How to start SEO?

[Lovelybear]

We built a website aimed to B2B blankets market. We want our website ranking on the first page when people search any word related to blankets.
I feel confused about how to start working on SEO? Anybody can help me improve my SEO?

Thank you

 

[Sarah Ryan]

Do you have any knowledge about SEO?
Maybe for the beginning it's better to hire SEO specialist or company, that will help you. Because without special knowledge and experience it'll be hard.

 

[makeusvisible]

We want our website ranking on the first page when people search any word related to blankets.
Thank you

Keyword research. Believe me, you do not want to invest considerable time and money into EVERY keyword relating to blankets. For example...do you want to be ranking for "fire blankets", "comfort blankets", "baby blankets"? Find the most profitable keywords, and less competitive, and firstly concentrate on those.

If you really do want to rank for EVERY keyword relating to blankets you will need extremely deep pockets.

My advice would be to start with PPC (Adwords), and determine which keywords work for you....which convert into sales... and have some accurate figures for search volume and CTR before you invest into SEO.

 

[fisicx]

I feel confused about how to start working on SEO? Anybody can help me improve my SEO?

Do this course: http://www.freshbananas.co.uk/

But fix the site first. Join the forum as a full member and get a website review. And rethink your product range - they may be popular locally but they aren't the sort of thing europeans would by.

 

[Alessandro Paletta]

Hi, SEO is a long process, but a valuable investment.
There are several parts to SEO.
The first part is on-page SEO - This includes stuff like heading tags, title tags and page load times
The second part is link building - This is links going from other websites back to yours, and they count as a vote in googles eyes.
A third part is social media - You must be active on social media and make sure it's optimised well
Finally, content marketing - maybe the most important part of SEO, create valuable content that people want to share!

[removed by mod]

Hope this helps!

 

[stevebrownlie]

If you want to achieve 'total search dominance' for blankets you're up against a lot of big retailers (search for 'blankets' and you'll see some of the sites you're competing with). You'd need to think 'big brand' for your site, so it has to look great, be full of compelling content that searchers are looking for, and have a wide range of products that meet their needs across ALL of the search terms you want to dominate (as @fisicx says a limited range won't help you if people are seeing stuff they don't like and bouncing back go Google - you'll actually move down in rankings). Oh and lots of links to that content of course too (not rubbish easy-to-get ones either, natural, quality links).

Assuming you don't want to hire and agency and you want to do everything in house here are the things you need:

Web designer - make the site look 'best in class' and then work on the linkbuilding content with your writers
Conversion expert/UX expert - later on once you have traffic you'll need to be testing endlessly to improve sales and conversions - big ecommerce stores do tons of this... you'll at least want to dip your toe in and make sure there aren't any obvious (to an expert) leaks in your user flow
Content writer - for sales page, product copy, blog, linkbait type content (things that are designed to be easier to link to than an individual product listing but still super relevant to your business). You'll need a lot of content.
Outreach expert - for getting those links, promoting your content, getting press coverage and all those kinds of things.

As others have noted there might be easier places to start such as social advertising (Facebook ROI is often really strong for ecommerce stores), PPC (for sales and for helping you define which keywords are most profitable for your future SEO efforts), etc.

 

[boring-friday]

stick it all on alibaba and hope for the best

 

[Lovelybear]

Keyword research. Believe me, you do not want to invest considerable time and money into EVERY keyword relating to blankets. For example...do you want to be ranking for "fire blankets", "comfort blankets", "baby blankets"? Find the most profitable keywords, and less competitive, and firstly concentrate on those.

If you really do want to rank for EVERY keyword relating to blankets you will need extremely deep pockets.

My advice would be to start with PPC (Adwords), and determine which keywords work for you....which convert into sales... and have some accurate figures for search volume and CTR before you invest into SEO.

Thank you. If we choose several keywords, besides PPC Adwords, would you plz tell me is there any other way to do free website promotion.

 

[fisicx]

There are loads of free ways to promite your website. But none of them will work. If you want to sell blankets you need to 1. Fix the site. 2. Invest money in marketing.

 

[stender]

It's a slow ongoing process. There's no quick overnight success, at least none that last.

 

[makeusvisible]

Thank you. If we choose several keywords, besides PPC Adwords, would you plz tell me is there any other way to do free website promotion.

Any Free method is going to involve your own time in two ways;

1. Devise a strategy
2. Implement your strategy

If your goal is to rank organically, you are going to have a significant amount of research, and time implementing your strategy.

If you go with social media, you are likely to achieve more instant results, and the learning curve will not be quite so steep.

If you are not looking to spend any money at all on marketing, then you are gong to have to learn 'on the job' and accept that the rewards will come only from careful planning, implementation, and a lot of research.

I would advise that as a bare minimum you get Google Analytics setup properly on your site, and start monitoring your traffic...and most importantly your conversion rates. Without these statistics you are going to be unable to monitor the success of whatever strategy you implement.

 

[Liam Curley]

I agree with most of the points above. SEO shouldn't be the starting point. You need to address the website (with a review) before you begin investing any time or money in search marketing.

If you're looking to rank for terms related to 'blankets', my guess would be that they're highly competitive and you'd need a big budget to compete. A quick search for one of your current keywords, 'baby bedding blankets', shows that the top five results are taken up by Asda, Mothercare, Tesco and Amazon. Without a huge marketing budget, you're not going to rank organically for that type of keyword any time soon.

Better to use other marketing methods that don't require a huge upfront investment (time or money) and deliver results in the short term. Paid ads (social, Google or otherwise) would be a better bet in the short term. They'd give you the chance to test conversions on your target keywords, determine which seem to be the more commercially lucrative, and hopefully get some ROI in the short term too.

 

[justinaldridge]

All good points mentioned already but also a great place to start is to read Google's own guide to starting SEO.

I can't post a link yet but if you do a search in Google for "Google seo guide" you'll see the first result is a link to Google's own SEO PDF!

That should give you a good grasp of the fundamentals and what Google needs to rank your website.

Best of luck with it.

 

[StevePoster]

You have a wide range of learning place when it comes to SEO and I would recommend those reputable blog site to start up your knowledge such as Moz and SearchEngineWatch.

 

[Bjones01]

There is a wide range of online platform to do that Training...Like Umedy's SEO Training and other SEO blog will also help to increase Knowledge regarding SEO.

 

[Marek Skoczylas]

Search for some SEO ebooks on AMAZON. I can recommend Stephan Spencer ebooks

 

[ZakTomlinson]

Hey there,

If I may contribute to the great recommendations above, I would like to point out that SEO is an ever-changing environment. This is mostly because of the frequent changes to the Google Search engine. Those fellows are testing and changing our beloved search engine on a daily basis.
This means that even when you familiarise yourself with everything "SEO", you'll have to update your knowledge.
In light of this I would like to share the best online communities where SEO wisdom sharing is in high regard:
moz.com
searchengineland.com
searchenginejournal.com
semrush.com

Welcome to the Land of SEO!

 

[russianjack]

Are you new to seo ? Firstly you should have great and basic knowledge about SEO tools ,platforms, techniques,strategy..You should follow some books , learn from Google SEO guide .after you get all information about seo then you can easily do these task they will help to keep higher rank of your website in search engines.
Welcome to world of SEO !!

 

[JamesMason67]

My thoughts are if you want to rank for such a competitive term, you are going to need the help of the pros, many of which you will find on here (Marek, Justin and Graham at Fisicx who answered your post are all knowledgable, pleasant people for example).

I think with basic knowledge, with this keyword, you are barely going to scratch the surface I'm afraid.

However, do as others have suggested and start to learn. If your site is nowhere, basic on page stuff, titles, keyword research and placements etc will take it far, but not to the upper echelons where you want to be.

Learning some SEO will also go a long way to stop you getting ripped off by cowboy SEO's, which I reckon you'll need somewhere down the line. Best of luck with this.
James

 

[Mike Cowell]

You should start with keyword research. Find some good keywords and make a plan, analyse your competitors websites and check how they are performing in search engines. Keyword selection is most important thing to start with SEO.
But it is very difficult to let you know everything here. There are number of things an SEO specialist check to rank keywords at top of the competitors.

In brief I can say:

1) Keywords Research
2) On-Page Optimization
3) Off-page Optimization

 

[brettsalt1995]

Take a look around on Moz, they have some good guides.

 

[Swansea SEO]

I think that the days of self servicing seo are soon to be at an end! Many big companies will soon develop software that could dominate local searches with minimal effort and costs. So the opportunity for 'joe bloggs' to rank in his local niche, will quickly be deminished.

 

[JamesMason67]

I think that the days of self servicing seo are soon to be at an end! Many big companies will soon develop software that could dominate local searches with minimal effort and costs. So the opportunity for 'joe bloggs' to rank in his local niche, will quickly be deminished.[/QUOTE

Google will never let that happen, and I'm pretty sure that the best SEO brains on the planet have long dreamed of being able to do this to no avail.

I can see a day when the whole of page one for competitive terms becomes PPC though.

 

[Venchito Tampon]

There are many SEO resources out there, but there are only a few that I trust and does helped our new hires learn about the basics of search.
1. Google's How Search Works - this will give you a background of how search engines crawl and index pages across the web.
2. Moz Beginner's Guide to SEO - provides you the basic principles and methodologies in search engine optimization - read it twice or three to familiarize yourself with technical terms.
3. Moz Beginner's Guide to Link Building - links are valuable signals for search engines to determine the site's relevance and authority - more high quality links can actually help your site get to the top page of SERPs (depending on the vertical you're in).
4. SharpRocket's Off-page SEO - check out this resource if you're looking for actionable link building tactics - suitable for blogs or company sites - SMBs to Enterprise brands.

 

[Innovative Ecom]

Hi,
For Starting SEO You should have Few knowledge About SEO, like, What Is Link Building?, Having Knowledge of Basic HTML, What are tools Used For SEO ? Etc.

As SEO is Not Short Term process it takes longer Time To Come Up , So If have Not knowledge Of it you should Hire One company who lookafter SEO of website.
If you Need Good SEO Company Visit our Profile.

 

[threenine]

I always find these discussions about SEO, a little ironic. Often the need for SEO, is about the desire to end up on the 1st Page of google, for a chosen Keyword. It's always as if, this is some kind of magic elixir that will boost your business ten-fold.

Don't get me wrong, SEO is important, but it's not critical. SEO should be part of your strategy, but is should be not be your strategy.

If you're going to rely purely on the fact that your business should be on page 1 of google, then I'm afraid you're taking your business straight into Price Competitive markets. The internet market place has moved leaps and bounds since 2001. Users are a lot more savvy, and use the internet with clearer intentions.

The B2B market space, is a complex one. A vast majority of deals in this space are conducted on relationships. Relationships are between humans. It's the networking between humans that is important.

If you're going to rely, or for one minute think that ending up on the 1st page of google, is going to power your way through that, you'll have to reset your expectations.

The vast majority of business users, may only use web search for a quick price comparison check.

Here you are, asking for SEO advice, asking for tips and advice on how to do it. Yet if you simply typed into Google, SEO Tips and Advice, Google will promptly offer the best of the Results, and one in theory would just click on the first result and click buy now ?

If the answer is no. Ask yourself the question why?

Take this example to your business. If somebody searched for Blankets. would they click buy now on any of the links supplied by Google?

The clue here, is that if you want to excel at gaining inbound leads from the internet, is that it takes a lot more than SEO.

 

[UKSBD]

Google will never let that happen, and I'm pretty sure that the best SEO brains on the planet have long dreamed of being able to do this to no avail.

You need to have a read of this to get an idea of what is happening -
http://www.viperchill.com/google-control/

 

[fisicx]

A very interested article. I doubt many will bother to read the whole thing but those that do shouldn't be too shocked. Acquisition is what the mammon has been doing for years. The advantage now is all that free traffic generated because of the ranking obtained from links from authoritative brands.

 

[UKSBD]

Acquisition is what the mammon has been doing for years.

For the past 10 years+ Digital Agencies have been taking over.

Big businesses answer to this - Acquire the Digital Agencies.

 

[fisicx]

Absolutely.

And not just digital agencies. I follow a number of online comics and they are all slowly being brought up by the big publishers. Small hosting companies and being subsumed into bigger organisations and even local independent B&M stores are being targeted by corporations.

Big business owns the world.

 

[threenine]

Maybe we should have a referendum to see if we want to leave the world of big business ? We could have months and months of pointless debates and maybe this could all culminate in somebody being forced to resign!

 

[Marek Skoczylas]

Absolutely.

And not just digital agencies. I follow a number of online comics and they are all slowly being brought up by the big publishers. Small hosting companies and being subsumed into bigger organisations and even local independent B&M stores are being targeted by corporations.

Big business owns the world.

Sounds line the new world order conspiracy theory

 

[fisicx]

It's not a conspiracy. It's people with all the money making sure they get a bigger slice of the pie. Every time you buy something from a fast food chain or amazon or some other corporation you are making some one else rich at the expense of the independent trader.

It's why I started this thread 5 years ago: http://www.ukbusinessforums.co.uk/threads/ive-stopped-buying-things-online.203417/

 

[Tom_Dwan]

I would recommend you subscribing for Neil Patel's articles. He covers almost any topic you can imagine when it comes to SEO and online marketing as a whole. He also explains the stuff pretty good, so even inexperienced people will get the idea. Also, you can ask him literally everything in the comments section and he will answer you.

 

[rf-harris]

The first thing is the on page SEO which mainly include meta tags, sitemaps etc. Then you need to build some quality backlinks, one of the better ways to building quality backlinks these days is to do guest posting.

 

[Marek Skoczylas]

Building backlinks profile with only guest posting method will simply drive your website to penalty. Rule nr 1 for any backlinks = diversification.

 

[Ivan N]

First, you should join some SEO training if you do not have knowledge about SEO. And... it will be difficult.

 

[Leandros21]

Focus on link building to high quality sources and onpage optimization.

 

[Tom_Dwan]

And... it will be difficult.

..but not impossible if you give your best, after all SEO is not rocket science... still

 

[Marek Skoczylas]

..but not impossible if you give your best, after all SEO is not rocket science... still

Google is getting more and more annoying about reveal SEO factors - some of them can be noticed after +-8 months after tests run. This is not taking candy from the baby game anymore.