How to Learn SEO - A guide for Starter

Learning SEO is not a rocket science. It has a simple logic-

"Stay focused, Stay active, Keep communicating, Post Content, Keep Spreading"

If you are trying to learn SEO, having passion of Internet, thinking of your career in online world, These tips will surely enhance your expertise in t he domain. For being a SEO expert, the best strategy is to start from basics. Running around for big tools, services, ad hoc methods doesn't help. You need to keep working on your project no matter how much response you are getting or how many clicks or how many visits you got for your blog or post.

Lets start with a list of must-haves to begin with SEO-

1- Laptop (Obviously)
2- Internet Connection (Not Joking)
3- Website/ Blog to work on
4- Minimum 1 hour a day with no excuse+time to create content
5- A lot of patience
6- A Niche ( A small part of overall domain, which you are expert in, Not required If you already have a website)
7- A little bit technical knowledge, especially HTML (Basic but not mandatory, you can learn in due course)
8- Passion for success in blogging/SEO

Once the checklist above is completed, you are good to go with the journey of Blogging and SEO. Pointing out a few well known basic but powerful strategies to be a SEO expert-

1- Finding a Niche-
Now to start with this, take your laptop, connect Internet and start browsing around to find a niche which is not very common but is largely potential. To be more statistically correct and If you are confused, Try getting help from Google. Decide a Niche of your expertise and start working on the same.

2- Deciding Domain Name-
This is a simple but practically hard decision. For this you have to take care of too many visible and hidden things like google search statistics, Negative keywords, short and simple name which has at least one keyword, price of the domain, TLD (Top Level Domain) and many things. Find out a good name go to www.godaddy.com search for availability, register and get ready. Get a good hosting, map the name server with help of customer care and you are ready with your website. I will explain in details in a separate post.

3- Deciding Hosting-
If this is only for learning process, try for free hostings otherwise you can buy a good hosting from www.hostgator.com. In general VPN hosting is more reliable and fast compared to windows hosting. You can use www.1freehosting.com to start with. Though it has some uptime issues but you cant ask for more than that for free. I will explain in details in a separate post.

4- Creating website-

You can try wordpress for beginning or use blogspot initially. For learning matter, Wordpress has more options than Blogspot but similarly, Blogspot is more simple to operate than wordpress. Decide as per your convenience and get your website ready for content posting. Try creating post and saving it. Have a look at final preview before posting. Post on regular time like 10 AM or 6 PM based on your target audience. You can also try posting at different times and analyze the visibility at different times. In general a post at around 4 PM to 6 PM is effective.

5- Create Content-
Draft strong content, with Images and Videos if possible, and start posting on your blog. The content should be original, interesting, useful and nothing has to be copied until you quote the owner. You can decide to post immediately or save for future. Post on a regular interval and not randomly. Use all keywords related to your domain normally with reference. Don't fill keywords for the sake of SEO.

6- Register on Website Indexes-

Register on all Website Indexes mainly Google, Yahoo, Bing etc. Once your blog is indexed and you allow Search Engine Bot on your blog, It Will start indexing your blog and show in search results based on the content. You can also try Alexa ranking. There are also a few other small indexing sites where you can register and add you blog in their index list. The more traffic you have on your blog, better indexing you will rank and your blog's rank will increase gradually.

7- Use plugins-
Using plugins for various purposes like images, Social Media, Suggested content, Most Viewed content, Recommendation, Sharing, Discussion, Video, Chatting etc will enhance the website experience and help getting more organic traffic. All these plugins are available for free on internet and with basic knowledge of HTML, you can configure these in your website. You have to make sure that website doesn't look cluttered by the plugins. it should be neat and clean and similarly easy to browse.

8- Social Media Optimization (SMO)-
Register on All Social Media sites as below-

www.facebook.com
www.twitter.com
www.youtube.com
www.instagram.com
www.stumbleupon.com
www.pinterest.com
Plus.google.com and many more

Add the links of all these sites profile on your blog. and give options for sharing. This will help in Word of Mouth. You have to post each content of your site with an interactive language on these platforms. Make sure that same content is not posted on all platform simultaneously. You can also try sharing random information without blog link to avoid the boredom of same content. This will make you profile more interesting and attractive to visitors

9- Subscription-
Add a subscription option on your blog, so that people who like your content, can subscribe their email id and the auto mail should got to them every time you post on your blog. You can also plan for a weekly and monthly mailer, which can be a good idea for getting repeated visitors.

10- Online Forums-
Join online forums of related domain and start being an active member. Add you blog link in your signature and keep posting valuable contents there. This helps fetching visitors from other platform. Almost every forum has a separate subgroup to promote your website or content. Which can be utilized.

11- Ping you blog links-
You should ping your blog link daily once to search engines. There are many free pinging sites, which do the job. You can try www.pingomatic.com. Please note that you should not ping more than once in a day or Search engines like Google will start degrading your blog. This is one of the important steps to tell the search engines  that your blog has got updated and there is a new content available for indexing.

12 - Avoid Negative Keywords

You should avoid using keywords which are blocked on search engine. For example "Child P.orn" is a negative keyword and using this may harm your site's grade for search engine bot. Take special care for that.

13 - Have an Eye on statistics-
Once you have enough content posted (Approx 100+) you should start analyzing the trend of your visitors for what content they are liking by checking the comments, visits etc on the a post. This will help you in getting more posts in that regards that can help your visitors connected. Checking the statistics should be your basic routine and you should use the result derived from the statistics. Blogspot has this function prebuilt but in Wordpress, you need to use plugin.

14- Share for Share-
Once your fan following starts increasing, you can use this feature which will get you more visitors. This strategy will work only when you have sufficient number of followers to trade for. In S4S method, you can contact admin of a successful page of social media and ask him to share you content on his page and in return you will share his content on your page. This strategy depends on your personal relationship and number of followers you have.

Start today with the tips and you will see how fast search engines start valuing you blog. After 3 to 4 months of continuous follow up of above tips, your blog will start coming on google searches. Though traffic will increase gradually, you need not stop posting content thinking that you are not getting visitors. To keep continuity in your postings, you can draft and save content or schedule the post directly on blog.

Your comments and experiences are welcome.