Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Starter Guide

[Harrison Jordan]

If you own, manage, monetize, or promote online content via Google Search, this guide is meant for you. You might be the owner of a growing and thriving business, the website owner of a dozen sites, the SEO specialist in a web agency, or a DIY SEO expert passionate about the mechanics of Search: this guide is meant for you. If you're interested in having a complete overview of the basics of SEO according to our best practices, you are indeed in the right place. This guide won't provide any secrets that'll automatically rank your site first in Google (sorry!), but following the best practices will hopefully make it easier for search engines to crawl, index, and understand your content.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is often about making small modifications to parts of your website. When viewed individually, these changes might seem like incremental improvements, but when combined with other optimizations, they could have a noticeable impact on your site's user experience and performance in organic search results. You're likely already familiar with many of the topics in this guide because they're essential ingredients for any web page, but you may not be making the most out of them.

You should build a website to benefit your users and gear any optimization toward making the user experience better. One of those users is a search engine, which helps other users discover your content. SEO is about helping search engines understand and present content. Your site may be smaller or larger than our example site and offer vastly different content, but the optimization topics in this guide apply to sites of all sizes and types. We hope our guide gives you some fresh ideas on how to improve your website, and we'd love to hear your questions, feedback, and success stories in the Google Search Central Help Community.

 

[Kane]

Well, SEO is not just about making small modifications to parts of your website as the OP has mentioned in his post. Sometimes you might have to change or edit entire content on your website in order to get better ranks on search engines. That's because the basis of SDEO starts from publishing well written quality content.

 

[Busybee]

You are absolutely right. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) goes beyond making small modifications to website elements. It encompasses a holistic approach to improving a website's visibility and organic rankings on search engines. Publishing well-written, high-quality content is indeed a fundamental aspect of SEO. Search engines value websites that provide valuable and relevant content to users. By creating informative, engaging, and optimized content, you increase the chances of ranking higher in search results.

 

[Shaffy]

It seems a lot of emphasis is also placed now on backlinks to boost SEO especially of a new site. Does that mean that you can't do well with well written content only?

 

[chapmansean]

I recently started working as a content marketer and quickly realized how crucial SEO is for driving organic traffic. Your point about making incremental improvements really resonates with me. It’s like fine-tuning an instrument – each small adjustment can lead to a better overall performance. I also appreciate the focus on user experience. It's easy to get caught up in the technical side of things and forget that ultimately, we’re creating content for people, not just algorithms. Balancing this with SEO is something I’m striving to master. If you’re looking for more detailed insights, especially from a content marketer’s perspective, I recommend checking out the audit guide on Rank Revival (https://rankrevival.com/). It has been a game-changer for me in terms of understanding how to optimize my content effectively.