It's Still About Text
With sites like Flickr, Facebook and YouTube it's easy to assume that video and images are overtaking the humble written word. It's important to realize that the Internet is still very much driven by text. Video, photos and social media are important yes, however text is the backbone, it's how the Internet works. Therefore it makes sense when getting started with search engine optimization to focus on text, which.
Starting With Research
A "Keyword" is the name given to the words and phrases that people type into search engines. The first thing new SEO practitioners need to think about is what keywords would people use to find your products and services?
Let's assume you sell widgets. What keywords would you like your site to appear for? Would you like your site to appear in the search results for "Blue widgets", "Widgets in Australia" or what about "How to use widgets".
It's one thing to understand the keywords, it's another to understand the traffic volumes for those keywords. If no one is search for "Blue widgets" there is little point in optimising your site for that keyword. So how do you know the traffic for any given keywords? Lucky, Google have the solution. Do a search for "Google keyword tool" and spend some time getting familiar with this tool.
Here's a pro tip: See what results you get when you use the "Exact Match" setting.
Are You Competitive?
How powerful is your site based on the competition? How would you know?
When you search for the keywords look at the first 5 spots? Are they big sites, with lots of content? Do they have hundreds or thousands of pages of content?
An indicator of a strong or important site is the number links that point to the site from other sites on the Internet. How can you tell? This is where you need to look at using some more tools. Do a search for "backlink analysis" and you see a number of free and paid tools that will help you understand the competition.
Choose a tool and find out how many links your competitors have. Next, break use a spreadsheet to track your site's authority, linking root domains, and pages indexed and see how your website stacks up against your competition.
Start With On-Page SEO
While links are important getting your website sorted out and optimised is the most critical thing you can do to boost your rank in search engines. Every page of your website is unique. This means the title tag (title of you page) should be written specifically for every page of your website. Here's an example title tag: Widgets | How To Use Blue Widgets. Make sure your page is relevant for the "How to use blue widgets". Make sure all your images are tagged and that your page contains links to sources relevant for the content.