A Guide to SEO for Beginners: A to Z to Know in 2024!

In the digital market, owning a website for business is necessary so that your brand can be easily found by internet users. 

Yet, to appear in the most visible place, a website needs to be optimised for search engines. Therefore, understanding SEO for beginners will aid you in improving your website.

This guide will help you learn SEO from scratch and how this digital marketing tactic builds your site for both search engines and users. 

What Is SEO?

SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is an “unpaid” strategy to increase the site’s visibility on search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.). Why is SEO considered unpaid? SEO makes your website appear higher in organic search results than sponsored search results, where companies can pay to rank higher.

More website traffic will lead to more leads and sales, which is the ultimate purpose of SEO. SEO generally consists of three primary elements: off-page, on-page, and technical SEO.

Off-page SEO is improving a website’s visibility from the outside, such as through link building, social media marketing, digital PR, and so on. Meanwhile, on-page SEO focuses on optimising the website from the inside, such as improving title tags, headings, URLs, etc.

On the other hand, technical SEO focuses on the website’s performance, such as page speed, mobile-friendliness, and many more. All three of these SEO elements need to be taken care of if you want your website to rank better for high-value, relevant keywords.

How Do SEO and Search Engines Work?

To learn basic SEO, you must know how SEO and search engine works for your website. Search engines like Google aim to provide the most relevant and helpful content for users.

Therefore, certain search engines index the most pertinent and excellent material on a search engine results page by using proprietary algorithms to scour the internet.

Though other media kinds like photos or videos can also be included, the content is usually blog posts that focus on a certain topic.

In addition, search engines utilise a combination of on-page, off-page, and technical SEO elements to identify material that best answers the user's query and intent before displaying the most relevant results.

They do this by first analysing the search term to understand the user's overall intent.

From this explanation, it can be said that SEO works to improve your content to be the most relevant to the queries, which later increases the ranks on search results. Therefore, to achieve it, you must target the right keywords and incorporate them into the content.

Then, you must craft the content to be valuable, high-quality, and pertinent. You can find the detailed explanation of the beginner's guide to SEO below. 

Why Is SEO Important?

Now that you already grasp the idea of SEO for beginners, you might wonder why SEO matters to your business. In Malaysia, it was predicted that between 2024 and 2029, there will be a steady increase in the number of internet users, reaching 1.7 million users overall.

Following fifteen years of growth, the number of users is predicted to reach 35.65 million, marking a new peak in 2029. This means that people are more active on the Internet and business in Malaysia should leverage this to be discoverable. 

Yet, the challenge does not stop there. In 2017, 68% of Malaysian companies had websites to spread information about their brand, and from those numbers, it is possible to find companies in your sector using SEO for their site. 

This indicates that creating content is not enough to bring you triumph over the competition in the digital market, especially in your niche. Hence, SEO is important for your site. 

Furthermore, you can benefit from SEO as one of your digital marketing attempts for these reasons: 

• Improve user experience: Enhancing your website's overall user experience through technical SEO can lead to increased conversions and satisfied consumers.
• Boost website visibility: When it comes to high-value keywords that are crucial to your company, SEO helps you rank your website higher in organic search engine results. This can lead to greater sales by enabling potential clients to discover your business online naturally.
• Drive traffic to site: With millions of internet users in Malaysia, sitting at a discoverable place will give you a bigger chance to get clicked by users, driving more traffic to your site. 
• Enhance authority: Since potential customers naturally trust brands they see ranking well in search results, producing excellent content that performs highly for relevant search queries is an excellent way to develop brand authority.
• Grow sustainably with cost-effective tactics: Organic SEO traffic generates long-term traffic that you don't have to pay for, in contrast to strategies like social media or search advertising that only function if you're actively paying for ads.

How to Do SEO Basics for Beginners

Understanding SEO for beginners also includes learning how to implement it on your website. Even though SEO can seem difficult, there are a few recurring procedures you can follow to carry out successful SEO strategies.

These actions consist of determining your target market, choosing pertinent keywords, creating valuable content, building backlinks, and enhancing the functionality of your website. Below are the SEO for beginner steps you can adhere to:

1. Determine Target Audience

Before working on your website, you must know the target audience first. This is important to identify the type of content you will make. To do so, you can create a buyer persona and do market segmentation. With that, you can understand the type of audience you are targeting. 

2. Perform Keyword Research

Once you already know the target audience, you can begin conducting keyword research to find the relevant terms used by users. You can then incorporate them into your content and web copy.  

One of the tools you can use is Google Keyword Planner. Then, you can cluster it into topics so that you can track the performance. 

3. Produce High-Quality Content

Now that you have keywords and topics to write, you can begin producing valuable content. You can make an outline consisting of structured headings (H2-H6) first to see where your content will lead to. 

Do not forget to put keywords you obtained on the title, body, headings, and meta description. Et, make sure to do it naturally and avoid keyword stuffing to make it readable. 

You can also add relevant visuals like images, videos, or infographics to make it comprehensible. But, you must ensure to put alt text to the images. Well-crafted content will add value to your piece, making it sit in a prominent place on search results. 

4. Build Backlinks

Other than creating content, you should also optimise your site externally, one of which is by building backlinks. A backlink, which Google counts as an indicator of authority, is a link referring to your content from another website.

You can look into worthwhile websites that might gain from links pointing to your content. Then, you can contact them and suggest them to link to your site.

5. Improve Website Performance

Last but not least, you must also focus on your website performance by making sure that it loads rapidly and is responsive to mobile devices. You can do regular site audits to find areas of improvement.

Conclusion

Those are the detailed information about SEO for beginners. Combining three core elements of SEO will gradually make your website rank higher. However, doing so can require time and skills; therefore, you can entrust it to SEO Services by cmlabs. Book a meeting now and tell us your SEO needs for free!