Learn Search Engine Optimization (SEO) For Beginners

Talking about the digital world, friends are familiar with Search Engine Optimization, one of the digital marketing techniques that need to be considered to develop a business in the current era.

Through SEO, you can get free/ organic traffic without spending a penny. If the traffic comes intending to convert, SEO can provide increased conversions so that your business can grow.

Without SEO, your business may stagnate. For those who don’t know, Google is currently one of the search engines that has a bigger market compared to other search engines such as Yahoo, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Baidu, and others.

In fact, according to data from Search Engine Market Share in 2021, Google has a market share of 92.01%, far above Bing with 2.96% and Yahoo at 1.51%.

Seeing this data, of course, it is very unfortunate if you do not take advantage of SEO optimally.

However, maybe friends who want to dive into SEO to develop their business are still confused about how to learn. Do you have to learn keyword research first, or master JavaScript?

To overcome this, I will provide several ways that you can practice learning SEO from scratch.

Understand the definition of SEO carefully
Get to know how search engines work
Learn key SEO activities
Learn keyword research
Understand SEO tools
Learn from experts online

Understand the definition of SEO carefully

Some of my friends may often hear this term but do not know exactly what the definition behind it is.

Broadly speaking, according to Neil Patel, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, where SEO is a process to help your site or content be able to rank or be on the first page on Google.

Back again to the initial explanation, Google is the largest search engine today. In fact, according to Neil Patel, 75% of online searches start from Google.

Most people will certainly search for information through Google with a variety of keywords. For example, people want to find a recipe for soy sauce chicken. Automatically, it will search for keywords such as “chicken soy sauce recipe”, “how to make soy sauce chicken”, etc.

You also have to understand carefully the intent behind the user‘s search for a keyword. This is called search intent.

This is where Search Engine Optimization has an important role to make your content rank in the best search engines like Google.

As much as possible, choose the right keywords and make the content of good quality so that it can answer questions from users.

Finally, Search Engine Optimization does not end only when the website is already on the first page or ranking on search sites. With a higher ranking, it should be able to bring traffic that can achieve business goals from your website.

Get to know how search engines work

Understanding the definition of Search Engine Optimization alone is not enough. You also need to understand how search engines work in finding and placing content on the Search Engine Result Page (SERP). This is very important so that you can create content that satisfies search engines as well as users.

Friends, you probably already understand that on Google there are hundreds or even millions of sites that provide various kinds of information for users. The job of search engines is to review these millions of sites and decide which sites have relevant and quality content for users.

So, how does Google do this? There are three terms that you need to know:

Crawling : In this process Google has a robot called Google crawler to find content that is on search engines . From all the content found, the crawler will choose which content is quality and relevant according to the keywords searched by the user .
Indexing : After collecting relevant content, Google will store the information found in the crawling process and process it to be displayed for relevant queries . At this stage, it is important for website owners to improve their sites so that they are indexed properly by Google.
Ranking : Google will rank for the most relevant and quality pages in the best rankings. This means that the results will be sorted according to the level of relevance of the content and its quality.

Learn key SEO activities

What are the activities in SEO that friends need to learn?

On-page content optimization
On-page technical
Off-page optimization

(Other practitioners divide it into on-page SEO, technical SEO, and off-page. Different names, but essentially the same thing)

The three key Search Engine Optimization activities are based on how search engines work, so these three activities are activities that must be carried out to get maximum results on search engines.

It’s easier, let’s discuss it one by one

On-page content optimization

On-page content optimization is an effort made to optimize the website through content.

In creating content, friends, not only write articles but also have to pay attention to keywords, meta descriptions, SEO titles, permalinks, and internal links, to include visuals in them such as images or videos.

By maximizing content, your content will be easily indexed by Google and potentially enter on the first page of Google.

Technical SEO

In this section, you have to learn some technical aspects of SEO such as XML sitemaps, page speed, crawling, and indexing to structured data.

Technical SEO is considered important to be explored properly so that your site has a good experience for users.

In addition, learning technical SEO is also able to make your site easy to crawl and index by search engines.

Off-page optimization

If on-page tends to optimize the site through its website (both in terms of content and technical ), off-page is one of the SEO efforts to maximize from outside the site.

One way of optimizing off page-SEO is by doing link building. Link building is an effort to put links on other sites that point to our site or commonly called backlinks.

Make sure friends get links in a natural way, not against the guidelines from Google.

This is done to gain the trust of Google. The higher the trustworthiness of your site, the more likely it is that your site will be placed on the first page of Google.

Learn keyword research

Keyword research is a process where you search for relevant keywords for a particular topic that is searched by users through search engines.

In searching for keywords, friends can use several paid tools such as Ahrefs, SEMrush, to Google Keyword Planner.

In addition, you can also use Google Trends and social media to search for keywords for free.

Using keywords that are relevant to what users are searching for for a particular topic will help your content rank well in the SERPs.

As your illustration, there are several types of keywords that need to be known:

transactional, keywords that are usually searched by users to make a purchase transaction
informational, keywords used to find information from search engines
navigational, this keyword is usually used when the user wants to go directly to the site, but doesn’t know the domain

Understand SEO tools

Not only learning about the fundamentals, but you also need to understand the tools that can support SEO activities.

With SEO tools, friends can read the data and process it properly and do competitor research carefully. These SEO tools can also make your SEO activities easier.

Here are some SEO tools that you must know:

Google Analytics, this tool serves to monitor traffic that enters the site. Not only that, this tool is also useful for identifying bounce rates and potential keywords
Google Search Console, this tool also functions to search for potential keywords on the site, do indexing , to the sitemap
Screaming Frog, this tool is useful for crawling your site and monitoring errors that occur in it
Ahrefs, SEMrush, Google Keyword Planner, these tools are useful for doing keyword research

Learn from experts online

It is undeniable, that self-taught SEO learning is not for everyone. It will be easier if we follow the guidelines/teachings given by SEO practitioners.

Some places to learn SEO online that are recommended for friends to follow:

Full-Stack Digital Marketing Program from RevoU . In addition to SEO, friends will learn about digital marketing as a whole from experts & practitioners in their respective fields.
YouTube channel: Search Agency . Search Agency is one of the leading SEO agencies in Indonesia. On their YouTube channel, they often invite different SEO practitioners to talk about specific things about SEO.
Skill Academy: SEO 101 . This online class, guided by Ilman Akbar, provides step-by-step directions for learning SEO for beginners

Those are six ways that friends can practice when they want to start learning SEO. Apart from all that, you don’t need to worry about SEO things that you haven’t mastered well.

Stay focused on SEO techniques that you have mastered and be consistent in creating content. This way, over time you will be able to develop some SEO techniques that are still to be learned.