Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the most critical tools in a website owner’s arsenal. It involves optimizing a website to make it more visible in search engine results pages (SERPs), ultimately driving more organic traffic to your site.
In this guide, we’ll break down the fundamentals of SEO in a clear, actionable way—perfect for beginners or anyone looking to solidify their understanding of key SEO concepts.
Good SEO is essential. Without it, even the best content may never reach its audience. Think of SEO as the bridge between your website and potential visitors. By following best practices, your site can rank higher in search results, increasing exposure, traffic, and engagement. Let’s explore the core pillars of SEO, how to get started with an audit, and the steps you can take to optimize your website effectively.
What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. At its heart, SEO is the practice of improving a website’s visibility in search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, and DuckDuckGo.
When users search for information online, search engines display results ranked by relevance. SEO helps your website appear at the top of these results, making it easier for people to find your content. Without good SEO, even great content can be buried under pages of search results.
In short: SEO is about making your website more visible to people searching for topics related to your business or content.
Why SEO matters
Visibility and traffic. SEO matters because it bridges the gap between your website and your audience. Without it, even the most compelling content can remain hidden, buried deep within search engine results pages (SERPs). A high-ranking website benefits from increased visibility, which naturally leads to more traffic, greater engagement, and higher conversion rates. Think of SEO as the key to unlocking your website’s potential—it ensures your content reaches the people actively searching for it.
Beyond traffic, SEO also builds trust and credibility. Users naturally view websites that appear higher in search results as more authoritative and reliable. By optimizing your site, you’ll improve its technical performance while also creating a better user experience, which search engines reward.
Finally, think about the competitive edge! In a competitive digital landscape, effective SEO allows you to stand out and attract your target audience. You don’t want your website to get lost among countless competitors.
Effective SEO is vital for growth, visibility, and long-term success in the online world.
Start with an SEO audit
Before diving into SEO strategies, start by analysing your website’s current performance. Analysing a website to assess its SEO is known as an SEO audit, and it’s the foundation for any optimization plan.
An SEO audit can consist of many things, but it typically involves:
- Identifying major issues with your website
Are there broken links on your website? Are your images corrupted? Are meta descriptions missing? Are your CSS stylesheets uncompressed? Is the URL structure consistent (e.g. pick either ‘www‘ or non-‘www‘)? - Fixing simple problems
For example, make sure titles are in<h1>tags, and use<h2>and<h3>for subheadings. Ensure your pages have clear and concise meta descriptions, sufficient content, and links to other internal pages. - Analysing organic traffic
Use tools like Google Analytics to understand who’s visiting your site, and what search terms they’re using to find your content. - Reviewing backlinks
Backlinks (links from other websites to yours) are crucial for SEO. Tools like Ahrefs or Moz can help you analyze your backlink profile, which you can then work on improving.
You could do a lot of this manually, but there are many great, free tools available to help you audit your site effectively.
For starters, signing up for Google Search Console is essential. It provides speed insights, analytics information, and a wealth of free SEO information to help you audit your website and assess the impact of your SEO efforts. You can see each page on your website that has been indexed by Google, and you’ll be alerted to any pages that become unavailable due to 404s or other errors.
Using Google Analytics you can acquire key information about your website’s visitors, and better understand their behaviour and traffic sources.
You can check for many problems, such as multiple header tags, images without alt attributes, absent meta description, as well as perform a simple keyword analysis, with one of the many free SEO tools available.
Keyword research
Keywords are the backbone of SEO. Keyword research involves discovering the terms your audience searches for and strategically using them in your content.
Here is how to research keywords effectively for SEO.
- Compile a list of root topics relevant to your website or business
What might people search for when trying to find your content or website? - Search for keywords based on these topics in Google or similar search engines
Do you find content that’s similar to your own? - Build a list of keywords you intend to focus on
This can be as many as 15 or as few as 1. Narrow down your list by considering the competition you might face for each keyword, and considering how relevant each keyword is to your website/content. - Make sure your list of keywords contains both head keywords and long-tail keywords
Head keywords are those such as “football” or “cars”, whereas long-tail keywords are those with three or more words, such as “football t-shirts coloured” or “where buy cars London”. Head keywords face a lot more competition, so it’s important to have a healthy mix of both head keywords and long-tail keywords. - Utilize these keywords in your content
Put together your content, utilizing your keywords throughout, but not too often. Keyword density, as explained in our glossary of SEO terms, refers to how often a word or phrase appears in your writing; the percentage of your content that’s made up of your keyword. If you write a 1,000-word article, and your keyword appears 100 times, the keyword density would be 10%. While there is no agreed-upon percentage, and search engines have never published any precise figures, it is commonly said that a keyword density above 2–5% is likely to negatively affect a webpage’s search ranking, as it will be considered keyword stuffing. So keep your keyword density to under 5%!
You now have a list of keywords that are relevant to your website, which you can focus on and use sensibly in your content, and will help naturally drive traffic to your website.
Note that it’s important to re-evaluate your list of keywords at least a few times per year, and pay attention to the specific keywords you’re using on particular pages of your website.
Optimize your website
Now, optimizing your website is what SEO is all about! Below we explore some simple ways to improve your website and its pages.
- Use header tags
Always have your page’s title in<h1>tags and any subheadings in<h2>tags. - Never have more than
<h1>tag<h1>tags are for the page’s title only, so there must be only one for each page. - Give images alt text
‘Alt text’ is an attribute of the HTML img tag, and is used to describe images for those who are visually impaired. But alt text is also useful for signalling to search engines that your page is relevant for the keywords contained within the alt text you use. See our page on alt text for more info. - Make sure your website is canonical
Have either a www version or a non-www version, and make sure whichever you don’t use points to the correct version. For example, if you run example.com you will need to pick between www.example.com and example.com; if you pick a www version, make sure example.com/example-page redirects gracefully to www.example.com/example-page. - Make sure nothing on your website 404s
Search engines don’t like 404s, as they suggest content may be outdated. Don’t have links on your website that point to pages you have since deleted. If the content is gone, remove the link! - Add links to other relevant resources
Google looks at the links on a page when assessing the page’s relevance to search terms. If you have a page discussing football, include links to the Wikipedia page for that football team, or to the football team’s official website or other, similar resources that are relevant to the page’s topic. - Use your keywords throughout your content
Once you have performed your keyword research, make sure you use your keywords throughout the page’s content, but don’t overdo it; stick to a sensible keyword density. - Write more!
Research has shown that pages with more written content rank higher in search results. There is no precise word count you need to achieve, but don’t be tempted to create 100s of 200-word pages and expect your site to be #1 overnight! More is better. - Write decent, sensible meta descriptions
An entire SEO topic in its own right, a meta description is an HTML tag that describes the content of your page. Google may decide to use this description as the blurb it shows for your page in result pages, so it’s important it’s appealing! Search engines also use this to gather information concerning the page’s relevance. There is a great article on writing good SEO-friendly meta descriptions on Yoast, available here. - Heed any warnings or errors from SEO audit tools
There are many free SEO tools around, some more capable than others. Use them to assess your website and pay attention to what they tell you! If there are warnings or notices, investigate and see if you can fix them.
Things to avoid
There are a lot of myths surrounding SEO, and many ways to do SEO “wrong”. Here are 8 things to steer clear of when putting SEO techniques into practice.
- Spamming your website
This might seem like a tempting idea, but search engines will penalize your website and downrank it if you are caught engaging in spamming. - Overusing your chosen keywords
Known as keyword stuffing, this is perhaps a tempting idea. However, overusing keywords is a surefire way to draw Google’s wrath. Keep to a keyword density of between 2 to 5% or risk the possibility of Google punishing your site. - Using unoriginal content
Write your own original content! If you use others’ inappropriately, search engines will take note and your site’s ranking will suffer as a result. - Using ‘blackhat’ methods
This could be spamming, deceptive redirects, inappropriately described links, clickjacking, and so on. While these methods may work in the short term, they never go unnoticed; Google is watching and has levied more penalties for deceptive SEO practices in 2018 than in any other year. - Neglecting link-building
Link building is fundamental to SEO. Gathering good quality backlinks from relevant websites is important and will help to improve your website’s ranking. Building good quality links from reputable, authoritative sources is incredibly important and invaluable as part of good SEO. - Considering only search engines
People are at the core of search engine optimisation. Write content for people, not search engines. Aim to write high-quality pages with engaging, informative content. User engagement is incredibly important to a successful website. - Choosing the ‘wrong’ keywords
You need to select keywords that accurately reflect the topic of your page, or the topic of your website broadly. - Failing to optimize title/heading tags
Try to include your keyword in<h2>and<h3>tags on your home page, and in the title of individual pages (<h1>) where possible.
Next steps
SEO is an ongoing process. Monitor your website regularly, analyze performance using tools like Google Analytics, and adapt your strategy based on new trends or changes in search engine algorithms (grr…).
For more detailed guidance, check out:
In investing time in SEO will boost your site’s visibility and provide a better overall experience for your audience. It’s a win-win for your content and your users.