SEO: 4 Skills You Can Learn At Home

Whether you run a business, study marketing, or run a small side hustle, SEO is an important tool for success.

In the digital marketplace, whether media or eCommerce, the SEO company you work for will have SEO strategies to ensure they can rank high on Google search and get as many eyeballs as they can on their content.

Everybody has to start somewhere, and learning SEO can easily be done online and at home. Have a look at these 6 easy steps you can take to learn the basics of SEO.

Understand what SEO is used for

There are various marketing goals for businesses, however, something most businesses have in common is the drive to boost revenue. That’s exactly what SEO is for. When you make improvements to your website with SEO it enables you to rank top in search engine results and helps to create revenue-inducing traffic.

Search engines such as Google have “bots” that crawl the internet to find, index, and then rank sites. When people search using one of these, they can then provide a list of websites with the right content. It’s important search engines can find your website, and that’s exactly the purpose of SEO.

Understand keyword research

For SEO to work, you need to find the right words that you want to rank for. In other words, keywords. The idea is to find keywords that fit your business and are searched for frequently. This should lead to your site being seen by more people.

There are two different types of keywords, short-tail and long-tail. Short-tail keywords only have one or two words, whereas long-tail keywords usually span three or more such as “ where to buy red paint” There are several different ways you can find the best keywords, for example, you could use Soolve or Keywords Everywhere.

This video will help you to learn more about Keywords and how to find the best ones for your business:

Understanding the difference between on and off-page SEO

You will use SEO in two places. Off the page and on the page. Off-page SEO is down to other sites, whereas On-page SEO is what you can change and alter when you learn SEO.

On-page SEO is where you manage several different parts of your website to please search engine bots and visitors. It includes things like formatting, keyword usage, URLs, image descriptions, alt text, meta descriptions, and navigation. It takes a lot of careful work to get right.

With off-page SEO you are relying on the opinion of others. For example, mentions about your brand, authoritative links, and social media marketing.

If you want SEO to work, you need to understand and incorporate both.

Understand user experience signals

User experience(UX) plays a huge role in SEO. Therefore, you need to understand that any changes you make to your site need to be with your users in mind. Whether you are changing your design, content, or functionality, you need to meet their expectations.

Some of the signals to look out for include, the click-through rate (CTR) and dwell time (how long they stay on your page before going back to a search result.

These are just four of the things you should learn about SEO and they will certainly help you to get started. Do you think any others should be included? Please share them in the comments below.

Featured image: GOCMEN, iStock.

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