
Second on our list of SEO tips for newbies is to target long-tail keywords.
Keywords are a part of search engine optimisation.
Creating relevant and high-quality content is crucial for driving more relevant traffic to your website and ensuring that visitors return regularly. If you want people to find your website (and if you want your content to rank in search results), you need to find relevant keywords, determine the search intent of users searching those keywords, and include them in your meta tags and content.
Before we get into researching keywords, let’s review the difference between long and short-tail ones:
- Long-tail keywords: A long-tail keyword is three to four words, like “how to roll sushi”. These keywords are more specific to the user intent.
- Short-tail keywords: A short-tail keyword is one to two words, like “sushi rolls”. These phrases are more broad and can show many different results.
If you’re starting SEO for a website, you want to focus your keyword research on long-tail keywords. A long-tail keyword (because of its length) has less competition than a short-tail keyword, so it’s easier to rank your content.
You can even look at short vs long-tail this way:
Short-tail keywords are like Olympic athletes; long-tail keywords are like high school athletes. If you haven’t trained or built your site up to Olympic level, you will struggle to rank at the top of search results. At high school level, you have a good starting point.
3. Know the 3 Search Intents
Another way to improve your SEO is to know the 3 types of user intent. They are:
- Navigational: A person wants to go to a specific website, like Apple or Facebook.
- Informational: A person wants information about a topic, like how to roll sushi or what types of sushi exist.
- Transactional: A person wants to buy a product, like a sushi roller or an order of sushi!
You need to know these intents because they will determine which keywords you target.
A service or product page of a tech company, for example, should target a transactional keyword, while a blog post should target an informational keyword. If you search for potential keywords on Google before you write your content and optimise your pages, you can determine the search intent by the results.
4. Research with the Right Tools
Fourth on our list of SEO tips for newbies is to use the right tools to research keywords for your website. Once you know what keywords to focus on, you can start researching them with these tools:
| Price Factor | Cost |
| Google Autocomplete | Free |
| KeywordTool | $89-$199 / mo. |
| Google Keyword Planner | Free |
| KeywordsFX | Free |
| AnswerThePublic | $0-$99 / mo. |
| Google Trends | Free |
You have a lot of free options as an SEO newbie so try them out and see which one you like
You have a lot of free options as an SEO newbie so try them out and see which one you like best. As your SEO efforts grow, you may consider investing in a paid tool like KeywordTool. You may even decide to invest in an SEO tool kit like Ahrefs, which has tools for keyword research, competitor research, backlink analysis, and more. Many of these tools will give you tasks to help improve your ranking over time and give you a green light when you have completed what is necessary.
5. Choose Core (and Related) Keywords for Each Page
SEO means learning about keywords. When you start optimising your website, you’ll start by researching keywords for your pages.
For example, if you have an informational page about rolling sushi, you may make “how to roll sushi” your core keyword because of its high search volume. In addition to a core keyword, you also want to compile two to three related keywords.
You can find these keywords with your keyword research tools.
If you use Google as your keyword research tool, for example, you can look at the search engine’s “Searches related to [keyword]” feature at the bottom of the search results to find similar keywords. Or you can use the autocomplete feature to find other keywords.
You can then enter those keywords into Google Keyword Planner to get:
- Search volume
- Competition
- Bids
Once you have your list of keywords, you can start optimising your content. For the best experience, create a Google Sheet and list your pages and their core and related keywords. This sheet will be a useful reference for you and your team.
6. Optimise Your Title Tags — and Make Them Hot
Your title tag is like that first meeting with someone new — it makes a first (and lasting) impression. That first impression also determines whether someone will click on your page or someone else’s, which is why informative, optimised, and hot titles are a must.
What is an informative, optimised, and hot title? Good question.
- Informative: Your title summarises what your page is about without using clickbait language.
- Optimised: Your title uses your core keyword and is 55 characters or less.
- Spicy: Your title gets readers excited and curious about your page and its content.
Remember, your title tag is seen in search results, not on your page.
If you want, you can create a different on-page title (via your H1 tag) for your content. For example, you may write the title tag, “How to Make Your Own Sushi Rolls (Infographic) | Allrecipes,” but then make the H1, “How to Make Sushi.”
Just make sure your title tag and H1 match. If users click on your site and then land on a page with a title that’s far from your title tag, they will bounce back to the search results. From Google’s perspective, that’s like your content isn’t relevant to the user, which can lead to lower rankings.
Start writing your first set of title tags with:
Remember, you can always change your title tag later, so compile a list of titles to try and see what works best.
7. Write Informative and Optimised Meta Descriptions
If you’ve read some SEO beginner guides, then you’ve probably heard about meta descriptions, which appear below title tags in search results, and how they aren’t a ranking factor, unlike title tags.
That doesn’t mean you should ignore meta descriptions from your SEO strategy.
Your meta description tells readers what your page is about. If you don’t write one, Google will pull in content from your page to create the meta description.
You want to include your keywords (and even related keywords) in your meta descriptions for users. If someone searches for a keyword that’s in your meta description, Google will bold that keyword. For users, this can make your page seem more relevant, which can result in a click.
Now you need to know that Google will often rewrite your meta description. Even if you write a meta description that summarises your content and matches the meta description character limits (which are 150 characters), Google may still decide to rewrite your content’s meta description.
That’s fine; it happens.
Still write a meta description because if Google does use your meta description, it will feature your core and maybe even related keywords. Those keywords, if bolded, can help users click your site, which can send a positive signal to Google about your content and its relevance to the search.
8. Use Keywords in Headings and Paragraphs
Another SEO tip for beginners? Insert keywords in your headings and content.
Google would love not to rely on keywords, but they’re a critical component to its ranking algorithm. Keywords help Google determine if a piece of content is about a specific topic or search query. That’s why your content (besides your title tags and meta descriptions) should use your keywords:
You want to include your core and related keywords in two places:
- Headings, like H1, H2s, H3s and so on
- Paragraphs, lists, tables and so on
You should include your core keyword in your first paragraph if possible. If using your keyword at that point doesn’t seem natural, then make sure to use your keyword within the first 100 words of your content.
Breaking your content into separate headings with H2 headings, for example, can help optimise your content and improve a visitor’s user experience. A heading makes your page easier for users to skim and read. It also helps users and web crawlers, which helps search engines index your content.
You can also use headings to target your related keywords, depending on your keywords.
In the above example, the page targets the following core and related keywords:
- How to roll sushi
- How to roll hosomaki
- How to roll futomaki
- How to roll uramaki
- How to roll temaki
This way, the website targets its keywords, organises its content and gives its readers a skimmable experience. They can find what they need on the page fast which makes them more likely to stay and less likely to bounce back to the search results — a positive signal to Google.
9. Write for Humans First, Then Search Engines
For many SEO beginners, it’s tempting to create and write content for search engines versus users. This approach can result to keyword stuffed pages, title tags and a tone of voice that seems robotic or unrelatable to users.
Write for your audience when creating and writing your content.
Think what they’re looking to find, solve, or learn from your content. Then think how you can make learning, understanding, or solving the problem even easier with your content structure, page design, or multimedia.
For example, this page about how to roll sushi uses images to help users learn.
From a user perspective, this makes sense.
What better way to learn how to roll sushi than to follow along with a visual guide? If someone tried to explain how to roll sushi through text only, it would be confusing and would make users unsure and nervous at every step.
Writing for your audience matters because, through SEO, you hope to earn revenue. You want users to find you via search but also convince them that you’re the best via your content. If you’re only writing for search engines, you’re cheating yourself of real leads and potential customers.
Put your audience first and your optimisations second to get the most out of SEO.
10. Optimise for Featured Snippets
One free SEO tip that affects your strategy is to target featured snippets. Featured snippets appear in 50% of search results so you want to optimise for them.
As a quick reminder featured snippets appear at the top of select search results in what’s called Position Zero. This position puts you above every other page which can help your site get more clicks and organic traffic.
When you research your core and related keywords you can check if the search results have a featured snippet. Make a note if they do. That way you can remember to optimise for that featured snippet.
Start claiming featured snippets for your website with these SEO beginner tips:
- Answer featured snippets with tables, lists or 46- to 84-word paragraphs
- Expand lists to eight-plus items (if useful to readers) to get clicks
- Create tables with three-plus rows (if useful to readers) to get clicks
- Write dedicated headings for answering featured snippets like “Is sushi healthy?”
- Use the core or related keyword that triggers the featured snippet as your heading
Remember your content will need to rank on page one to become the featured snippet. While the featured snippet sometimes goes to a site on the second page of search results it’s extremely rare. Most featured snippets come from the top five pages.
11. Go Ahead and Link to Other Sites
Links are a big part of SEO — in fact they’re one of Google’s ranking factors.
The emphasis on links can make new SEOs hesitant to link to other content or sites. While you don’t want to link to a competitor site or link away from your site on a product or service page, you don’t want to avoid linking to other sites entirely.
For Google internal and external linking is a sign of a healthy and genuine website.
Feel free to link to other websites when writing informational content for your audience. Use links to support and add to your content, like by sharing a statistic, study, guide or another piece of supporting content.
When linking to other sites remember to choose reputable high quality sites. Sending your readers to a site that looks (or is) shady can hurt your brand reputation. It can also make Google wonder about your site’s trustworthiness. Keep your reader and your brand safe by only linking to sites you’d be happy to send your grandma to.
12. Create Longer Content
Repeated studies show that longer content (long-form) performs better than short-form content when it comes to rankings and social shares. So your SEO strategy should consider (and probably include) long-form content.
For reference, long-form content is 1200 words or more, and short-form content is 500 to 800 words.
With long-form content, you can give users a complete guide to a topic.
If they’re researching the types of sushi, for example, they probably have follow up questions you can answer, like which sushi is the healthiest, where can they find the different types of sushi, and how much each type costs.
Remember, while long-form content tends to perform better than short-form content, that’s not always the case. Sometimes shorter content will rank at the top of search results. So before you write your content, always check the search engine results pages (SERPs).Remember write for your audience first and then for SEO.
13. Include Keywords in URLs but Keep URLs Short
URLs are another SEO tip for beginners.
For search engines and users, it’s good to have a short, descriptive, and organised URL. This kind of URL gives web crawlers more context about your content and site structure. It also helps users know where they are on your website.
When creating URLs for your site, follow these:
- Include your main keyword
- Keep your URL to 5 words or less if possible
- Use hyphens (-) to separate words
- Lowercase your URL
- Avoid apostrophes (‘) and hashtags (#)
Here are some good and bad examples:
| URL | Good or Bad |
| example.com/blog/12345.html | Bad |
| example.com/blog/how-to-roll-sushi.html | Good |
| example.com/sushi-rollers-2123123213.html | Bad |
| example.com/sushi-rollers.html | Good |
| example.com/blog/Types-of-Sushi.html | Bad |
| example.com/blog/types-of-sushi.html | Good |
Site structure is a big deal for SEO.
14. Set up your site structure now
When it comes to SEO basics, we need to talk about site structure.
Your site structure, also known as information architecture, is how you structure and organise your website. For example, what pages are on your site’s navigation? How do you categorise different site content like blogs, products or resources? And how does all your content relate to each other?
It’s a lot to think about, but it’s important for SEO.
Start brainstorming how you’ll structure your site (or revise its structure) with these:
- Determine your website’s hierarchy: Your hierarchy is your site’s organisation; think of it as a family tree. If your homepage is the parent, it’ll have several children like /products/, /about/ or /blog/ and those children may have children like /products/sushi-rollers/.
- Compile your header and footer pages: A website header and footer helps users,s as well as search engines navigate your site. You need to decide which pages or page links to include on those two elements. In most cases, these will be your most important pages or site sections.
- Design your pages with breadcrumb menus: A breadcrumb menu helps users navigate your site. Plus,s a breadcrumb menu can be structured data which can enhance your site’s look in search results. Work with your designers to include breadcrumb menus on pages.
While your site structure will need to be worked on with your design and development teams, it’s a part of SEO even for beginners. That’s why you should think about it now and include it in your strategy. If you’re working with a reputable SEO service provider, they can help you with this too!
15. Link your site to Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a must have tool for any SEO.
This free tool (from Google) gives you instant insight into your site’s performance in Google search results. It shows you how Google sees your site. Plus, you can find ways to improve your website’s SEO.
For example, in Google Search Console, you can check:
- Page impressions and clicks from different queries
- Crawl errors
- Mobile-friendly issues
- Rich results markup
- Page indexing
- Page rankings
- Page speed ratings
- And more
You can also submit your URLs (or entire site) in Google Search Console.
Every SEO should use Google Search Console. Set up Google Search Console for your site by following the “Get started with Search Console” guide from Google.
16. Get backlinks from reputable sites
Our next free SEO tip is about getting backlinks for your site.
Backlinks are links from another site to yours and helps to build your site’s credibility fast. If you can get backlinks from credible sites, Google will take that as a signal to trust your site (and rank it higher).
The best way to get backlinks as an SEO beginner is to build out your content and create quality pages on your site. So people will want to link to your site naturally.
Other ways to get backlinks:
- Guest posting: Write content that gets published on another website’s blog or newsletter and link to your site, or encourage them to learn more.
- Asking for links: You can ask other sites to link to your page. Just make sure you have a piece of content that fits their niche.
- Replacing broken links: If you find a site has an outdated statistic or brokenlink,k you can contact them to replace it with your page. It’s a win-win since you’re also helping them keep their SEO intact.
Never buy or ask for backlinks from shady sites. They will only harm your results and potentially get your site banned from the search results.
17. Find and research your top competitors
To rank well in the SERPs, you need to know who you’re competing against.
Your competition isn’t necessarily your direct business competitor. If your local competition has no online presence, they aren’t going to be as big of a threat. You need to see who (and what) is ranking to get ahead.
If you’re a sushi restaurant, you might look at other local restaurants and see how they rank to help get yourself in front of potential customers online.
From this result, you could look at Miyako and Yokohama’s websites to see what content they post and how they approach SEO.
18. Focus on E-E-A-T in your content
E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. This set of search rater guidelines determines how Google’s raters evaluate content creators online.
While E-E-A-T is not an official search ranking factor, it’s worth considering when creating content. Often, the information and approach you take for E-E-A-T will create content that ranks well naturally.
Make sure you’re telling Google and users what makes you a credible source. How long have you been in business? What experience do you have in the field? Does your service match what’s on your website?
This free SEO tip will make a big difference to your content.
19. Create topic clusters
One of the best SEO tip for content creation is topic clusters. Topic clusters are groups of related content that helps you to structure and organise your pages.
For example, if your topic is local restaurants, you might have a page on breweries, a page on coffee shops, and a page on Italian spots. From there, you might break down the top 5 options in each topic, the must-have menu items, and what spot is best for different activities.
Topic clusters are meant to help you create content that answers various searches without repeating yourself too much.
20. Target “People Also Ask” with FAQ sections
If you want to answer search intent directly, the People Also Ask section is a great place to start.
For most searches, you’ll find this section with related questions that people ask.
You can take these questions and create an FAQ on related pages and answer them directly. This section makes it easy to add more content to your pages while answering actual searches.
This simple SEO tip gives you more content ideas and targets featured snippets all in one.
21. Create a content schedule to prevent content decay
Some content won’t age well depending on the topic. That’s why you should create a schedule for creating and updating content to prevent content decay and improve rankings.
For example you could set a reminder to update your statistics pages at the end of December. That way you’ll be up to date with the latest information.
Learning SEO is easier when you have a schedule. There’s a lot to cover but planning out what you write when will make all the difference to your content strategy.
22. Create a content schedule to prevent content decay
More SEO Tips from an SEO Expert
Ready to get started with these SEO tips for beginners?
Still unsure (or feeling overwhelmed)? Search Engine Ascend can help.
Our award winning SEO agency offers SEO consulting services where you’ll be partnered with an experienced SEO specialist. We also offer SEO services if you want a long term partner to manage your company’s SEO.
Get in touch online today to find out how we can help your business.
