In a study conducted by a digital marketing company, they found that 94% of users focus on organic search results while ignoring paid ads at the top of the search results.

Having your site appear at the top of search results is fantastic — it brings the site plenty of visits from your target customers. In this article, I'll walk you through a beginner's guide to SEO for your site, which will ultimately lead you to your goal.

How Search Engines Work

Search engines are gateways to a world of information and knowledge — imagine walking into a massive library containing billions of books, but instead of searching manually for each one, you have a smart assistant who knows exactly where to find what you're looking for. This is exactly what search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo do.

When you enter your query into a search engine, a magical journey begins behind the scenes. Search engines send out digital "spiders," known as "crawlers," to browse the internet and gather information from various web pages. These crawlers read text, capture images, and analyze the links between pages to understand the content and determine its quality.

After gathering the information, the indexing stage begins, where the data collected by the search spiders is organized and stored — imagine it like an archive containing copies of every web page on the internet. Now, whenever you search for something, the search engine reviews this archive to find the best answers to your query.

But it doesn't end there — search engines use complex algorithms to determine the ranking of the results shown to you. These algorithms take many factors into account, such as how well the content matches your search terms, the quality of the site, page load speed, and even the overall user experience. The goal is to provide the best and most accurate results possible to meet your needs.

What Is SEO?

SEO is a digital marketing technique practiced on websites, aimed at increasing traffic (the number of visits) to a site, by appearing in the organic (unpaid) search results on search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, and others.

It helps a website appear higher in search engine rankings, and the higher a site ranks, the more visits it gets, which then translates into sales.

It's practiced on website pages, where the ranking of a site's pages in search results is improved, in addition to improving the site's appearance in various types of search, such as image search, video search, or job search, and so on.

SEO focuses on how search engines work, which is based on what users search for — the phrases or main terms (keywords) used to search in search engines.

This is where SEO comes in — targeting the keywords relevant to the website's field, so the site appears with a good ranking when customers search for them, in addition to targeting the country or region where the website's business operates.

The Principle of SEO

The principle behind SEO is the secret to the success of digital websites. It all starts with a deep understanding of users' needs, and researching the keywords they use to search for solutions to their problems. Then comes the role of good content, through which we encourage the user to decide to buy from you.

An ideal user experience is the foundation everything else is built on — the site needs to load quickly, be easy to use, and be visually appealing. Backlinks are also the bridges that connect your site to the world, boosting your credibility and standing in search engines. That said, success in SEO requires continuous data analysis, adapting to technical updates, and constantly improving every aspect of your site.

The Importance of SEO

SEO has many benefits, which I'll walk you through below: SEO is based on studying the online behavior of your target customers, targeting the keywords they search for to find your type of products, while taking into account the target geographic region (target country) for your business. The idea behind SEO is publishing content on your website that targets keywords, and with good content and solid technical practices, the site gets a good ranking in search results without running any ads or paying any costs to search engines. Publishing good content on your site leads to a good ranking, and in turn, good results — and over time, those results continue in the long run, since unlike paid ads, ranking results last much longer. Continuing to work on SEO and getting a good ranking for keywords in your field leads to consistently appearing to customers in search results, and with good content, your appearance becomes appealing to them, which increases brand awareness and its continuity. In SEO, the progress you achieve isn't limited to improving your site's ranking in search results — you may also gain ground on your competitors. The better your ranking in search engines, the more visits you get compared to your competitors, and in turn, converting those visits into sales that achieve your business goal.

The Difference Between SEO and Paid Ads (PPC)

SEO is about achieving a good ranking in search engines for keywords by working on content and technical factors.

Paid ads, on the other hand, achieve a ranking in search results by paying the search engine a cost for every click your site gets.

So SEO is usually less costly than paid ads, in addition to its results lasting longer.

Beginner's Guide to SEO

Appearing in search results isn't just about designing a website and adding products to it — you also need certain practices to appear in search results for keywords, and to properly reach your target customers. Below, I'll walk you through the steps of the beginner's guide to SEO you should follow to appear in search results: The first step in SEO is defining the purpose of creating your website. Is your goal to sell your products? To get customers to subscribe to a service you offer? Or to place ads on it and profit from them?

This is definitely the most important step, particularly for SEO for new sites, since every goal has a different action plan, starting from ranking to content strategy to publishing. So you should define your goal carefully so you can build your future plans.

In addition, you need to carefully identify who your target customer is — SEO is all about reaching that target customer, and if you define it incorrectly, you'll reach a different customer who doesn't need your products, wasting all your effort.

So define the purpose of creating your site carefully, and then identify the target audience that will help you achieve that goal.

Before starting any beginner's SEO practices, you first need to check your site's indexing status — indexing here means search engines placing your site in the search results.

You need to determine how many pages have been indexed and compare that to the total number of pages on your site, and if you don't find your site, you need to identify why your site is missing from search engines and fix it.

You can find out how many pages have been indexed through advanced search in the search results, done using the following search:

site:domain.com

[caption id="attachment_125" align="aligncenter" width="1240"] Google search results, February 2024[/caption]

The number of results that appear is the number of your site's pages that have been indexed by the search engine.

After defining your site's goal and checking its indexing status, we now need to move on to technical matters — technical factors are the foundation for building your site and achieving the best results.

Improving technical factors means implementing practices that help search engines crawl and index your site more effectively.

If the technical side of the site is handled well, search engines will crawl and index your site efficiently, which makes getting a good ranking a faster process.

So you need to pay attention to technical factors and not neglect them, since neglecting them can have a negative effect that could go as far as search engines refusing to show your site at all. Below, I'll walk you through the most important technical factors in a beginner's guide to SEO:

The robots.txt file is a text file containing instructions for search engines, telling them which pages you don't want to appear in search results.

Some people think that having every page on a site appear in search results helps increase visits, but that's a big mistake — there are pages that shouldn't appear in search engines, such as the checkout page and the login page, in addition to any page that may record data for your site's users.

So you should check all the pages on your site, identify which ones you don't want to appear in search results, and add them to this file.

Note: In the robots.txt file, don't add a link to any page or subfolder you want to appear in search engines — once you add its link there, that page won't appear in search results, so think carefully before editing this file.

An XML sitemap is a map containing all the links to your site's pages, provided to search engines so they can crawl through the links it contains and then index them.

You should pay close attention to it, since it's one of the most important steps in a beginner's guide to SEO. You add all your site's links to it, except for the links you've already added to the robots.txt file, and any link or subfolder you don't want to appear in search engines.

You provide it to search engines by creating an account with webmaster tools such as Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.

Structured data is a set of code you add to your page to give the search engine a general idea about the page's content — whether it's a product page, an article page, a news page, and so on.

Paying attention to it helps search engines direct your page more effectively to the user searching specifically for that content, and it helps you rank your site on Google's first page.

So you first need to define your goal for publishing that page, and then choose the type of structured data that will connect you with the target customer for achieving that goal.

This is an HTML tag used mostly for duplicate or near-duplicate pages — if you have the same content, or similar content, on different pages (different URLs), you need to choose just one of them to appear in search results, and the canonical tag is what helps you do that.

So if you have duplicate content on your site, you should use this tag on those pages, adding the link to the page you want indexed. For example: let's assume we have two different pages with different URLs as follows:

https://example.com/duplicated-content-1/

https://example.com/duplicated-content-2/

In this example, let's say you decided to index the page with the URL /duplicated-content-1/ — you would then add its link in the canonical tag on the other page, /duplicated-content-2/, like this:

<link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/duplicated-content1/" />

In addition, you should include a canonical tag on every page of your site pointing back to that same page's own URL. For example:

Let's assume there's a page with the following URL:

https://example.com/article-content/

You would add a canonical tag to it like this:

<link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/article-content/" />

And the same goes for all your site's pages — you should add a canonical tag to every page of your site, pointing to that same page's link, except for pages with duplicate content.

If you're using WordPress, you'll find plugins that help with this, such as Rank Math and Yoast.

These are HTML tags you add to a page to tell search engines whether or not you want that page indexed and its links followed.

They're written like this:

<meta name="robots" content="follow, index"/>

Here, "index" tells the search engine to index the page, and "follow" tells it to follow the links on it — following links means allowing search engines to access and index all the links on the page.

But if you don't want that page indexed and its links followed, it's written like this:

<meta name="robots" content="nofollow, noindex"/>

These tags should be present on every page of your site, and you should choose them carefully.

After finishing your website's design, you need to make sure it has only one version, since a site can end up with multiple versions in the following forms:
  1. https://www.example.com
  2. https://example.com
  3. http://www.example.com
  4. http://example.com
So if you have different versions of your site, you should redirect them all to just one version, preferably the HTTPS version. A page's URL is one of the most important ranking factors in search engines — it's the first thing a search engine sees on your page, so you should pay attention to your links and leave no room for randomness.

Here are some tips to help you choose a page URL:

So you should pay attention to choosing your page's URL, given its significant impact on getting a good ranking.

You should make sure your website is secure and easily accessible for search engines to crawl and index its content, by:

When working on your SEO steps, don't forget to also improve the user experience, since the two are closely linked — implementing SEO practices on your site without considering the user experience can lead to losing a lot of customers.

When it comes to building a top-tier site, SEO practices work hand in hand with the user experience — a good ranking in search engines comes from applying SEO practices alongside a smooth user experience.

A good user experience improves audience engagement with your site, sharing of your content, increases traffic, boosts your ranking in search engines, and ultimately increases your sales rate.

Two of the most important user-experience elements to consider on your site are mobile usability and site speed, and below are the most important practices for improving both:

Did you know that 92.1% of all internet users browse the internet from their phones — that's 4.32 billion users!

That's a huge number, and as a result, the percentage of website users on mobile phones has grown compared to those on desktop or laptop computers.

So you should pay attention to your website's design and its mobile usability, since neglecting it can cost you a lot of visits, and in turn cost you your ranking on Google.

The most important practices for improving the mobile user experience are:

Improving the mobile user experience is a practice that needs continuous attention — always test your site, try it yourself as a user on your phone, and note down everything you notice as a user. This is one of the most important practices in a beginner's guide to SEO — in 2018, Google officially stated that site speed had become a ranking factor in search results.

In addition, it affects user behavior on your site — the faster your site, the more engaged users are with it.

So you should pay attention to your site's speed given its importance to the user experience and sales rate, and among the most important practices for improving your site's speed are:

There are tools to help you determine your site's speed, such as PageSpeed Insights and GTmetrix.

You should continuously monitor your site's speed, work on improving it on an ongoing basis, and consider the user experience across different devices.

After putting in the effort on SEO, you need to measure and analyze the results of that effort, and you can do this using Google Search Console and Google Analytics — two tools provided free by Google that help you measure your site's results and analyze your traffic.

Through them, you can find out your site's daily number of visits, know which geographic location those visits came from, in addition to which pages on your site are visited most.

This helps you get to know your site's users well and analyze their behavior, so you can provide them with a good user experience.

After creating an account on each tool, you'll add an HTML tag for each one to your site, allowing them to track visits and user behavior.

A keyword is the term or phrase users search for in search engines, and the idea behind keywords in SEO is choosing the phrases most commonly used by your customers when searching for your type of products or services.

In addition, you should choose keywords most relevant to what your site's content offers — a keyword should be chosen to match the content of your site's page.

If you target the wrong keyword, one unrelated to the page's content, your site won't get a good ranking on Google, and it will also be harder for you to reach your potential customer. Choosing the right keyword is tied to your site's number of visits and sales rate, so you should choose your keywords carefully.

There are key factors for choosing a keyword, such as:

You can use these factors to choose the keyword that gets the highest monthly search volume, since it will lead to the highest number of visits, while having the lowest competition — the weaker the competition for a keyword, the easier it is to rank for it, in addition to how relevant the keyword is to the page's content. There's no field without competition — competition is one of the fundamental pillars of the business world, and in the world of SEO, competition plays an important role in your site's ranking. Competitor analysis is one of the first steps in a beginner's guide to SEO.

Competitor analysis is gathering information and data about your competitors, identifying the strongest competitors in your field, analyzing each competitor's strengths and weaknesses, and comparing them with your own site's strengths and weaknesses.

This lets you build a competitive advantage that helps you outperform your competitors, which helps you get a better ranking on Google.

But why should you do competitor analysis when setting your SEO strategy?

As mentioned before, there's no field without competition — you'll always find someone competing with you in search results for keywords. Below, I'll show you the situations where you need to do competitor analysis before acting:

Competitor analysis is one of the most important steps in a beginner's guide to SEO, so you should pay attention to it and do it continuously. If your content plan is limited to just choosing keywords, that's a mistake.

A content plan is the process of organizing a website's content to improve its appearance in search results — it's the process you carry out in order to get organic visits from search engines.

A content plan is the main factor affecting appearance in search results — if your content is scattered and disorganized, search engines will find it difficult to read, which reduces your chances of getting a good ranking in search results.

Below, we'll show you the most important tips and steps for creating a content plan for your site:

The first step in creating a content plan is discovering who your audience is and understanding their interests and desires.

So you should create a buyer persona to guide your strategies toward what your audience needs and satisfying their desires.

You need to do comprehensive research into the most common phrases your audience searches for that meet your target audience's needs. You need to analyze your audience's online behavior and find out their most common questions about your field and which topics attract their interest. Relying only on text-based content is no longer enough today to achieve a good conversion rate — you should diversify your content formats, such as creating videos and adding them to your site's pages.

Videos have become one of the most popular content formats audiences turn to today, and they've proven their importance in increasing sales.

You should also analyze your audience's online behavior and identify which type of content they engage with most — this analysis will give you clues about what to add to your site's content strategy.

Publish articles on your site according to an organized schedule, along with repeatedly sharing your articles on social media pages on a set calendar. Keep track of the content published on your site and update it continuously — you should update outdated information in it, or add new elements to the topic.

When creating your content plan, you should also consider the user's search intent and internal linking between articles.

Search intent is the user's main goal behind searching for a keyword — in other words, what exactly the user wants when they search for that keyword. Do they want to learn a piece of information, or do they want to buy a product?

If a user searches for the phrase "most famous tourist attractions in Paris," they want to gather information about tourist spots in Paris — so the search intent here is informational. But if they use the phrase "hotels in Paris," the user is looking for a hotel in Paris to book — so the search intent here is transactional.

There are four types of search intent: informational, navigational, transactional, and commercial.

So you should study the search intent behind the user's keyword and match your page's content to that search intent.

Internal linking is one of the most important elements of a beginner's guide to SEO — it's linking your site's pages to each other through hyperlinks. This makes it easier for users to move between your site's different pages, keeps them on the site longer, and encourages them to keep browsing its different pages, in addition to making it easier for search engines to reach the content on your site's different pages.

The internal linking process should be organized — when you link pages to each other, the content of those pages should be closely related.

So when creating your content plan, you should keep internal linking in mind — you can divide the plan into groups of articles, each group covering a specific topic, with internal linking within each group.

Setting up your page code correctly is the foundation your SEO strategy's success is built on. This process starts with a careful review of your page's head section, making sure the metadata is present and correct, such as the title, meta description, and meta robots tags, the canonical tag to define the page's original version, the hreflang tag if your site is multilingual, and schema code to boost your appearance in rich search results.

After that comes making sure the content displays correctly and appealingly in the body section. Text, images, and videos should be clear and easy to read, with an organized use of headings (H1, H2, H3) to define the page's structure. You should also make sure internal links point to related pages within your site, and external links lead to trustworthy sources, which boosts the value of your content and helps improve your ranking in search engines

These are the SEO practices you carry out within your site's pages, done for the benefit of both search engines and users. They include common practices such as: optimizing the page title, content, internal links, and page URL.

Search engines focus on the keyword and other on-page SEO factors to verify that a web page's content matches the user's search intent, and if the search engine decides the page is useful to the user, it will improve its ranking in search results.

SEO isn't limited to the practices you do on your site alone — you also need some practices outside the site, such as communicating with other site owners and building relationships with them.

You can search for other sites related to your field and reach out to them, inviting them to link to your site — this is called a backlink, where one site links from its page to another external page on a different site.

The more external links pointing to your site, the more trust search engines place in it, which improves your site's ranking in search results.

One of the most important off-page SEO practices is posting on social media, which, unfortunately, many neglect despite its importance.

Using social media is important for your site's SEO campaign, but its importance isn't directly in improving your site's ranking — rather, its importance lies in continuously sharing your site's content on social media, which increases how often your site and brand appear in front of your audience.

In addition to the visits those shares generate for your site, social media becomes an additional source of traffic, which leads to engagement with your site's content, and it has also proven its value as a traffic source that increases sales through the site.

Many experiments have shown that user engagement on your site — comments and shares — is one of the factors search engines use to improve your site's ranking in results. The more users engage with your site, the better its appearance in search results.

So you should analyze your customers' online behavior, find out which social media platforms they use most, and focus on those platforms, publishing content there.

SEO Analysis and Performance Measurement Tools

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When you start your SEO journey, you're like a captain steering a ship across a vast ocean full of challenges and opportunities. To sail skillfully and successfully reach your destination, you need analysis and performance measurement tools that act as an accurate compass guiding you every step of the way. Here are some of the most important SEO analysis and performance measurement tools:

  1. Google Search Console

Google Search Console is my wise friend that helps guide my SEO strategy — it provides reports on your site's performance in search results, lists the keywords bringing you traffic, and any technical issues that need fixing, and helps ensure your site meets search engine requirements as well as your target audience's expectations on search engines.

  1. Google Analytics

Imagine having a magic mirror that lets you see everything your site's visitors do — Google Analytics is that mirror. It lets you monitor the number of visitors, their sources, the pages they visit, and even how much time they spend on each page. Through this information, you can understand user behavior and find out which part of your site needs improvement — it's an indispensable tool for guiding your strategy wisely and confidently.

  1. SEMrush

SEMrush is one of the best paid SEO tools — you can use it to analyze competitor sites, discover the most effective keywords, and see their marketing strategies. It gives you detailed insights to help you outperform them and make your site the preferred destination for users.

It also includes many tools, such as Backlink Analytics, which you can use to analyze your site's backlink profile and determine which backlinks you've gained or lost over a certain period, and the Keyword Position Tracking tool, which gives you reports on your site's ranking for your target keywords and its ranking progress in search engines

  1. Ahrefs

Ahrefs is the magic key that opens the doors to the world of backlinks, and SEMrush's strongest competitor — it helps you discover the links pointing to your site and gives you an idea of how much they affect your ranking in search results. You can also see the links pointing to competitor sites and use this information to build an effective link-building strategy that boosts your standing in search engines.

  1. Moz Pro

Moz Pro is one of the oldest and most important SEO tools — through its many features, you can analyze your site's ranking, discover available opportunities, and see how much progress you've made toward your goals. It gives you customized tips to help improve your site and make it more appealing to search engines.

  1. Screaming Frog SEO Spider

Screaming Frog is the most powerful tool for auditing sites and identifying technical issues — it thoroughly examines your site and reveals any technical issues that could be holding back your SEO, such as broken links, redirect issues, metadata code issues, and other technical problems, giving you a detailed list of everything that needs fixing.

The Most Important Tips for Starting a Successful SEO Strategy

Below, I'll show you the most important tips for creating a successful SEO strategy: Numbers never lie — tools like Google Search Console and Google Analytics show you reports on user behavior on your site and in search engines. You need to analyze those reports carefully in order to be able to double your site's results.

You should analyze your CTR and identify pages that have issues with that rate and work on them, analyze the gap between clicks and impressions and work on narrowing that gap by increasing clicks, and also analyze the engagement rate for each page and work on improving it.

Competition is one of the biggest factors in your site's appearance in search results — if you take your eyes off your competitors for a moment, they'll outrank you in search results and get a better ranking than your site, which in turn gets them more visitors and more sales.

You should monitor them, find out what keywords they're targeting, understand their content plan, and check the user experience on their sites.

An SEO specialist usually starts their work after the developer finishes designing your site, but if you involve them alongside the developer and UI/UX designer while they're working on the site design, you'll save a lot of time, and results will show up faster. Having a presence on social media brings you closer to your target customer and increases your credibility with them, in addition to analyzing their behavior on social media helping you understand them accurately, making it easier to create a content plan suited to their needs.

Mistakes You Shouldn't Make

At the start of working on any project, I analyze the site and identify its mistakes, and after working on more than one project, I've identified the most common mistakes among sites that lead to negative results. Below, I'll show you the top 4 most common mistakes: As mentioned before, backlinks are important for SEO, and increasing them helps improve your site's appearance in search engines — but despite the importance of quantity, quality is more important. Backlink quality is the strongest factor in off-page SEO.

Backlinks follow the principle of "quality over quantity," and some experiments have shown that a single high-quality backlink is worth 1,000 random backlinks.

So you should avoid buying random backlink list offers, and instead search for high-quality links from trustworthy sites, in addition to choosing sites relevant to your field.

One of the most common mistakes among sites is duplicate content, and it's one of the most harmful mistakes to your site.

If you publish a page, don't publish the same content again — search engines see this as randomness, which reduces their trust in you, and negatively affects your site's appearance in search results.

SEO isn't just about publishing articles — you also need certain technical practices. There are technical issues that delay your site's appearance in search results, such as poor site speed, poor mobile compatibility, or adding unnecessary plugins and software — all of this negatively affects your site.

So you should pay attention to the technical side of your site and continuously analyze it to make sure no issues appear that could hold back your site's appearance in search results.

This is one of the worst practices for sites — its effect isn't limited to your site's appearance in search results, it also reduces your credibility with your audience.

Search engines penalize sites that copy content, and sometimes the penalty results in your site's pages not appearing in search results for a period ranging from 6 months to a full year.

In addition, if a user notices you've copied content from another site, this can weaken your brand's credibility, negatively affecting your goal for creating your site.

So you should create unique, distinctive content to improve your site's appearance in search engines and get users to engage with it positively.

Additional resources

Types of search engines and their features

The Difference Between White Hat and Black Hat SEO

SEO practices are divided into two types (white hat and black hat), and each has a different approach from the other, and each approach leads to different results. Below, I'll show you the difference between them. In short, these are the correct, ethical practices for improving a site, which follow search engine guidelines, focus on meeting the target audience's needs, and involve long-term optimization plans. These are practices that are the complete opposite of white hat SEO — they violate search engine guidelines, rely on manipulation, and focus on quick results that ultimately ruin the site in the long run.

This infographic illustrates the difference between them

That's why I always recommend following white hat practices, given their positive long-term results, and you shouldn't listen to anyone who tries to tell you otherwise.

Should I Hire a Professional SEO Company to Do the Work for Me?

The answer to that question depends on several factors, including your ability to learn, your site's current standing, in addition to your target market and level of competition in it. You can do SEO on your site yourself, but if you end up looking for help with it, don't hesitate to reach out to me.

Additional resources

Tools for checking your site's Google ranking

Frequently Asked Questions About the Beginner's Guide to SEO

Below, I'll show you the most frequently asked questions about SEO: SEO refers to the practices you carry out to get your site to rank higher in search engines without running ads or paying per click. SEM is the opposite — running ads on search engines so you appear at the top of the search results.

SEM results are limited to a specific period — the duration of the ad campaign — while SEO results last much longer, in addition to costing less.

You need to carry out the correct practices, starting with technical factors, moving on to creating a content plan, publishing great content, and doing off-page SEO. You need to focus on technical factors first — technical issues can waste all the effort you put into publishing and promoting content.

Focusing on SEO for your site has many benefits for your brand, particularly in the long run, given its importance in increasing sales volume and brand awareness — if you have a comment or question, don't hesitate to reach out to me in the comments.

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