SEO might sound intimidating and difficult when you first start. It was that way for me as well. The Internet is filled with technical explanations and different recommendations. I didn’t understand half the suggestions and didn’t know which to follow. Now after extensive experience working on Search Engine Optimization, I will do my best to write you a guide that I wish I’d had to read when I first started.

Title Tag

The title tag is the first thing that will reveal what your page is about. Whether traffic is exposed via an on online search, a backlink or a social media preview, the title tag will be their first impression of your site. If you choose a unique title that clearly shows what your website is about, you will be off to a great start.

Since the title tag is important, you might feel like you need to explain everything in it. But if you make it too long, it might get trimmed and you might end up not being able to show some important parts of it. Since it is all about space, try to not use caps lock as that would reduce the number of characters you can include.

It is good to use some of your SEO keywords in your title tags. But if you use them too frequently your page could end up looking spammy. Even if there is no SEO penalty for it, people will still avoid your website. That is the more important part. Always consider your users, real humans, above the search engine robots.

Meta Description

Meta descriptions can be seen as a very short summary of your page. It is very important to explain your website in the best way possible. It is best to keep the length between 50-160 characters, something that describes your site well enough, but not too long. Again, the key here is to be user-friendly. Keep the search robots in mind but always put your users first and make understandable, non-spammy descriptions.

Another important consideration is to make your meta description unique. If you make a description tag that can also describe other pages on your website, you can get a penalty.

What are the H tags?

Header tags or <hx> tags are very similar to your title tag. It gives certain subjects heightened importance when used. The headers go from h1 to h6, with a decreasing level of importance.  They all help to make your topics stand out. When you are using your header tag, put it at the top of your page <h1></h1>

It is good to use only one h1 in your page as a header. If you make all your headers h1, that wouldn’t look good. If you have sub-topics, using h2, h3 etc. will make your page look much more organized. The more user-friendly, the better.

H tags will also help you with the search engines. When you use them properly, the search engines will better understand what your pages are about.

How to Properly Use H tags

Since h tags have different levels of importance, it is important to use them properly to better structure your page. Since h2 is more important than h5, you need to use the correct one to separate your sub-sections.

For example, I used an h1 tag for this page’s title, “SEO On-Page” and used h2 for “What are H tags?” After, I used h3 to further explain something related to h tags, “Hot to Properly Use H Tags?”

As an example, this is the whole h structure I have for this article:

h1 = On-Page SEO for Beginners

h2 = Title Tag

h2 = Meta Description

h2 = What is h tags?

h3 = How to Properly use h Tags

h2 = Links to External Sources

h2 = Social Sharing

Writing your h tags can help you a lot when you are first planning an article. By using this method, you can see the structure of your article before you write it. You probably won’t need anything more than h3, but if you do, you can use the same logic.

Links to External Sources

When another website gives a link to you, this means you are getting an external link. When you give a link to another website, you are giving an external link. In the SEO world, getting external links is considered one of the best ways to get traffic to your website. But another, more overlooked way is giving other websites your links. If you give your link to a respectable and credible website such as Wikipedia or WebMD, that would increase your credibility and respectability. Just like how it is with getting external links, giving out external links to shady, spammy websites would harm your ranking rather than helping it.

Giving links is also important to make the Internet a better place. I know it will sound cliché but if nobody shares what they have, the Internet won’t develop. Since we are people making money off the Internet, we need to help it flourish.

Social Sharing

It is widely believed social media is not of consideration for SEO. While Google states that there is no direct link between the two, that doesn’t mean there aren’t indirect ways to use Social Media to increase your sites ranking on modern search engines. Indirectly, you can achieve a lot by having a good social media presence. The more your content is shared in the social media, the more likely it will become to show in the first results.

To achieve a great social media presence that can help you rank higher, you need to commit to your accounts. It is important to post just enough posts, not too many or too few. Also, having catchy photos and titles is always helpful with the things you shared on social media. Another thing is to make sure your website is user-friendly when it comes to sharing online. Big, distinctive buttons for sharing should be available to the user, along with encouraging words to make sure they share.