Step by Step SEO Tutorial for Beginners

Here we have a full and easy to follow step by step seo tutorial for beginners. Follow this strategy to get your website ranking number one for your selected keyword on all major search engines.

This guide will help you do search engine optimization yourself without spending a single dime to rank your website top.

The guide is a complete seo run down from start to finish including keyword research, content writing, backlink indexing and backlink building and tracking.

If you already have parts of this process complete simply skip to the section you need help with.

It’s a good idea to read through each section so that you do not miss anything important, each and every step must be applied to rank top.

If you miss anything this will be the reason you are not ranking top.

Keep in mind that keyword research is the most important step, getting this wrong will lead to all sorts of headaches in the future.

So, with that being out there you need to really knuckle down and spend a lot of time researching your desired keywords.

This step by step guide includes:

• Keyword/Niche Research
• Content Writing/Optimization
• Backlink Building
• Rank Tracking

This works for any keyword out there, including local search terms.

Step by Step SEO Tutorial for Beginners

Because this guide is for beginners I am going to use free tools only.

I want everything to be accessible to you right now without having to spend any money.

Keyword/Niche Research

This will make or break your efforts, take this part very seriously.

If you are struggling then you can let us deal with this part for you, we have a keyword research service in our store.

The best free keyword research tool is KWFinder.com.

Go ahead and sign up for a free account, this way you will get more free daily searches.

For this tutorial we are going to be looking to set up a new website, let’s say it is going to be an Amazon affiliate site.

We are looking for:

• Low SEO Competition Score
• Highest Possible Search Volume

Enter a seed search term and hit the search button.

As you can see I have found a keyword with a very low seo competition score.

The next step is to hit the “Analyze SERP” button (circled red).

This will give us a whole load of useful information about the top ranking websites.

The software reveals the following about all the top 10 ranking sites for the selected keyword:

1. Domain Authority and Page Authority
2. Citation Flow and Trust Flow
3. Number of Facebook Shares
4. Alexa Rank
5. Number of External Backlinks (provided by Majestic)
6. Number of Referring Domains (number of different sites that link to the site)
7. Number of IPs (how many different IPs link to the site)

Do not let these metrics confuse you.

The process is very simple.

All we are interested in is the following:

1. How many sites have exact keyword in TITLE and DESCRIPTION TAG
2. How many sites have exact keyword in URL
3. Number of backlinks from different IPs

Which is this area here:

Let’s look at the stats for my selected keyword.

1. At the time of writing not one of the top 10 ranking sites have the exact search term “compare razor electric scooters” in the META data.
2. Not one of the top 10 sites have the exact keyword in the URL.
3. Most of the sites in the top 10 have just one backlink from one IP.

You can also look at the quality of the content on the sites, however this is not a problem, because no matter how long it is or good it is yours is going to be better.

That’s how you find an easy to rank for low seo competition keyword.

If you write some well optimized content around the keyword (which I will show you how to do later) and add the exact keyword into the META data and URL you are guaranteed to rank on the first page even without backlinks.

If you go ahead and get the few backlinks in place (which I will show you how to do this later) you are guaranteed to rank number one in the search results pages for this search term.

There is one last thing I need to mention before you go ahead with a keyword/niche project.

You need to know the value of your keyword, follow the link to the post I have already done on this.

There is a simple calculation you can do to estimate the value of your keyword.

There is no point going after a keyword that is only going to bring in $10 a month, unless that is what you are looking for.

Just 10 posts focused around easy keyword like the one above can make you $100 a month on complete autopilot.

The next step is to scale it up to $1000 a month.

It can be done, just be sure to get yourself an easy keyword like the one above and you will be making money fast.

These blog posts do not take a long time to complete, you can do one a day, the post will make you money over and over again.

Content Writing/Optimization

Before I write any content I like to take a look at the content on the top ranking site for my selected keyword.

The site is top for a reason, so let’s find out why.

There is a free tool to analyze your competitors content, it is called WebSite Auditor.

You can also use the tool to analyze your own content when complete, this will ensure it is 100% optimized for a top ranking for your selected keyword.

Drop your competitors URL into the software and hit the next button.

I always go with the default crawler settings as above, then hit the finish button.

Let the software do it’s work, usually take 2 to 3 minutes to analyze the website.

In this time you can do a manual review of the top ranking sites content.

The top site for my selected keyword has thin content, very few images, does not have an informative video and is littered with Amazon affiliate links.

It is clear that some half decent content will knock the site off the top spot.

Okay, when WebSite Auditor has finished you will see this.

We now know the content is “1,023” words in length and it has one external backlink (which we already know).

I know that 2000 words well optimized content will rank top guaranteed for this search phrase.

The next step is to use Website Auditor to discover the words/phrases we should be using in our content to get it ranking top.

Click on “Content Analysis” and select the URL that is ranking top for the search term and hit the next button.

Now enter the keyword and hit the finish button.

The software will take a few minutes to analyze the domain.

Next click on the “TF-IDF” tab (circled red).

This will give us a list of multi-word keyword phrases the top sites are using within their content, and guess what??? You are going to do the same.

The software tells us the search phrases that the search engines want us to use within our content.

You can see how often each search term is used within the content, the number of sites ranking in the top 10 that use that search term within their content and even the keyword count on the top ranking sites page.

This is very useful information.

Not only are you going to create highly optimized content around that search term, you are also going to use the multi-word keywords within your content that the big search engines are looking for.

This combined with well written META TAGS will 100% guarantee you a number one ranking.

Okay, so now you need to ensure your content is fully optimized for a number one rank.

To do this you need to do the following:

1. Have exact keyword at top – first paragraph (in bold), in the middle and at the bottom – last paragraph (in italic) of your content.
2. Ensure you have the exact keyword in one image ALT TAG. An image ALT is the text that is displayed on screen if the image does not load. To see how to add an ALT TAG to your image go here.
3. Have the exact keyword in the URL extension.
4. Have the exact keyword in the META data – TITLE AND DESCRIPTION TAG. For details on how to do this click here.
5. Have the exact keyword in the H1 TAG and the H2 TAG. For details on how to do this go here.

That’s it, you are fully optimized and ready to rank top.

To check that everything is correct simply enter your URL into WebSite Auditor.

Hit the “Page Audit” tab (circled red).

This will let you know instantly if your content is fully optimized for a top ranking.

You will be able to check:

• Keywords in TITLE TAG
• TITLE TAG length
• Keyword in DESCRIPTION TAG
• DESCRIPTION TAG length
• Keywords in body count
• Total word count
• Keyword in H1
• Keyword in H2
• Keyword in bold font
• Keyword in italic font
• Keyword in IMAGE ALT

The software will check to make sure if your page has been optimized correctly as I have suggested above.

The next step is to let the search engines know you have new content available.

To do this you need to tell the search engines your content exists.

How To Index Your New Content

You must make sure that you have submitted your sitemap to Google and Bing search console/webmaster accounts.

To learn how to add your sitemap to all major search engines including Google, Bing, Yahoo and Yandex go here.

You only need to do this once, not every time you write new content.

Okay, the next step to ensure your new content is found and indexed is to share it on all social media platforms, Google Plus being the most important for obvious reasons.

I always drop a link to my new content from:

• Google Plus
• Facebook
• Twitter
• Reddit

This always get’s my new content crawled and indexed within 24 hours guaranteed.

Now that you have an easy keyword, killer content (which is indexed) it is time to get those all important backlinks which will guarantee you a number one ranking.

Backlink Building

This step is very important, in most cases without these backlinks in place you will never rank top.

My step by step seo tutorial for beginners backlink strategy is very easy to follow and works for any site out there.

Do not skim over this section, you must apply everything as I suggest or you could well face problems further down the line.

To get started go and do at least one internal link if you can. Take a look at the other pages on your site and contextually link to your new post (if you don’t have any other pages miss this step until you have some). If that post is indexed it will also help index your new content.

To know how to do internal links take a look at this guide. Make sure you use exact match anchor text for your internal links, if you are doing more than one internal link use long tail exact match anchors too. (A long tail exact match anchor has your keyword in the anchor plus more words. So if my keyword is “compare razor electric scooters” a long tail exact match anchor would be “compare razor electric scooters right here”.

Now you have some internal links done it is time to get some external backlinks in place.

The very first step in any external link building campaign is to take a look at your competitors backlinks.

You can do this using a free piece of software called SEO SpyGlass.

You need to enter all top ten ranking sites for your keyword into the software and take note of all backlinks.

This is how it works:

Enter the full URL of your competitor and hit the finish button.

Now in some cases you will be able to go ahead and get some of the same backlinks, they maybe from web 2.0 sites or even from free directories.

It is important here to take note of the anchor text used.

Where it says [Image] “then keyword” this is the ALT TAG text used in the image, the site is getting a backlink from the image.

It is key to note what kind of backlinks they are getting, it will be different in every single seo campaign.

In this case the top ranking sites have a lot of image backlinks, so I would make this a big part of my backlink strategy for this keyword.

Take a look at the quality of the sites that backlink to your competitors, you are going to get the same.

In this case a simple web 2.0 link wheel will rank the site top for my selected keyword in this tutorial.

You can get most backlinks for free if you choose to do them yourself.

Be sure to use the correct anchor text ratio, if you need to know what I mean by anchor text ratio take a look here.

For low seo competition keywords you will rank number one using web 2.0 backlinks only.

For any new page it is good to start with niche blog comment backlinks, you can purchase these from our store or do them yourself as shown below.

To get niche blog comment backlinks go to your favourite search engine.

Enter your “exact keyword” followed by “leave a comment” as shown above.

Work your way through the sites leaving blog comments including a backlink to your website.

Make sure you leave a decent comment that will add some kind of value to the post, this will ensure it gets approved and does not remain in moderation forever.

Keep in mind that your “Name” will be the anchor text for your backlink.

When you are ready simply hit the “post comment” button.

For easy keywords you can do 15 of these per week until you hit the number one spot.

You do 15 per week because many will not get approved.

For easy keywords like the one shown here in this tutorial just a few need to be approved and the site will hit the top.

Because we know the sites are indexed where we are getting the blog comment backlinks from it will also ensure our new content gets found and indexed in the SERPs.

These backlinks are great because you do not have to index them, they are already indexed and ready to rank your site up.

There is a free piece of software that will help you get backlinks for your site called Link Assistant, to get niche blog comment backlinks using this software follow this guide.

If you go ahead and get web 2 backlinks you can use tier 2 backlinks to index your tier 1 links, the tier 2 links should be from sites that are already indexed.

To find out more about tiered link building follow the link.

Of course you can let us do all this for you and purchase one of our monthly seo packages, we will get your website ranked number 1 for you.

This strategy works for any keyword out there, even local search terms.

Be sure to get the right backlinks in place by looking at what backlinks your competitors have. This will guarantee you get a top ranking.

If you take one thing away from this tutorial it is that you understand how important keyword research is for the success of any project.

Your time is important, taking your time on keyword research will help you succeed quickly further down the seo road map.

Rank Tracking

The final part is to keep track of your seo efforts.

There is a free piece of software you can use to track your ranking, this is called Rank Tracker.

Enter your full URL into the software and hit the next button.

You do not need to connect any Google accounts, ignore this and hit the next button.

Enter the keyword you want to track rankings for and hit the next button.

Select the search engines you want to track your keyword ranking on. Click the “Add More Search Engines” tab (circled red) to add the search engine for your location.

Then hit the finish button to get your current keyword ranking.

If you are not ranked number one yet you can use the same software to understand why you are not quite there yet.

To get this information do the following.

First click the “Keyword Difficulty” tab (circled red).

Then click the “Arrows” tab (circled red).

This will get you a whole load of ranking stats for the top ranking sites for your selected keyword.

You can compare how your site looks against your competitors.

This will give you a clear idea of how many backlinks you require to rank top.

If you have any questions about my step by step seo tutorial for beginners leave a comment below or drop me an email any time.