Basic SEO Guide – An Introduction

This is the primary page in the Basic SEO Guide section. The guides introduce basic elements of a successful SEO campaign and links to explanations of the fundamentals.

#SEOGuides #SEOStrategy #WebsiteStrategy #ContentStrategy

Basic SEO Guide – Purpose & Guidelines

Purpose:

  • The purpose of these guides is to give a basic introduction to the fundamentals of SEO, so you can implement them on your web property.
  • These guides are meant to be read by webmasters, marketers, IT guys, content creators, and anyone who has a hand in publishing a web property.
  • These basic guides are not intended to give a complete overview of everything related to SEO – use them as a starting point.

Guidelines:

  1. Read the guides, do your best to understand them ;-) Contact me with any questions or comments.
  2. Implement elements according to the guidelines.
  3. Remember there are very few hard and fast rules about SEO. There will be many examples where well-ranked sites do not appear to meet these guides.

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Basic SEO Guide – Inclusions

You do not have to execute any of these basic elements perfectly, but you should execute them reasonably well, and slightly better than your ranking and business competitors.

The focus of these SEO guides are basic on-page inclusions, basic internal linking, basic external linking and connections to enable search engines to find, crawl and index the content, which will all go to aid your rankings.

These are the areas covered:

  • Basic SEO Keyword Research
    • The first steps in understanding how organic search users search Google for your product or service and starting to optimise your site towards these topics.
  • Basic SEO Competitor Analysis
    • The first steps in understanding what other sites / pages / content rank in search engines for topics your users use when searching.
  • Basic Goal Setting & Monitoring
    • Setting goals for your SEO campaigns and monitoring progress helps you to achieve them.
  • Basic SEO Content Planning
    • How to use your Keyword Research and Competitor Research to plan valuable content which will achieve your goals.
  • Basic SEO Information Architecture
    • How to structure your site into content silos, with key landing pages, secondary and supporting pages and structure internal linking.
  • Basic Google Search Console / Webmaster Tools
    • Get yourself set up to understand how Google is crawling and indexing your site.
  • Basic Robots.txt
    • Control whether or not googlebot  and others can crawl your content.
  • Basic XML Sitemaps For SEO
    • Help Google and others to find new content, crawl it and index it.
  • Basic SEO Meta Tags
    • The very basics of on-page meta structure and optimisation.
      • Title
      • Meta Description
      • Canonical URLs
      • Open Graph Tags
      • NOINDEX Tag
  • Basic HTML Heading Tags
    •  The first steps in on-page content structure and optimisation for SEO.
      • H1 heading
      • H2 heading
      • H3 heading
      • H4 – H6 headings
  • Basic SEO Internal Linking
    • The first steps in linking your content together for architecture, usability as well as optimisation.
      • Header Navigation
      • Breadcrumbs
      • Sidebars
      • Footer Navigation
      • In-Body Links
  • Basic SEO Body Content
    • The first steps in creating valuable content for users and optimisation.
      • Introduction
      • Main Body
      • Conclusion
      • Media
  • Basic Page Inclusions & Structure
    • What each page on a website must have, should have and would be nice to have.
    • Basic structure of a webpage.
  • Basic Link Building & Web Mentions
    • The first steps in generating links and mentions from other sources on the web:
      • Building External Links
      • Keyword Usage
      • Spam
      • External Linking To Other Websites

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