10 SEO Tips - Optimizing for Beginners

If you have a nice website, it does not mean that you will automatically be found in Google or other search engines. For this, you can (must) optimize your website. There are dozens, perhaps hundreds of factors that influence this and nobody knows the complete algorithm that Google uses for this. It is also not an easy task to get to the top of the search results and it will certainly not happen overnight. Why then is SEO important? Because in the long run, it will bring you a lot of extra traffic to your website, traffic that converts better and therefore more turnover.

In this article, I discuss 10 tips to get started with search engine optimization right away so that the basis of your website is in good order and you take advantage of your competitors. These are tips for beginners, so you don't need to have much knowledge of search engine optimization, but a little knowledge of how your website works and where to find something is desirable. Also take a look at the SEO glossary of FLIX Marketing, here you will find the most common SEO terms explained briefly and powerfully.

10 tips to immediately optimize your website for SEO

1.       Determine the keywords you want to be found on
2.       Use the keywords in relevant places
3.       Do not skip the title tag and meta description
4.       Optimize the headings of your page
5.       Get more from your images for SEO
6.       Use the subject of the page in the URL
7.       Add a blog to your website
8.       Create enough relevant internal links
9.       Give search engines access to your website via robots.txt
10.   Add an XML sitemap

Tip 1. Determine the keywords you want to be found on

Keywords say it all; they are the words that your (potential) customers use for their searches and that you want to be found on. Keywords and keywords are the same by the way. Maybe even eventually at position 1, but page 1 is also very nice. But how do you determine the right keywords to focus on?

As an entrepreneur, you know better than anyone what your company has to offer. Start by writing down all the words that come to mind about your product or service. Think broader here! What are synonyms? Which geographic places are of interest to you? Which materials? Think from your target audience; what would they enter when they are looking for your products and/or services?

There are also online tools that help you. Google suggests a hidden tool that everyone knows. How? If you go to Google and you start typing your search query, you will see that Google will automatically complete it for you. This addition is based on many previous similar searches. Even after your search has been performed and the search results are visible, Google will again give you valuable tips to increase your keyword list. For this, you look at the very bottom of the search results page.

Finding keywords through Google Suggest

You can also gain extra inspiration via  Google Adwords. You create a free account for this and go to 'Utilities' and then 'Keyword Planner. The option 'Find new keywords and receive data from search volumes' helps you discover related keywords and you can immediately view the search volume and competition level per keyword.

Looking for even more keyword inspiration? Then also read the article Keywords as a starting point for SEO - 14 quick tips.

Tip 2. Use the keywords in relevant places

Now that you have an overview of all relevant keywords, it is good to see which of them you think is the most important. You will use these keywords to pre-optimize your pages. It is wise to optimize each page for just one keyword (or keyword combination). You do this by having the keyword appear in different places on the page. This is one of the important parts of on-page SEO.

So in the text of your page, you start working with your keywords. Like any good text, you provide a good structure; an introduction, the core, and a conclusion. You also include a Call to Action here so that you encourage the reader to take action. It is wise to include the keyword on all these points.

But beware of keyword stuffing! Keyword stuffing is the overuse of keywords with the aim of ranking high in search engines. This has not worked for years and is now even punished by Google! Moreover, there is a good chance that this also makes the text not pleasant to read for the visitor. So watch out for this.

Read more: The next four tips focus on specific places to visibly and invisibly include the keywords on your page.

Tip 3. Optimize the title tag and meta description on keywords and length

The title tag and meta description may not be terms that you recognize at first but are super important for all pages of your website and for finding ability in Google. Not only the findability, by the way, they are also the text that comes up in Google's search results. Here is the example from the FLIX Marketing page about SEO:

Keywords in title tag and meta description - SEO tips

The title tag has a maximum length of 70 characters. Keep in mind that you use the most important keywords and that there are no unnecessary words. Curious about what you should pay attention to? I have 6 title tag tips for SEO for you.

The meta description is a short summary of the page. The maximum length depends a bit on the search engine and the device you are using, but I would stick around 140 characters. Again, it is important that you include the keywords in it and that it is catchy text. Do you want to know more about this tip? Read how you can best optimize the meta description and title tag.

Tip 4. Optimize the headings of your page

Headings are another word for headings. Just like in “regular” texts, it is also important to include headings in web texts. Almost all visitors to your website first briefly scan the text before they decide whether to start reading. Headings pop out when scanning the page and often summarize the text that will follow in a sentence. Google looks at it the same way, the headings in the ranking algorithm weigh more heavily than the rest of the text. Good to add the keywords here!

Each page should consist of a single H1, which is the title of the page. It is important that you include the keyword for which you are going to optimize the text. Preferably you start the H1 with the keyword. After that, you usually have a number of subheads in the text. You can add multiple H2s and H3s to your lyrics and you can even go up to H6. But I usually limit it to the H3 with a single H4.

Do you want to know more about headings? Then also read the article Headings on your website, what can you do with it for SEO?

Keywords in headings - SEO tips

Example of the Headings I used in my article

SSL certificate - from HTTP to HTTPS for WordPress

Tip 5. Get more out of your images for SEO

Google cannot read images, so it is important to make Google visible with words that are in the image. With images you let the keywords come back in two places. First, there is the file name of the image. You can summarize what can be seen in the image in a few keywords. These should largely correspond to your keywords. Don't forget to use hyphens between the individual words. A good file name for the image I used in Tip 4 would be keywords-heading-SEO-tips.png.

In addition to the file name, you can also optimize images for keywords in another way, namely through the ALT tag. ALT tags are a tool for visually impaired people to know what is in the image, but Google is also limited in this and cannot read the image. That is why it is good to use the ALT tag of an image to provide as clear and concrete a description as possible of what can be seen in the image. So for the example just mentioned, the ALT tag could be “Example keywords used in headings”.

There is a third easy tip for optimizing your images for SEO. Curious which one that is? Then read the article ' Optimizing images for SEO - three important tips '.

Tip 6. Use the subject of the page in the URL

Each page has a separate URL. In WordPress, this URL, also called permalink, is very easy to adjust. Choose a concise version of the title that only consists of keywords, so without small words. If you have already formulated the title correctly, then again the keyword should be at the front or at least mentioned.

Tip 7. Add a blog to your website

Having a high-quality blog on your website to which new content is regularly added has a (large) number of advantages. It ensures new content on your website, a reason for visitors to return, but Google also likes to update the content. In addition, it also exudes a certain level of expertise (provided you write good blogs) because you share with your blog knowing that you have gained with interested parties.

My own Flix Marketing blog is of course a good example of a blog :). But not only do I use my blog to be increasingly found on keywords that are important to me, but I also enjoy sharing my knowledge and in that way helping entrepreneurs grow.

All the previously mentioned tips apply to your blog and the articles. Write an article with at least 300 words. Actually applies; the more extensive the article, the better. At the moment so-called sample articles, texts with more than 2,000 words, are popular. However, make sure that all information you share is relevant, and that you are not going to use padding or even worse keyword stuffing.

Add blog for SEO optimization

Tip 8. Create enough relevant internal links

An internal link is a reference from one page of your website to another. If a page is referred to by several other pages, it is easier for Google to recognize this page. Pages that are referred to more internally are also considered more important for search results than isolated pages.

A blog like the one discussed in the previous tip is a good resource for creating additional internal links. Most likely all blog articles are written around a number of central topics. Because of this, there will be several blog articles with related information. You can then have these refer to each other. As you have already seen in this article, I also refer to other blog articles, so they are all internal links. Another example is to now refer you to my article specifically about internal links.

Tip 9. Give search engines access to your website via robots.txt

By adding a simple text file to your website - called robots.txt - you determine whether or not a search engine can access your website. You give them permission to crawl your website. So make sure that you really give the search engines this permission and that you do not accidentally block them. Two small lines of text are enough for this. Do you want to know how to do this? Then read my blog: Robots.txt what is it and why is it important?

Robots.txt search engines allow anything

Tip 10. Add an XML sitemap

Search engines, of course, have millions, maybe billions of websites that they have to check every day. Initially, they crawl a website, which means they go through it and are aware of the website's existence. However, it is more important that your website is also indexed. That means that when the search engine indexes the content on your pages, it becomes visible in the search results.

XML sitemaps can facilitate this process for search engines. You can compare an XML sitemap with the table of contents of a book. It tells the search engines which pages there are and which structure there is.

You don't want to create a sitemap manually, that is a lot of work to start with, but a lot of work to maintain. Fortunately, there are many different options for automatically generating an XML sitemap. If you work with the Yoast plugin for WordPress, this sitemap will be automatically created for you. You can view these by going to SEO in the left menu of your WordPress admin panel and then XML sitemaps.

Not working with Yoast or WordPress? Then there are hundreds of other options for automatically generating a sitemap. Xml-sitemaps.nl is an example of a frequently used Dutch website and XML-sitemaps.com is an American variant.