7 SEO Basics Every Entrepreneur Should Know

seo basics

When you are creating a new startup company, and you are building your website online, you want to be able to grow your exposure and leads as easily as possible. Understanding SEO for your website can seem daunting, but learning some SEO basics can be the secret between you having 1000’s of leads generated from your site, and never getting a single lead through the door.

Many understand the importance of SEO, after all with 75% of users never scrolling past the first page of search results, if you aren’t ranking effectively with SEO, you’re missing out massively.

Instead of having a meltdown and thinking of SEO as this big, daunting apocalypse waiting to happen, all you need to know are some of the basics.

These basics will help you nail down your sites SEO and get you ranking in no time.

Let’s get started.

Why Getting SEO Right Is So Important

You’ve likely heard of SEO, and you realize that good SEO is the gateway to high levels of organic traffic through Google. But why is SEO so important to get right?

After all, can’t you just ram your content full of important keywords and Google will see that’s what’s best?

The long and short of it is no. Ever since Googles Penguin update in 2012 Google has been cracking down on sites that don’t provide high-quality content.

That means that stuffing in keywords just isn’t going to cut it. In fact, Google will penalize sites which don’t adhere to their strict guidelines, and their rankings can drop or disappear completely.

That’s why it’s important to make sure you have the SEO basics nailed, so you don’t get caught out and you boost your traffic.

The 7 SEO Basics You Need to Understand

To make it as easy as possible for you to understand what SEO basics you should be focusing on, we’ve put together these seven tips on the SEO basics you need to master, for your website to be successful in search rankings.

1. Content Is King

As with all pieces of content marketing, it’s crucial to make sure that you are producing high-quality pieces of writing that are helping your audience. This is so important for SEO because as Google’s algorithm gets more and more complex, it understands exactly what high-quality content looks like.

Content that is helpful to a user like a how to post or video content that helps accomplish a goal will always rank higher than those without.

Google continues to move it’s focus to longer-form content because it knows those types of articles are the most useful.

2. The More Words, The Better You’ll Rank

Organic traffic is all about hitting the first page of Google search terms. Research has shown that the average first-page results on Google have 1,890 words.

Longer content ranks better; it’s one of the SEO basics you should try not to forget. If you also consider that over 50% of all searches have more than four words in their search query, you know that these people are looking for a specific answer to their question.

Andrey Lipattsev who is a Senior Search Engine Strategist at Google confirmed that high-quality content and link building are the two biggest ranking factors used by Google when it comes to search results.

3. Speed is Crucial

So you may have all the internal and external SEO basics figured out, but if your website speed is too slow, then Google will damage your ranking because of this.

Google is always looking to make the user experience as high-quality as possible, so if your site is slow, then it’s going to punish your site and rank you lower.

To speed up your website, you should consider both your website hosting provider to see if they are slowing you down and also look at your webpages itself.

Are you loading lots of large images that are slowing down the load speed of your website? Consider upgrading or purging your website of these large images to increase loading speed.

4. High-Authority Sites Are What You Want

When you are looking to build links to your site, which is an important aspect of SEO, you should consider the importance of high-authority sites. One of the old SEO basics that people used to live by was guest posting for backlinks.

However, since people have been abusing guest posting for spamming backlinks over the last few years, Google no longer holds the same value for guest post backlinks as it did before.

It’s therefore much more important to try and gain some genuine links from high-authority sites to help boost your websites SEO efforts. This will help to increase your page rank as well as your ranking in search results.

5. Labeling Meta Descriptions and Title Tags Correctly

When it comes to meta descriptions and title tags, many people don’t bother to edit them, yet in search results, this is not only a tool you can use to convince people to click your link and jump onto your page, it’s also an important aspect to use to help your SEO.

Having a meta-description won’t necessarily improve your ranking on the SERP, but it’s something you should definitely be editing before publishing your content.

The meta description is the paragraph of text that you see under your pages URL in the search results. Aiming for under 156 characters is what you should be aiming for, and make sure that the content is relevant and expands on your headline.

7. Tag Your Images Correctly

When it comes to uploading images, many people fail to grasp the important SEO basics which will help you to rank and also increase page load speed.

When uploading your images, you should always label the image before uploading with a name that includes your keyword and a good description of the image.

You should also make sure to write an alt attribute for the image. By describing the image in the alt attribute, this helps Google to understand what the image is, as it can’t process images.

This makes it much more likely for your content to appear in Google image results.

Time to Upgrade Your SEO Knowledge

Now that we’ve made it through these seven basic SEO tips, you should have a much stronger grasp on what is important to Google to help you rank.