SEO is the foundation of a successful business. Understanding the principles of SEO is necessary to start working in this field. Considering that about 51% of site traffic is attracted naturally, the high ranking of the website in Google search results has a great impact on its success and traffic increase. If you are a newbie in the field of optimization, it is better to learn some basic SEO concepts before taking any action so that you can perform well. Understanding these general principles of SEO is a very good way to start succeeding in this field. However, SEO strategies are not used by some businesses; Because they have not understood the importance of site SEO well, and be sure that if they know a series of basic site optimization principles, they will immediately start using this success factor.
Of course, you should be careful that SEO can be deceptive in some cases. It means that a website owner may have optimized his desired page well but has not received adequate traffic from search engines. In this model the situation, most of the website owners give up SEO of their website and use SEO principles and no longer use its strategies. We must say that website optimization may take a few months or even a year to achieve results and improve the performance of your site pages.
In this article, we have answered your questions regarding basic SEO learning:
- How do I learn SEO?
- What points should we learn at the beginning of learning and the basic principles of SEO?
- What are SEO optimization methods?
- Is it hard to get to know and learn SEO at the beginning?
- What principles should be followed to start SEO?
In the following, we examine the answers to each of the above questions:
How to learn SEO?
To learn SEO, there are different solutions and methods that you can choose depending on the conditions and situation of your life.
You can participate in a face-to-face SEO course and benefit from the experiences of SEO professors in person.
You can also choose a non-attendance course such as Neoseo’s SEO training course and have an up-to-date and permanent course at your disposal, or enter an SEO company as an intern and learn SEO on a project-based basis.
In general, it depends on your working conditions and life situation. But keep in mind that the best choice will make it possible for you to reach your goal in the most comfortable conditions.
Prerequisite for learning SEO
As a prerequisite for SEO, you must know the answers to the following questions:
- Why is SEO so important?
- How does the Google search engine work?
- Why should new business managers know the science of SEO?
- What is the difference between white hat and black hat SEO?
- Why and how does Google show our website in Google results?
These are the questions that you must find an answer to before learning SEO and you have a prerequisite to learning this science. In the following, we try to answer these questions:
Why is SEO so important?
SEO (search engine optimization) is a set of rules, and principles that must be implemented on the website for your website to appear successfully in Google results, attract organic input, attract the attention of target users, and ultimately increase multiple sales. Just as we try to attract customers and increase sales for our store in a commercial area, the flow is the same in the web space.
We have to meet the prerequisites so that users can meet their needs by entering the website, choosing their product, and finally making their purchase from our website.
The reason why most users buy from DigiKala is that this website is optimized with SEO principles and has reached the first results of Google. For this reason, the user can easily choose his product by entering the DigiKala site, get answers to his questions and concerns about purchasing the product, and as a result, they also buy from the same DigiKala.
Now, if you do not optimize your website with the general principles of SEO, you definitely cannot benefit from the potential of several 100 million sales.
This article has categorized the basics of SEO for you:
- Internal SEO principles
- SEO principles in content writing and production
- Principles of external SEO
Each of them has specific principles that we will examine in detail below:
Internal SEO principles
We consider any process related to the internal parts of the site as site optimization or internal SEO. The principles of internal SEO are the ones that we will examine together below:
Principle 1: Identify the criteria behind the keywords
Most people focus entirely on the following two criteria when doing keyword research:
Search Volume: (number of monthly searches, on average)
Keyword Difficulty: An estimate of how easy or hard it will be on the first page of search results for that term.
These are important SEO principles because they provide useful insight into a keyword’s potential and how to rank for it. But, instead of just looking at search volume, you should try to figure out the actual search traffic potential for each keyword. That way, you can focus your ranking efforts on the people who are likely to send the most targeted traffic to your destination.
Finally, by reading this SEO principles article, you can make very useful changes in your mind and people who have the wrong idea about SEO.
Principle 2: Create a great user experience
Naturally, when people land on your website, you want to create a very pleasant user experience for them. This includes various things such as the speed of uploading images.
According to the obtained statistics, when a website takes a long time to load its page, tired and annoyed users tend to leave the page.
Based on a study conducted in this field, we found out that just by increasing the page loading time by one second, the number of visits by users decreases by about 7% per year. You can improve the speed of your site by using the following:
- Use of essential plugins
- Enable browser cache
- Optimization of large images
While using the right-sized images is very important and is especially important for SEO, the images themselves can also help improve the user experience. Images that are unique, especially photos taken directly from your business, are great to use on your website.
Humans naturally like visuals more than text articles. As a result, you can use this to increase the attractiveness of your website articles.
Principle 3: Improve the navigation status on the site page
When the user enters your site, if you have learned the basics of SEO well, you want to help him navigate the site well and read the content in the best way. Users should understand exactly where they are on your website and your articles. For example, if they want to learn more about your business, you should include a link to your website’s homepage in the article.
The URLs of your website should be structured in a specific way and show well what topic they intend to present.
Principle 4: Create pages optimized for search
Keyword research is the first step to attracting more organic search traffic. You need to make sure that your pages are well produced and will satisfy the person behind the search and reading of your article. Your site pages will be ranked based on user satisfaction.
When the user enters your site, the site should be in such a way that the user feels satisfied and not boring for him. So you have to give your user a good experience with your site. Avoid additional options or excessive advertising. These things make readers not feel good about your website.
Principle 5: Analyze your performance in the field of user acquisition
Obviously, if you want to do the SEO process well, you should analyze some criteria. When you’re just starting out in this field, there are a few main areas you should focus on.
- Site traffic rate
- bounce rate
- User-to-customer conversion rate
- Cost amount for the conversion rate
These rates help you to understand how successful your site optimization efforts have been and to what extent your site content has been attractive to users. When you have a good performance in the field of learning SEO principles and your work process has become professional, you can analyze more important and deeper factors. Like if you check how your website performance has changed this month compared to last month.
Fortunately, there are many free tools on Google that can help you with this.
Some of the most important tools that are currently active in the field of analyzing and checking site performance in different time frames are:
- Google console search tool
- Google Analytics tool
- Maze and Ahrefs site analysis tool
- And…
Principle 6: Basic internal linking with a specific strategy
Internal linking is one of the principles of SEO that affects the time your audience spends on the site page. This issue is so important that we always explain issues of this issue under the title of an article in the articles of the SEO training blog. When you use internal linking, you direct your audience to additional pages on topics related to your page. Internal links engage your audience on your page.
They help drive your audience to informative pages that expand their knowledge on a topic they’re already interested in learning about. Internal linking can even lead them to learn something new! They can continue to learn about different and relevant topics while getting to know your brand better.
Now that you understand the importance of internal link building, it is better not to forget this principle in internal SEO you must use a specific and principled program for internal link building. The internal linking strategy can help to target the user’s presence on the website.
Principle 7: Optimizing the site for mobile phones
Optimizing the site for mobile phones is one of the main things that you should learn when starting to learn SEO as one of the principles of SEO. Start this activity so that the performance and loading speed of your site is suitable for all mobile devices.
Any delay in loading your site will result in the loss of at least one visitor. According to the obtained statistics, the number of people who use mobile phones to search the Internet is increasing every day. This means that a new SEO strategy in 2022 must include important tips about mobile site optimization.
The best way to succeed in this field is to put yourself in the shoes of users using mobile devices. It is better to check this issue from their point of view and implement your SEO strategies using these tips on your site. One of the important reasons why people use their mobile browser to search on Google is to save time, as most of these people tend to find the answer to their question as quickly as possible by searching for certain keywords. . You should also check and find out what kind of headlines these people find more attractive and click on.
Principle 8: Understanding how users search in search engines
All website owners want to know what keywords will perform better for their website. Therefore, you should do research on this topic and as one of the principles of SEO, examine this topic deeply. But today’s SEO is more focused on website owners understanding and understanding what exactly Google users are looking for and what results they want. Nowadays, finding a keyword and putting it in the text of your site’s content is not a good way to increase your site’s rank.
A strong and long-term SEO strategy seeks to understand the purpose and reasoning of users when they start searching about a topic. Once you can understand what your target audience is looking for in search engines, then you can easily succeed in optimizing your site.
Of course, be careful that as time goes by, Google search results become more dynamic and conceptual. This search engine tends to display results in its top rankings that have conceptually worked on its site’s content. Therefore, only using hypotheses is not the right thing to do in this field. It is better to start implementing these strategies in improving your site and check what changes your site traffic gets.
SEO principles in content writing and production
Content production is so important in site optimization for users and search engines that we should not forget its tips and principles:
Principle 1: Know what your customers are really looking for
You can’t optimize your website without knowing what your customers are looking for.
How to understand this point?
The best place to start is to use common sense.
Imagine a person who wants to go to Shiraz from Tehran and is looking for a place to stay in Shiraz. What will be the first things he searches for?
- Shiraz hotels
- Residence in Shiraz
Or if he knows a hotel, he will type the name of that hotel, such as Chamran Shiraz Hotel
Knowing this, you can produce an article with the type and need that the user searched for.
Principle 2: Find the most basic way people search for you
It is possible that some of your customers are searching for your job using the words and phrases you mentioned. That the majority of people is another story. So the first step is to understand the most common way people search.
To do this, you can use the ideas that you have already identified. Start by doing a Google search for one of the words or phrases on your list. It doesn’t matter how ridiculous or unexpected the phrase is.
Principle 3: Find popular and interesting topics in your field
Content marketing is the art of creating useful and valuable content to attract your target customers. But don’t just start a blog and hope for the best and know what topics are popular and interesting in your field.
Join social networks and see what people are talking about and which topics are the most popular. You can even sort and filter the content you produce based on the top topics of all time.
Principle 4: You must know for whom you are producing content!
Before you use the rest of the SEO basics tips, you need to know who you are writing for. This is one of the principles of SEO in writing. This means that you should personalize your target customers in the best way. These categorizations will help you understand the basic problems and needs of your audience, and based on this, you can produce content that is completely relevant to users.
You can identify your target customers by doing more research. In fact, what you should get is what your users want to get from the content of your site and what they are looking for in your business.
Principle 5: Understanding what site users want to know!
After you understand who you are creating content for, the next part of your job is to find out what the users of your site want to read.
To do this you need to do keyword research. Keyword research is one of the most important topics in content creation training. By doing keyword research, you can actually get proper information about the difficulty of the desired keyword and how to get the right rank for it.
This actually helps you understand what topics your target users are looking for, and what they want to read and get information from. In Google, there are many different tools that you can use to perform better in this field. In general, you should learn the correct use of keywords in your content creation strategy.
Principle 6: Creating valuable and understandable content
Now that you have learned the SEO principles mentioned above, it is time to start your content creation process and create new, unique, valuable, and understandable content. As you are creating content for your site, first of all, you should make the user your main target, and then you should produce content that is suitable and attractive for this target user.
To do this, you need to use your specialized skills. This process not only increases the connection between you and your contacts but also creates a great image of you as an expert in the minds of users. Your users, who have gained the necessary trust in you and your business, will naturally refer to your website the next time they encounter a problem. Remember that in online marketing this situation is one of the best situations where you can increase your communication.
When you intend to produce content, it is better to pay enough attention to the format in addition to the text of your article. Based on the obtained statistics, we have noticed that people decide to stay on a site page or leave it after about 8 seconds. As a result, you should use factors such as the title, paragraph length, content in the form of a list, etc. to make the content and environment of the site completely attractive and understandable for the user.
Principles of external SEO
Any process that must be checked and carried out outside the site is called external SEO. Now, to optimize your site’s external SEO, you must be familiar with some principles. In the following, we examine all the principles of external SEO:
