6 Super Basic SEO Tips I Think Every Website Owner Should Know
By: Christian Gomez
Tags: Web Development, SEO, Tips And Tricks

A summary of Google’s beginners guide to SEO, which was graciously handed down to us mere webmasters (back in 2010).

Introductions

I’ll keep this short so we can jump right in to the post. My name is Christian and I’m a freshly minted freelancer writer. I just started writing about SEO, and organic marketing strategy.

I want to talk about SEO as a methodical science, even though most recommend to describe it as a mythological creature. I hope you guys enjoy reading my stuff, and find some value in it!

Enough about that, let’s jump right into it.

Super Basic SEO Tip #1

Can I interest you in some Meta Tags?

Meta Tags are like the little 1 and 2 bit Lego blocks of SEO, and these lil’ guys might have something to do with what you site looks like on search engine results page. I’ve included some screenshot taken by Google to help illustrate what I mean.

Source: Google

The first blue line is almost always what you set as the <title> tag in the <head> element of your page. Don’t worry if you don’t know what that is. Just trust me, that’s where it belongs. Try to make each title tag unique, like a little code snowflake.

The smaller black text under the title is almost always what you set as the <meta name=“description”> in the <head>, right under the title if you’re OCD (like me).

Benefits of titles:

With titles, you get to tell search engines what that page is about.

Simultaneously, you tell users searching for you what you got.

Explicitly controlling what your pages look like on Google listing just plain looks better than Google picking a snippet programmatically.

What to include in titles:

Name of your website

Physical Location of the business

Maybe, a few key services or offerings.

What about descriptions?

Similar to titles, description tags let you tell search engine what to put as the little black text under the title on their results page. Use this tag to include a summary of the content a visitor can expect to find on that page. This tag also helps search engines develop context to what your site offers.

Bottom line:

Always include unique title and meta description tags for each and every page. For large sites consisting of thousands of pages, you can think of implementing programmatic solution like dynamic titles and descriptions.

Super Basic SEO Tip #2

Improve your site structure.

Have you ever seen a URL like this:

Source: Google

Search engines are nerdy enough to understand it; humans however, not so much.

In an effort to keep their customer’s happy, search engines prefer showing sites with URL’s that are “human readable” over sites that are not. Like this:

Source: Google

Making URLs Human readable is a major key to improving your site’s structure and SEO.

Benefits of human readable URLs:

Improved organization

Could lead to better crawling and indexing

Provides a better visitor experience

Another important element to your sites structure is the navigation. You think designing the navigation in a way that makes it easy for people to get from the homepage, to very specific content, in a logical and understandable way.

Google recommends using a breadcrumb navigation like this where possible:

Source: Google

These menus make it easy to see what page your on, and how you got there. It also makes it easy to hop around and explore different areas of the site, who doesn’t want that?

Quick question…

Have you ever chopped off the end of a URL, hoping to get back to a general listing page or something, only to land on a 404 error page?

Source: Google

In know I have. Don’t let that happen on your site.

Try it out, go to an article on your website, delete the article bit off the end, hit enter, and see where that takes you. This is a cool little thing, I never really noticed I did this until I read about it in Google’s SEO beginner guide. Apparently it’s more common than I thought.

If it is happing on your site, you can fix it by creating index pages for each directory you create on your site. For example, the 2010 directory of the site above might be full of article.html pages, but no index.html page. If you add an index.html page within that directory, you’ll see that page when you delete the article.html bit off the end of the URL. Every site is different though, so check with your local webmaster.

Super Basic SEO Tip #3

This is where stuff starts getting good.

If I had to pick the #1 most impactful element to effective SEO it would be quality content. You’ll hear this alot, but it’s very true.

Creating quality content that is compelling, engaging, unique, and or useful is the #1 most influential factor to your websites SEO.

“Here we go, another post about creating creative, creations blah blah blah…”

Hold on, I anticipated that question and included my 3 super secret tips to creating quality content:

Be yourself *gag*

Create for your people

And finally, anticipaaaaate!

I’m really laying it all out here for you imaginary friends. But, let me elaborate on that last one: Anticipate.

Try this with me — close your eyes and pretend you’re that one person that reads your writing. *giggle*

Imagine what they’re thinking about. What are they worried about? What would inspire them to read your post (other than your magnificent title)? What are they looking to gain?

Whatever thoughts cross your mind, write them down.

Open your eyes and address those thoughts in your post. This is how I think of anticipation, my secret weapon.

A couple additional points regarding content:

Illustrate your point with quality images

Use next gen image formats like webp

Describe the image as best you can in the “alt” text

Use descriptive link text don’t link words like “click here”

Use heading tags like <h1> <h2> sparingly, where it makes sense

Super Basic SEO Tip #4

Less exciting, but there are still some gems in here.

Use robots.txt files to tell bots not to crawl certain folders. This makes sense for image folders that you don’t want showing up on search.

Protect your sites reputation using “nofollow” links. If you ever need to link to a page you’re not proud of for whatever reason (I wont judge), slap a rel=“nofollow” in the link element. That will prevent bots from giving your reputation over to that site.

Super Basic SEO Tip #5

Here’s where the 2010 guide starts to show it’s age.

So I’ll just share what I know instead.

Google created a nifty mobile-friendly test tool where you can type in your website URL and get a complete report on how mobile friendly your site is. Getting a high score on this tool is a good first-step in optimizing your sites SEO.

Super Basic SEO Tip #6

Last but not least, I’m going to talk about ways to share and promote your website in the right ways.

You’ve probably heard about backlinks. But if you’re like the old me, you probably wouldn’t know how to describe what it is, or much less, how to do it.

A backlink is essentially a link that goes to your website from another website. Naturally, the number of backlinks to your site grows over time, as your site becomes relevant and people share your stuff.

Search engines understand that you’d like to let others know about the hard work you’ve put into your content. So effectively promoting your stuff will lead to your content getting picked up by people, and publications that are also interested in your same subject, hopefully sharing and further spreading your content.

That means, become a master at being recognized online.

“How do I do that?”, you might ask.

Here are my 3 tips to sharing your content and getting recognized online:

Give, give, give, then give some more great quality content.

Distribute all that generous giving to on different channels with automation tools like Zapier.

Open up and connect with your peers, that’ll make you better at what you do.

Place yourself everywhere you’d like to be seen, for me it’s medium, instagram, and twitter.

Do all these things (in your own way), and you’ll be on the way to online recognition.

In conclusion

That concludes this list of 6 super basic seo tips. I hope you found it useful! I try to post daily so stay tuned for the next article.

Cheers,

Christian