It takes more than just reading a blog post to fully understand how to drive more traffic to your website. You need to have a clear understanding of search engine optimization (SEO) and all of its components, which can be confusing. When learning about and practicing SEO, there are a few basic elements that every SEO beginner will need to know. To help anyone new to SEO, we have created a list of the most important aspects we think all SEO beginners should learn.
- Authority – Authority is Google’s perception of how credible your website is. Having an authoritative will help your website or page to rank higher on a search engine. There are various factors that are taken into consideration when determining authority.
- Site history
- The originality of the website content
- Age of the website
- The website traffic trends
- Backlinks to your site
- Meta Tags & Descriptions – Meta tags & descriptions are absolutely crucial for SEO. Meta tags help businesses to accurately describe the content of their website so that search engines can more quickly gauge the content included on the site. This allows for the pages of your website to be ranked more easily. Following the title, meta descriptions are typically a sentence or two that expand on the title to help google better understand what kind of information the website contains. The more relevant a meta description is to a search query, the more likely it is to appear on a search engine results page.
- Keyword – Keywords are incredibly significant when practicing SEO. Keywords are words or phrases that are incorporated into your website content that will allow the website to be found by search engines. They are typically very precise and will describe exactly what information the website contains.
- Domain Authority – Domain Authority (DA) is a score of how well a domain as a whole will rank on search engine results ranging from 1-100. Domain authority is based on several different factors including both relevancy, and authority. It is much more difficult to raise your DA than it is to change your keywords, meta tags, or meta descriptions. Raising your DA is a long-term strategy that will require effort, strategic SEO planning, and patience.
- Content Relevance – Content Relevance refers to how relevant a website and its content are in relation to a specific or topic search query.