BEGINNER'S GUIDE TO SEO 2014 | Free SEO Tutorial 2014
SEO is search engine optimization. It's how you can optimize your website, blog, pages, or forum so that they appear at the top of search engine results pages, or SERPs. The most popular search engine for English language searches is Google. Other search engines include Yahoo, Bing, Blekko, DuckDuckGo, Baidu, and Yandex. This is a free SEO guide for beginners in 2014 with tips on how to apply SEO to your websites, blogs, webpages, and forums so that you will rank high in the SERPs in 2014.
2014 SEO Tips and Tricks for the Beginner
Give your webpage a title with keywords that relate to the topic of the webpage. Use a descriptive title that tells the reader what the webpage is about.
Put your title in h1 HTML tags. Search engines give more weight to content in the h1 tags when deciding how to index a website, blog, or webpage. But don't put the entire content of your page in h1 tags and shrink the font size with CSS, because that is too obviously an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings. This is called "black hat SEO" and it is a no-no!
Give your webpage a URL with keywords that indicate the topic of the webpage. You can use different words in your title than in your URL to capitalize on more keywords.
Use keywords and keyword phrases in the text of your webpage so that search engine crawlers will know what your page is about. This tutorial is about SEO for beginners, so I use phrases like "SEO for beginners" and "SEO in 2014" to make it obvious what the topic of this guide is.
Don't keyword stuff your text. Keyword stuffing is when you use so many key search phrases that the text reads awkwardly. And don't include a section of keywords in invisible text (same color as background). That is also black hat.
Write naturally with correct grammar and spelling.
Use alt and title attributes within the img tags so that image search engines will properly index your website's pictures, photos, and images.
Write good content that people want to link to and share with their friends. When someone on another website links to your webpage, this is called a backlink. Having lots of backlinks is good so long as they appear on other high-quality pages. A backlink on Wikipedia is excellent. A backlink on a spam blog is worthless.
If no one else is interested in sharing or linking to your content you can create your own backlinks, but they will probably not be nearly as good as backlinks earned naturally. You can drop a link in the comments section of a blog or news article, or on a forum. Moderators may remove your links. The more related your link is to the content of the blog or forum post, the more likely it will survive the moderators.
Write enough text to get your point across.
Write about things people want to read.
Write on topics that are not already saturated. There are already too many webpages about weight loss, iPhones, and SEO, so these are poor topics to write about.
Advanced SEO Techniques for 2014
Besides SEO, there are other ways to make sure your pages rank at the top of the SERPs. One is to analyze search data for keyword phrases using Google Adwords. It is free to create an Adwords account. With Adwords, you can see how much advertisers generally pay for Adsense blocks based on certain keywords, the average search volume, and information about advertiser competition for certain keword phrases.
You can also set up analytics to see where your site's visitors are coming from, how long they stay, which pages they visit most frequently, etc. Google Analytics is a free tool of this nature. If certain pages receive more search traffic than others, you should create more pages like the popular ones.
You can set up Google Authorship with your G+ account. If your website is properly linked to your G+ account, your profile photo may appear alongside the title of your page in search results.
Free SEO and Website Resources for Beginners in 2014
Take advantage of free online SEO resources for beginners. These websites have introductory tutorials on optimizing your websites for search engines in 2014, as well as free tutorials on how to work with HTML. You will learn how to use img tags and heading tags h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, and h6.
Google SEO Guide: This is a guide written by the people who work at Google, so it is the most authoritative SEO manual for people who want their websites rank high in Google SERPs.
Moz.com (Formerly SEO Moz) and Copyblogger.com: These sites are maintained by people whose full-time job is to stay abreast of SEO and changes in search engine algorithms.
Tizag and W3Schools: These sites have tutorials on how to write correct code and markup in HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, and other languages used to create functional websites.
