Let’s get this straight about SEO.
Organic (search engine) traffic is the Holy Grail of all traffic.
Why?
Because it means you’re getting people to your site that have intent.
It means they are actually looking for something so when they get to your site they are actively engaged in trying to find it.
This is different from social media traffic where people end up on your site out of curiosity. They might look for something or they might not.
You just don’t know.
That’s why even if you don’t want to learn SEO, you should know some things about SEO. Not knowing SEO is like running a restaurant and caring about how reservations work.
Now, I’m not saying you need to become an expert at SEO. You can save that for, well, the experts, but just by knowing the basics of SEO you’ll have covered 80% of the ground.
That’s what you’re going to pick up here. The 80%.
After that, you can decide to dive deeper or you can take your knowledge and run with it to see what damage you can do with your site.
Cool?
What Is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is the art and science of trying to improve your site’s rankings in the search engines.
Why do I say art and science? Because the search engines like to keep secrets so nobody is 100% certain of what makes you rank higher than other sites, however, there are things you can definitely be sure of.
The science part is understanding the things we all know have an affect on your search engine rankings.
The art is getting good at those things and adding your own touch to them.
How Do You SEO for a Website?
First, you need to understand what the search engines are trying to do.
And what is that?
They want to ensure that they are providing the most contextual answers possible for the searches that people make.
So if someone searches for why are elephants big? then the search engines have to make sure they provide the best answer possible for that.
You can’t expect to rank for that query if you don’t answer that question in the best way possible.
And that’s where SEO really begins.
With your content.
It’s very easy to get caught up in the allure of search engine traffic and look for quick tricks or hacks, but at the end of the day, if your content isn’t up to snuff, then it doesn’t matter what else you do.
So first and foremost if you want to get good at SEO then you need to get good at creating content.
If you can’t do that then everything else that you learn on this page is going to be a complete waste of time for you.
Can You Do SEO Yourself?
Yes. 100%.
If you can create content then you are already doing SEO.
Remember, SEO starts with the content that you create so there is already some level of SEO there.
The question then becomes can you write content that is relevant to whatever the reader is looking for?
If you can then you can do SEO.
Can you do advanced SEO where you go out and do link-building outreach campaigns?
You still can, but you might want to focus on other things.
I say this because we don’t do outreach. We just try our best to create awesome content and share it with the world.
Would it be great if we could do some outreach campaigns for backlinks?
Maybe, but if we keep the focus on creating content that is worthy of people linking to it naturally then that is where we’d rather spend our time.
Getting Started With SEO
So how do you get started with SEO? What exactly do you need to do.
First and foremost you need to develop a content strategy for yourself.
What I mean is that you need to understand the content that you want to create for you and your audience.
From there you can start to research the keywords that your audience would use to actually find your content.
Then?
Well you start writing.
Remember, the goal is to always create great content for your audience.
Too many people fall into the trap of putting so much focus on SEO that their writing sounds like it is written for a robot instead of a human.
Articles on SEO
We try our best to show you SEO from a non-technical perspective. Our goal is to make SEO available to everyone and that means not getting lost in the weeds.
There is nothing wrong with that if you want to dive deeper into SEO but for us we just like creating good things so that’s the level we tend to stay at.