How to Do SEO on Your Own: A Beginner’s Step-by-Step Guide

Some sites attract visitors easily, while others remain unattended. This is not always luck, simply because the site is SEO-friendly. An SEO-friendly site is made so search engines and humans can easily find, read, and make sense of it.

Theoretically, ignoring Search Engine Optimization is similar to setting up shop in the middle of an abandoned passage. You might have the best products, but who will find you? And that is the very reason why learning how to do SEO step by step is necessary.

This guide will undertake the practical steps of creating a website that search engines love and customers can easily discover. By the end of this post, you will know precisely how to do SEO on your own so that your website is visible to millions of people browsing for your services.

Why Having an SEO-Friendly Website Is Important

Before we discuss the “how,” let’s examine the “why.” An SEO-friendly website is not just a technical checklist; rather, it is an invaluable online asset.

• Free, Targeted Traffic: SEO pulls in users actively searching for your product, service, or information. These people are already interested and far more likely to become customers.
• Builds Trust and Credibility: Sites appearing on the first page of Google typically garner a level of trust and authority from users. A site well optimized for search conveys it’s a legitimate business.
• Around-the-Clock Working Potential: Unlike social media posts and paid ads that lose their edge when payments cease, an SEO-optimized website will bring in new visitors for a few months or years after publication.
• User Experience: All the SEO procedures you undertake, such as increasing site speed and designing good navigation, will also enrich the user experience. Hence, visitors tend to stay longer and roam around more.

Website-building must come with SEO in mind to work for you at all hours of the day. Therefore, let us see your 14-step blueprint for creating an SEO-friendly website.

How to do SEO for Your Website step by step: Your 14-Step Blueprint

This process is straightforward. You don’t need to be a tech expert. Follow these steps to create a solid foundation.

Step 1: Use Keywords Throughout Your Content

Scatter keywords throughout the content. Users type keywords into a search engine, so content must be able to respond to their queries in congruent terms. Effective keyword research ensures you target the right phrases that align with user intent.

• Methods: Search the main keyword, e.g., “organic dog food,” and aim to have the keyword appear as naturally as possible in your page title, main headings, and within the opening paragraph. You may then continue along the line of the related words and phrases throughout the rest of the present text, informing the search engines that your topic has valuable content. Write for people; put keywords where they make sense.

Step 2: Use Header Tags

Keywords and header tags, like H1, H2, or H3 tags, can create a TOC for a web page. A reader skims through these to get an idea about the page’s content, while search engines use these tags as a level-wise hierarchy for the page and its main points.

• How to do it: Use an H1 for the page’s main title. Then, the content is split into sections that use H2 tags for their headings and H3 tags for sub-points of each H2. Keywords should be placed here and there on some of these headers wherever they make natural sense.

Step 3: Have a Clean URL Structure

The URL shall be kept simple and descriptive. Messy URLs create perplexity among users and search engines.

• How to do it: Make URLs easy to follow. Keep URLs descriptive and meaningful. For instance, a URL like “yoursite.com/how-to-bake-bread” would be better than “yoursite.com/p=123.” The URL should be as short as possible while containing the main keyword relevant to the page.

Step 4: Include Keyword-Rich Anchor Text in Your Links

Anchor texts are images constituting hypertext navigational terms that contain words. Descriptive anchor texts help to inform users and search engines about the linked page.

• How to do it: Websites are designed considering responsive design techniques to change layout as the screen size changes. Google has a free mobile-friendly test that you can use for your website.

Step 5: Make Sure the Website Is Mobile-Friendly

Make sure the Website is Mobile-Friendly. For the most part, people browse on their mobile Phones. If such a site was poor on Google or one difficult to maneuver, it was how Google ranked, and visitors would simply walk away.

How to do it: The design of a website changes to a mobile-friendly responsive design depending on the screen size. To see current changes applied by the design, hence, easily test to check on Google’s Mobile-Friendly Testing.

Step 6: Optimize Images

Large images never slow down the website unless they are tuned or optimized. Thus, image optimization fastens the site as an alternative approach to image search rankings.

• How to do it: Resize images to reduce file size before uploading the file. Then give a relevant image name to the image-file name (such as: organic-chicken-dog-food.jpg), with a description in the alt attribute, including an appropriate keyword (if at all pertinent).

Step 7: Make Sure Your Web Pages Load Fast

Ensure Your Web Pages Load Fast

Speed is one of the few things that matter for the website. Anything that takes too long triggers customer frustration, and search engines seriously penalize slow websites.

• How to do it: Use Google PageSpeed Insights to check the service. The main ideas are choosing a good and fast web host provider; diminishing the amount of heavy freaks of UIView that plug in image optimization, thereby getting in the way of all the page views; and cutting back on the use of hefty pieces of MPEG for the sake of speeding up access to multiple files.

Step 8: Use Social Media to Promote Your Content

While social shares are not a ranking factor, they help increase visibility. This increased visibility may yield more links, traffic, and link building opportunities — the primary elements of SEO.

• How to do it: Share new blog posts and pages on all social media channels and encourage your followers to reshare them so that the content can initially gain the attention it requires to succeed.

Step 9: Use Google Tools

Google provides more tools to help you monitor and improve your SEO.

• How to do it:
  • Google Search Console: This is an absolute must-have! Search Console tells you how your site is doing in Google search, the keywords you rank, and what technical errors are present. `
  • Google Analytics: Formally established to inform you about the behaviour of visitors on your site-how long they stay, what pages they visit, etc.

Step 10: Clean Up and Organize the Site Code

If you write clean code, search engines’ “crawlers” can efficiently read and comprehend your site’s content.

• How you do it: This step is a more technically oriented one. This usually includes the minimization of CSS and JavaScript files. If you aren’t a developer, you should speak about this with your web designer or use well-coded themes or platforms such as WordPress, along with a clean theme.

Step 11: Add Internal Links

Internal linking means linking one page of a site to another. These allow users to discover more content, whereas search engines see the arrangement and prioritization of your pages.

• How you do it: When you discuss a topic in a blog post or on a page, link it. For example, under “dog nutrition,” you might want to create a link about “best dog food brands.” This will keep people on your site longer.

Step 12: Optimize the Title Tags and Meta Descriptions

Users will find the title tag and meta description to entice or kill clicks along the search engine results page.

• Title Tag: The clickable blue headline is shown in the search results. Place the core keyword close to the front and fit the entire thing within 60 characters.
• Meta Description: Consider it as a short hook to capture an audience (within 155 characters) to pull them in and have them choose to click.

Step 13: Use Images and Videos to Enhance the Content

One of the elements that makes content attractive is multimedia, with the possibility of retaining visitors for a longer time on a page, which may serve as a positive ranking signal in search engines.

• How to use: Always place good supporting images, infographics, or videos that support the written text and explain difficult concepts. Also, remember to optimize images in line with Step 6.

Step 14: Update Your Content Regularly

Search engines like to show fresh content. Regular updates and quality content writing on your website show that your site is live, valuable, and consistently updated.

• How to use: Monitor your content when you upload it. Place a review calendar on your older blog posts and refresh them with new content, numbers, or images. This will cause them to rank once more.

Your Path to a High-Performing Website

An SEO-friendly website seems like a long to-do list, but underneath it all, it creates a fast, clear, and helpful site for the visitor. Search engines are designed to reward exactly that. If you have ever thought about how to do seo for a website step by step, it really comes to cementing a strong foundation.

Following these fourteen steps creates a solid foundation for long-term growth; trends will never be overnight, but consistent efforts will grow your visibility, bringing a steady stream of potential customers to your site. If you want to learn how to do SEO on your own, these steps are the best beginning.

So if you would like your website perfectly placed for success from the beginning, the professionals at Angel SEO Services will gladly assist. The professionals specialize in designing SEO-optimized websites that are simple and enjoyable to navigate and correctly optimized for search engines, promising potential growth for your company.

Ready to get a website that fully works for you? Contact Angel SEO Services for a free website audit and determine how we will shape your online presence.

FAQs

1. How long does it usually take to start seeing an SEO effect?

SEO is very long-term. Minor changes might be detected in a few weeks, and big traffic growth on most sites happens between 3 and 6 months. This is because new sites must be present in the eyes of the search engine for a period before acceptance into the trust list.

2. Is being a technology expert required to make my website SEO-friendly?

No, not at all! You can do many easy steps, like writing good content and using header tags. If it comes to technical SEO for the harder stuff, such as site speed or code cleanup, there are easy tools online to guide you, or you can hire a developer. More importantly, focus on what you can do yourself, and get help with the rest.

3. What must a new site do to rank?

It has been noted to be the singular factor of importance: high-quality content that answers the user’s question better than any other page could. Without useful content, all technical optimization is useless. Think about helpful and complete content first, then optimize it using the steps in this guide.

4. So, it’s a tight budget. Can I use any free SEO tools?

Absolutely. Much can be done with and by free tools. Begin with the essential free tools of Google Search Console and Google Analytics. Give Google Keyword Planner and AnswerThePublic a try for free keyword ideas.

5. My website is already ready. Is it too late to make it SEO-friendly?

Never! You could return to your existing site to work on it anytime. Start by reviewing your content (to see which pages might not be ranking well but have potential), work on their title tags and meta descriptions, and link some of those pages internally. Gradually moving through the 14 steps above will greatly increase your site’s performance.

6. Can Angel SEO Services help if I already have a website?

Yes, certainly! Angel SEO Services specializes in conducting thorough website SEO audits and optimization for an existing site. We can analyze your current website, identify what is holding it back, and fix everything that needs to be fixed, from technical issues to content optimization, so that it starts ranking better and drawing more traffic.