The 12 Base SEO Concepts you need to get Traffic, Clicks and Conversions (sales) & Build Trust Faster

Like What Your Reading? Please Share

Is your SEO strategy bust or booming? A tsunami of organic traffic, clicks galore and customer on demand? No? Not yet?
SEO is that 1000-piece puzzle. These basis SEO concepts are the “how to” solve the puzzle.

But caveat emptor! The foundational seo basics never go out of style.

Is your SEO a boom or bust?

Even wen you master the SEO fundamentals, how does one

• solve for SEO when on page ♾?
• How to organize SEO if new and you have zero budget?
• What to do when SEO is a bust?
• How to know if you have SEO problems?
• What are the most common SEO problems?

If you ask 10 different SEO experts they will give 12 different answers on how to solve the SEO puzzle!

But, for the Non-Techie small business owner: Where. To. Begin. With. SEO?

Reminds me of the old radio skit “who on first, what is on second and I don’t know is on third base“.

Here are my dirty dozen SEO concepts every CEO and business owner, must know. Knowing the basic SEO concepts does not page 1 make. Yes, solving for SEO will grow your business.

Note the internet marketing truths:

Armed with these SEO basics, you can verify employees, contractors and agents are doing white-hat SEO. Without the danger of paying for services, you don’t need. Or worse being hit with penalties or de-listed from search engines.

Either evil will hurt💸🤕⚡ your business.

Here are the 12 basic SEO principles every beginner, founder, business owner and CEO, must know.

Back to basics what is SEO?

#1 The Basic SEO Concept is Understanding how Search Engines work

All the search engines use the same principles to find page and post.

They crawl, index and rank all the pages on the world wide web.

A crawl is a visit from a “bot”. After the crawl the info is stored in a database – with the address, the URL, and details about the content on the page.

When a person searches e.g. “how to clean white clothes?” The search engine looks in its database for the best-fit answers. The best-fit answers are partly based on keywords used in the blog post and in the search.

The best fit answers are put on an answer page called the SEPR, search engine results page. The ranked results, is via a series of algorithms. This algorithms use 200+ signals determine to determine the best-fit answers for the question.

For users of Google, Bing, Yahoo etc., the process is simple. We ask a question and the answers get displayed are on the SERP page.

“As a base SEO concept we put the user experience as our top goal.”

Google

This means if you don’t get good answers to your question, then you will choose a different search engine.

The ranking part of crawl, index and rank pages is part of the algorithms the search engines use. Think of the algorithms as recipes to find answers. But not a formula to follow.

I’ve left out how the search engine algorithm works for a different article. I am simplifying the answer for space considerations and topicalness.

The questions in this 👆👇 1st section beg more questions!!

• How do I get my pages displayed on the SERP page?
• How do I get my pages to rank higher in the SERPS
• How does the algorithm work?
• What factors influence a page’s rank?
• How to ensure my pages get crawled?
• How to ensure my website pages get indexed in all the search engines?
• How to ensure your pages answer the questions your potential customers are asking?

Point #1 leads to points 2 and 3.

#2 You are not Amazon… Select a Specific Audience (Niche) and serve them

Everyone is the opposite of a Niche. Everyone will not buy your snarky t-shirt, shovel, or shivel. They will go to Amazon for that!

A niche is a group of people with certain preferences, wants and identities. For example, Liverpool football fans, Springbok fans, rebels against society, survivalists, BMW car owners, or conservative/vegan/pro-vaccine people – yes they exist.

• Do you serve dentists or pediatric dentists or geriatric dentists?
• Do you serve vegan restaurants that sell gluten-free pastries
• Do you sell high-end sports cars or Bargaintown pine furniture?

Each of these serve a segment of an audience – a niche. Geriatric dentist, gluten-free pastries.

The most successful brands online marketers serves a specific segment of the market.

Each niche has preferences, needs and distinct identity along with the demographic – tap into their world views.

Serving a niche audience is a seo basis #1.

All Audiences have questions. Questions Demand Answers

If I want to buy an Aston Martin DB12 or Merc G-Wagon I have plenty of questions I want to be answered before I open my wallet and drop €200K+. Right?

Your audience has questions about every product and service. Even the simple question about returns, delivery, or the colours available.

Questions demand answering is the 3rd SEO concept. And these best way to answer those questions is on your blog page.

How to find the questions people are asking? Keyword research is the seo basics #1.

#3 Keyword Research – People want Answers Before they Buy

Answering all these questions is the process of content marketing.

To get your pages crawled, indexed and ranked you need to a) publish pages and b) answer the specific questions people are asking.

People have questions at all 5-stages of the buyers’ journey. Yes, 5 stages.

If you are not sure what questions people ask the “answer the public dot com” tool is perfect.

Just type a few keywords about your product or service and like magic you know the questions people are asking.

These are real question people are asking on Google.

For Example, If I typed how to “clean white cloths” the results look like this:

The blue 1-10 are the “how, when, can, which, where, what, who, why, are, well” questions. Each 1-10 relates directly to Eugene’s Swartz 5-stages of the buyers’ journey.

This simple “ask” generated 55+ questions.

A question is how do I organize all these answers on my website? That SEO basics is information architecture.

#4 Website Information Architecture is the fourth SEO Concept

Information Architecture is

A) organize information (content on your website) so people can find stuff.
B) organize so search engines know what subject your website covers.

Let us use an example. Think of the “Ultimate Guide to Cleaning All the Cloths in your Laundry Basket“

This guide has many sections.

• Which washing machine is best?
• Which detergent is cleans best?
• Which temperature cleans clothes the best?

The “which washing machines are best” section should be divided into separate pages covering efficiency, price, and reliability. And sub-sections for detergent, temperature, etc.

The size of the “Ultimate Guide to Cleaning All the Cloths in a Laundry Basket” would be something like 50,000 words long. Right?

What is the best information architecture structure for this example? a) one jumbo 50k word page or b) many pages linked together?

The answer is B, many pages linked together.

This is the pillar post strategy. With the title “Ultimate Guide to Cleaning….” and this then links to subpages and sub-sub pages.

Each sub-section with its own sub-pages and sub-sub pages. And so on and so forth until the subject is completely talked discussed, dissected and described.

Think about our keyword research from #3 above. Each of these sub-pages and sub-sub pages answers the questions people are asking. Each is its own URL. The SEO “link power” flows upwards from the H4 page to the->H3 pages to the->H2 and to the top ->H1 page.

The information architecture for organizing a series of pages and posts visually looks like this:

The top page is called a Pillar Post.
The “H4” post is the simple yes, no type of questions people ask. These posts have ∼10-25 searches/month
“H3″s are ∼30-40 searches/month
“H2” are ∼50-100 searches/month

What I’ve described is Wheel and spoke or Pillar Post with Top Cluster pages.

The description is topical.

#5 On-Page SEO Concepts

On-page SEO is a basic SEO principle that is practised every time a page or post is published.

The aspects on the page the website owner is in direct control over. Direct control means the owner can improve the page ranking in the SERP for specific keywords.

1. Page titles
2. The H2, H3, and H4 headers
3. The meta description
4. The Alt-text of images
5. The Page URL
6. The links to internal pages
7. The Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness, E-A-T of pages
8. The writing itself.
9. Images, pictures, videos, graphics and their optimization
10. Website speed – very important and a ranking factor

#6 Off-page optimization

• Backlinks – other websites linking to yours are sometimes called inbound links.
• Improving your brand awareness in the market.
• Creating and distributing content.
• Social Signals- people sharing or tagging your website.
• Online reviews and recommendations.

Off-page is everything you can do to show Bing, Google, Yahoo etc., that your website is the expert in its field. Show the website is authoritative and trustworthy. And the best way to show this is by getting backlinks from other websites.

Backlinks and inbound links are the internet marketing 👍 upvote equal to Reddit etc. Backlinks are a page ranking factor and help your domains build its authority.

#7 Technical SEO

A server is a computer designed to serve your web pages to search engines – hence the name server. Some website hosting platforms are good at this aspect and some are not good.

Tech SEO includes

• SSL- secure sockets layer
• Mobile-friendliness.
• Website speed
• Sitemaps
• Website Structure and Navigation.

And more.

#8 Tracking and measuring results – How is your SEO doing

Ok, so you’re doing all the SEO. What is helping your rankings and what is not? How do you know which is contributing to rankings, clicks, traffic, leads and sales?

Tracking all this in an excel sheet is the bare minimum.

#9 Core-Web-Vitals – is about the User Experience

Core Web Vitals have six different measures.

Using the Google Page Speed Insights tool we see the six different measures on a mobile page. The total score weighs the LCP, CLS, and FID heaviest.

Combined they contribute to the score of a page.

On June 17, 2021, Core-Web-Vitals became a page ranking factor! This Google blog post stated and confirmed as much.

Core Web Vitals is about the user experience.

A slow-to-load page is a poor user experience. Poor experiences lead to frustration. Frustration leads to apathy. Apathy leads to people leaving your website and never returning.

People leaving your website because of long load times signals to Google that people don’t like your pages and your rankings will drop. All that equals lost sales.

#10 Time to E-A-T Be the Expert, Authority and Build Trust

Google says E-A-T principles are “very important” for websites. Embracing E-A-T means your website is trustworthy, the content is from expert sources and you have authority.

Would you take financial advice from a homeless person? No
Would you take financial advice from a certified financial planner? Yes
Do you take medical advice from your Aunt Emma? No
Do you take medical advice from your GP? Yes.
Do you trust a certified financial planner?
Is a certified financial planner with books, and research papers on the banking industry an Authority? Yes
These are examples of Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.

Are you an expert in your field?
Is your website trustworthy?
Are you an authority in your field?

#11 Mobile-First Indexing as SEO Basics

Search engines use mobile-first indexing because most people access the internet and website using mobile phones.

Making websites mobile phone-friendly is more challenging compared to desktop friendly. But any reputable WordPress theme is mobile-friendly.

In the year of our lord 2022, I’m embarrassed to mention mobile-first indexing as a core SEO concept. And I still find websites that are not mobile-friendly….

Yet, here we are.🙈

#12 Website Accessibility as a core SEO Concept

In the US Website Accessibility is covered under Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act. In the EU Web accessibility is a directive that stipulates all public sector and government websites must comply.

Website Accessibility includes

• Keyboard navigation
• Alt tags for image – describing what is on the image
• Captions and transcripts for video and audio files.
• The website uses high contracts colours. Black on white or white on red.
• Using headings to divide the page into smaller manageable sections for ease of reading.

Whilst only about 3% of the population is sight impaired. Getting a website from here to there is not more than understanding a few basics and implementing them.

Wrap-up: How do the 12 SEO Puzzle pieces fit together to get Indexed, Crawled, and Ranked?

These 12 foundational SEO concepts are the timeless dozen. They help you get a grip on the concepts of search engine optimization.

These SEO basics help our understanding of how search engines function and find posts, put them in a database and rank pages. The best practice is to find your tribe, your community, and your niche part of an audience and serve them. When you know your tribe you know what their problems are before they do. And can easily answer all the questions they have about their problem and your solutions using keyword research.

Wantonly and haphazardly publishing posts on your website is not good enough. Create and follow an information architecture plan. An architecture plan makes understanding your website easy for search engines and easy for people.

Follow on-page optimization so Google easily understands and then ranks your page/posts. Off-page optimization helps improve your website’s credibility and therefore ranking. The technical side of SEO is often solved with good website hosting and newer reputable themes.

Measuring the effects of SEO is the only way to improve your website’s keyword rankings. Don’t underestimate the user experience. Google’s Core Web Vitals are how one aspect of user experience is quantified.

Demonstrating expertise, being an authority and building trust, E-A-T, with your niche audience is the keystone puzzle piece to higher rankings. Ensuring your website is mobile responsive and accessible to disabled people are the 11th and 12 SEO puzzle pieces.

Like What Your Reading? Please Share