SEO basics: a starter course, and the tools that go with it
SEO and digital marketing
SEO isn't actually difficult, but most people lack a solid foundation, which is why their website traffic stays flat for a long time or grows only a little.
So how do you do SEO well? This article organizes useful information step by step so you can carry out SEO methodically and save time and money on learning.
What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization.
Simply put, it means optimizing web pages on search engines (such as Google and Yahoo) using certain methods so they rank on the first page, helping you earn free search traffic over the long term.
What are the benefits of SEO?
Many studies show that more than 70% of search traffic goes to articles on the first page of search results. In other words, when 1,000 people search for a keyword, more than 700 of them click on websites on the first page.
And if you manage to rank first on Google's first page, you have an even greater competitive advantage—almost everyone will click on the first website.
More importantly, this search traffic flows into your website every day, and you can get it easily without spending anything on ads.
Share
Over the long term, this steady, continuous traffic can:
Raise brand awareness
Create more opportunities to sell products
Bring in more additional income (ads, sponsored content)
In addition, this search traffic is consistent and stable, which helps your website thrive for years and becomes the key to generating a steady stream of income.
On-page SEO and off-page SEO
Now that you understand what SEO is and its benefits, let's talk about the two parts that make up SEO: on-page SEO and off-page SEO.
On-page SEO, as the name suggests, refers to any optimization on your website's pages, including visual design, copywriting, and user experience.
Off-page SEO broadly refers to all optimization outside your website's pages, made up of external factors such as the number of links, link authority, valid links, website comments, and share counts.
In the next section, I'll bring these two parts together and walk you through how to do SEO in order.
These are the five main steps of SEO, and I'll explain each in detail below.
Keyword ranking research
First, you need to know what “keywords” your customers search for. A “keyword” is any word or phrase that might be entered into a search engine.
STEP 1 → Choose keywords related to your website's topic
What you need to do is use intuition and common sense to come up with keywords related to your website's topic. The benefit is that you can precisely target your audience and keep your keywords from straying too far off topic.
For example, if you're a travel company or a blogger, your audience is likely to search for keywords like these:
Taipei travel
New Taipei attractions
Taoyuan food
Taichung specialties
Tainan hotels
Kaohsiung accommodation
Next, write down all the keywords you come up with so you don't lose your ideas. Pay special attention that these keywords can be reasoned out with common sense—not illogical keywords that ordinary people would never search for.
STEP 2 → Check keyword competition and search volume
Once you've found your keywords, how do you make sure people actually search for them? And how do you judge your chances of ranking on the first page?
You need to use Google Keyword Planner. First, click “Sign in” in the top right to sign up for Google Ads. After filling in your details and signing up, choose “Pause campaign” to avoid being charged.
Pause the campaign first to avoid being charged
Then go back to the original screen and choose to go to Keyword Planner.
Next, click the arrow under “Discover new keywords.”
Enter a keyword—here I'll use “Taipei travel” as an example. In the chart below, you can see that the keyword's “Avg. monthly searches” and “Competition” are 1,000–10,000 and low, respectively.
Likewise, keywords are chosen based on difficulty, so any keyword with low or medium difficulty can be a good choice for a new website.
Below that there are also other keyword ideas. If you see keywords you need there, write them down too.
STEP 3 → Dig deeper for more keywords
Look up long-tail keywords
Every writer runs out of ideas sometimes, and that's when you need more keywords. What we can do is find “long-tail keywords”—as the name suggests, longer keywords.
For example, the keyword “Taipei travel” can be extended into narrower topics such as:
Taipei travel subsidies
Taipei travel map
Taipei travel recommendations
Taipei travel deals
These keywords are all longer than “Taipei travel” and more narrowly focused. Another benefit of targeting long-tail keywords is that it's easier to rank on Google: longer keywords and narrower topics mean fewer competitors and relatively lower ranking difficulty, and the articles are easier to write.
According to data from Ahrefs, 99% of long-tail keywords account for 40% of search volume.
Although this data is for English keywords, the same idea applies to Chinese keywords: there are plenty of low-difficulty keywords waiting for you, and you can still get decent traffic from them.
So how do you find more keywords?
The simplest way is to take a broad topic keyword and search it on Google. You'll then see many long-tail keywords suggested by Google—those are your source of inspiration.
Or check Google's related searches below the search results for the long-tail keywords you want. The recommended keywords are generally very similar.
STEP 4 → Find more keywords on related topics
If you feel you've found enough long-tail keywords, or you need more keyword ideas to settle your future writing direction, you can also use LSIGraph to generate more keywords on related topics.
Again using “Taipei travel” as an example, the list below shows keywords similar to Taipei travel, such as “Taipei events,” “Taipei dates,” and “Taipei walks,” helping you branch out into more topics.
STEP 5 → Find keywords for hot topics and trends
If you or your company's industry is seasonal—such as travel, skincare, or fashion—you can also use Google Trends to find hot topics and trends in specific months, helping you write the right article at the right time.
Again using “Taipei travel” as an example, you can see that searches for this keyword peak during the winter and summer school holidays. So you can plan to publish articles before the holidays, let Google rank them, and then ride the wave of traffic during the peak season.
You can also see hot topics related to Taipei travel, such as “Maokong,” “Ximen,” and “Le Méridien Taipei.” You can focus on describing these places or write a dedicated article about them.
STEP 6 → Organize your keyword list
Finally, compile all the keywords you've collected into a keyword list. Here's a Google Sheets template I've made that you can use.
Your organized keywords might look like the table below:
With the keywords you've collected, you can start scheduling the order and timing of your writing so you can write efficiently. The next section will show you how to write high-ranking articles.
To wrap up, here are the key points of keyword ranking research:
Keywords related to your website's topic
Keywords ordinary people search for
Keywords with low SEO difficulty/competition
Further reading: If you want more detailed keyword research steps, see this article: Google keyword rankings
Write high-ranking articles
On-page SEO broadly covers all optimization within your website, and the most important part is learning to write high-ranking articles in WordPress that bring search traffic to your website.
In the previous step, you learned why keywords matter and found suitable keywords using the criteria above.
Next, pick “one” keyword from your keyword list to write an article about.
Targeting just one keyword helps you stay focused on the article you want to write, and it also makes it easier for Google to identify your article's keyword.
Applying the idea from the first step, I again used Google Keyword Planner and chose “Taipei travel attractions,” which has “low competition,” as my keyword.
Some may ask: why not choose “Taipei travel” as the article's topic?
Remember the idea of “long-tail keywords” from the previous step? Long-tail keywords are easier to rank for than broader keywords like “Taipei travel.”
In addition, Google's algorithm is already very smart: if you target one keyword, you'll also rank for other similar keywords.
Let me prove it with the images below: you can see the same article appearing for the three different keywords above.
Finally, by common sense, “Taipei travel attractions” is a keyword ordinary people would search for, matching how people look for places to visit when traveling.
STEP 8 → Write an attractive title and description
Besides the body text, two parts of an article are seen by readers and search engines: the title and the description. They should follow these four basic principles:
The title & description must be attractive enough
The title & description must include the keyword
Title length of 25–30 Chinese characters
Description length of 60–80 Chinese characters
As long as your title follows the four principles above, the click-through rate is usually decent. But be sure to place the keyword somewhere prominent; otherwise, an overly long title may hide your keyword.
If you want to know whether your title length is appropriate, you can use a SERP tool to make sure important information isn't hidden because it's too long.
STEP 9 → Create well-organized subheadings
Good subheadings help you explain your article in more detail, make the content richer and more complete, and let you write in an organized way.
Not only does this make the article easier for readers to read, it also helps search engines categorize it, which helps improve the article's ranking.
STEP 10 → Use short permalinks
Simply put, a “permalink” gives every web page a URL that doesn't change.
Here are a few permalink principles that help your SEO:
Keep it as short as possible
Use English; otherwise it will turn into garbled characters
Content is the core of an article, but there's no fixed standard for what makes good content. There are, however, a few general principles you can follow to make your content easy to understand:
Don't put too many words in each paragraph; break it up
Use conversational language
Make good use of tables and lists
Avoid wordiness and filler
Avoid keyword stuffing
I want to stress the last point here: “avoid keyword stuffing.”
Although I said earlier that keywords are important, some people deliberately stuff keywords, mentioning them over and over in the body to try to make the article rank.
But today's advanced Google algorithm no longer ranks this kind of article, so don't deliberately stuff keywords when writing copy.
Just write with normal logic and a sincere tone. Even if the keyword appears only once in the body, the article can still rank.
STEP 12 → Add alt text to images
An article with both text and images is easier for people to understand, but it's a different story for Google's search engine.
Take the image below: even people might not be able to tell butter from cheese, let alone a search engine.
That's why you need to add alt text to the image so Google can recognize it.
So this is a cheese
STEP 13 → Add videos
Videos are a supplementary tool for articles that make it easier for readers to understand what we want to convey.
Videos can also increase the time readers spend on your website, lengthening a page's “average time on page,” which also helps the article rank.
Most YouTube videos currently allow embedding, and embedding a video can also be seen as helping its creator share their work.
But remember: the video only helps if its content matches the article's content.
STEP 14 → Add internal & external links
Internal links, as the name suggests, are links to other articles or pages within your website, such as my website's service introduction; external links are links to other websites, such as the Wikipedia page on SEO.
Internal links keep readers on our website longer and also send traffic to other articles; external links let readers learn more about information your website doesn't provide.
Naturally, the more internal and external links the better, but always put the reader's “reading experience” first—never insert links just for the sake of it.
Also avoid external links to competitors' websites—that is, websites on the first page of Google's search results—so you don't give your competitors a better chance to rank.
If your website is new, it's fine not to have many internal links. You can come back and add links once you have more articles and pages.
STEP 15 → Checklist for high-ranking articles
As I said at the very beginning, Google ranks articles based on many factors, but these 200-plus factors can be summed up in one sentence: write content sincerely and give readers enough value.
What does giving readers value mean? Summing up the points above, I've put together what a high-ranking article needs, and you can use this checklist when writing.
Improve website accessibility
STEP 16 → Speed up your website's loading time
Website loading speed is also a key ranking factor. The longer a page takes to load, the more likely visitors are to leave. It also hurts the reader experience and makes them less willing to come back next time.
That makes “website speed” a success factor you can't ignore.
So how do you improve your page speed? First, use the Google PageSpeed Insights tool: enter your URL to check your website's speed.
Treat the technical suggestions as a reference
But I think the technical suggestions this tool provides are just for reference. If you're not a technical professional, what I suggest we can do is resize every image uploaded to the page and compress its file size.
Resize and compress images
Here are a couple of tools to help you process your images: imageresizer and tinyjpg.
Both tools can help you reduce your image size. How small should they be? My suggestion is that each image should ideally be under 100KB. But if your images need high resolution to look good and improve the reader experience, you don't need to worry about the 100KB limit.
Install speed optimization plugins
Finally, you can install a few common speed optimization plugins, such as Breeze, which is free and very easy to set up.
Or WP-Optimize, which has free and paid versions, can help you optimize your database, and also compresses images.
STEP 17 → Make your website mobile-friendly
Almost everyone has a phone these days, and research shows that more than 60% of searches are made on mobile devices. So if your website isn't compatible with mobile devices, it's likely to hurt the reader experience.
Enter your URL and test it with this Mobile-Friendly Test tool!
STEP 18 → Install an SSL certificate
Simply put, SSL is a technology that keeps data transmission secure so it can't be stolen by others.
Installing an SSL certificate is the best way to get readers and Google to trust your website's security. This is especially important for websites that handle online shopping.
Once installed, a padlock icon appears in front of your website's URL, while websites without one show a “Not secure” label.
If your hosting provider doesn't have a built-in feature for installing SSL certificates, you can install the Really Simple SSL plugin to give your website an SSL certificate and make it more secure.
STEP 19 → Create a sitemap
A sitemap is mainly a map for Google. It lists all the pages and media on your website so search engines can better understand your content for indexing and ranking.
You can use the All in One SEO plugin or other free tools to generate a sitemap, then test and submit it according to Google's guidelines.
Increase website authority
Besides the three steps above that help your website rank better, you can also try a more advanced technique: increasing your website authority.
You may notice that some articles are clearly poorly written yet still rank on Google's first page. That's very likely because their website authority is higher.
Simply put, website authority is the score Google gives your website. The higher the score, the more Google trusts you and the easier it is for your website to rank. You can use a website authority checker to look up your own or others' website authority.
Besides minor factors such as your website's age and article engagement, the factor with the biggest impact on website authority is the “backlinks” mentioned above.
The more backlinks a website has, the more people are citing your articles, and the more Google trusts your website.
So how do you get more backlinks? Here are three ways:
Keep writing valuable articles
Keep writing good articles following the steps above. I think this is the most basic and practical method.
If your articles help other readers, they're likely to be reposted and shared elsewhere, and you'll earn many “effective” backlinks.
Backlinks gained through shortcuts won't give you higher website authority. On the contrary, Google may well judge them as illegitimate and give you a low score instead, which does more harm than good.
Write guest posts for high-authority websites
Simply put, a guest post is an article you write for another “high-authority website” that links back to your website, earning you a backlink.
But this method is more popular in the English-speaking market, and opportunities to write guest posts are harder to find in the Chinese-speaking market. Also, few high-authority websites are usually willing to let you write guest posts, unless the articles on your website earn enough of their trust that they ask you to write for them.
So back to the first point: writing many high-value articles is what matters most. If your website is still new, it's best to focus on “providing value to readers” first.
Exchange links with websites of similar authority
A link exchange is basically when two websites with similar authority and related topics exchange links so that both get backlinks—a “mutually beneficial” approach.
Specifically: link from your article A to their article A, then have their article B link to your article B. In short, just avoid having two articles link directly to each other.
Monitor SEO results
If you've properly completed the steps above, the next thing is to wait for your articles to rank.
Usually, the more competitive the keyword, the longer it takes to rank; the younger the website, the longer it takes as well. But this gets faster as you publish more articles and your website ages.
So ranking can take anywhere from 1–2 weeks to 3–6 months. Besides waiting, what we can do is keep focusing on producing high-quality content.
Track your rankings and click-through rate
Once your pages start ranking, you can use Google Webmaster Tools to track the average ranking of individual pages or of your website as a whole.
For these higher-ranking pages, you can:
Find out why they rank well
Estimate the average time it takes to rank
Add more high-quality content to help them rank even higher
You can also track the average click-through rate. As mentioned above, the key factor in click-through rate is the “article title,” so if you find an article's click-through rate is too low, you can tweak the title and test whether it effectively improves the click-through rate.
Track bounce rate and time on page
An article's bounce rate refers to whether readers go on to click other pages on your website after landing on it. This ties in with the “internal links” mentioned above: as long as they're placed well, the bounce rate usually won't be too high, unless the article's content isn't complete enough.
You can view this data with Google Analytics.
“Time on page” is an even more important metric than bounce rate. The longer readers stay on your page, the more complete and detailed your article is, and the more willing readers are to stay.
For pages with long time on page, you can likewise add more and richer content to keep readers there even longer.
Review your overall traffic
Whether or not you've heard of the famous 80/20 rule, you'll notice an interesting pattern in life: most results are determined by a few factors.
Traffic works the same way: most traffic comes from a few articles, and most of the articles that bring in traffic are of certain specific types.
You can use both Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics to review your overall traffic. What you need to do is:
Keep strengthening the articles that bring in traffic
Find out which types of articles are most popular
Plan to write more articles of those types
When you do this, you'll find your overall traffic growing over time.
Avoid black-hat SEO
By now, some of you may be thinking: “Why is SEO so complicated!!”
If you start looking online for some “special” SEO methods, I urge you to look carefully at whether they're black-hat SEO.
The core of SEO is presenting good content to readers, but black-hat SEO does the opposite: it uses deception, shortcuts, and even plagiarism to push rankings up quickly. In reality, not only is there no good content, there may even be scam links.
As Google's algorithm improves, even if these tactics achieve target rankings and traffic in the short term, the website is very likely to risk being removed by Google. Not only will articles that used to rank on Google lose their rankings, but a website you poured so much effort into could be destroyed overnight.
So if you're a blogger or business that wants stable traffic, avoid any black-hat SEO techniques, tools, or software. Instead, seek correct, professional techniques and strategies—sincerely sharing substantive, valuable articles is the way to go.
SEO tools roundup
Here are all the tools mentioned in this article:
Keyword research
Ubersuggest
Google Keyword Planner
LSIGraph
Google Trends
Ahrefs
Keyword list (provided by TimTech)
Image resizing
imageresizer
tinyjpg
Checking tools
Title and description length: SERP tool
Mobile devices: Mobile-Friendly Test
Website speed: Google PageSpeed Insights
Website authority: website authority checker
Website data: Google Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics
WordPress plugins
SSL certificate plugin: Really Simple SSL
Speed optimization plugins: Breeze, WP-Optimize
Sitemap submission: All in One SEO
Conclusion
Although search engine optimization (SEO) is complex, it's still the most effective way to attract sustainable traffic to your website. It saves you the money and time of buying traffic and ads, and over time your website will become more and more competitive.
I hope that after reading the five SEO steps above, you've learned how to get your website onto Google's first page and gain more traffic.
