How To Do Website SEO Step by Step - DIY SEO steps in 2022

Learn to do SEO Fast in 16 steps

How you can fasten your learning. What it means or takes to learn SEO fast? It is quite simple actually. You need to include this approach into your learning. This you can even do if you are still at zero. This SEO learning approach should have an interest in the subject, willingness to look more deeply and observe, and most important is to practice as you learn.

This is how I would suggest you to make SEO learning into an advantage and best learning approach to become an expert in search engine optimization, sitting right in the comfort of your home.

Step 1. Buy a good online course

You should enrol for an online course. You learn SEO step-by-step and methodically. This is the best way to learn on your own.

It saves you a lot of time and gives you structured learning in search engine optimization. Learning from an online course is fast and more convenient.

Even better is to go for an expert training. You cannot get the learning from free resources which such an advanced course can give.

For this one of the best training coulbe be a DIY complete SEO course with strategies to rank in 2022.

Step 2. Learn about the Types of keywords

Informational keywords – These are keywords which we use to search for some generic information about anything.

For example: top destinations in India, best blogs on digital marketing, easiest recipes for lunch.

Transactional keywords – The keywords that represent the intention of buying something are transactional keywords. These keywords mostly would include words like buy, price, discount, offer, coupon, sale, delivery, shipping, etc.

Many of the local keywords are transactional keywords resulting in purchase of a product or service like gift shops in palam. Although some keywords like the one we mentioned and also including local keywords may not directly mean or represent a buy however, the established understanding behind such keywords is that ultimately the searcher will buy the product.

For example, buy wrist watches online, kitchen appliance on sale in dwarka, delhi.

Navigational keywords – These are the keywords used when we want to look for specific information to find or reach a particular company, brand or a website. Branded keywords come under this category.

For example: Nike shoes, Hyundai car launches

Local keywords – These keywords represent or are always associated with any location. Local businesses use these kind of keywords because they are always targeting location based audience.

For example: famous places in Delhi, apartments for rent in Navi Mumbai.

Company based keywords – The keywords or queries used to find some types of companies or organizations are company based keywords.

These can further be location based also.

For example: furniture making companies, digital marketing companies in Delhi.

Product or service based keywords – the keywords that indicate towards any particular type of product or service.

These usually are location based, because we normally prefer a local vendor when buying something unless we are buying online.

For example: kitchen appliances in lajpat nagar, restaurants in Navi Mumbai.

Branded keywords – The keyword example of digital watches from Timex earlier is also an example of a branded keywords. When we are specifically searching for a brand name or products and services offered by that brand or anything else related to some specific brand then all those keywords are branded keywords.

For example: Maruti dealers, Pantaloon shirts, make my trip holiday packages.

Once you have selected your industry or subject, try to find all the keywords that you can find on that subject. Here one SEO insight will help you in selecting which keywords to write for.

There are two more types of keywords which you will be using. These are head or main or head keywords, body keywords including long tail keywords and LSI.

Head keywords are used as the main keywords to represent a page. These are the shortest in length, and are typically 1-2 words. Head keywords have a high volumes but are very difficult to rank for.

Second are body keywords. These are little longer than head keywords and are 2-3 words long. These also have high volumes but lower than the head keywords. These are usually used in the body of the page, in the content. Body keywords are easier to rank than head keywords but still tough for any new website.

Step 3. Practice Keyword Research

For this you need to start with finding all probable words, terms and phrases that belong to your niche and are relevant and applicable for your business or your website.

You could start with listing all the terms that you think relate to your website and could represent what you are focusing on. You can also start to think from the point of view of your target audience, the searchers.

How would they find you on Google and what all could they search for. What terms could they use?

After finding these terms you will have to see which ones are actually relevant for your business. There would be many terms which are related to your niche but do not belong to your business. These terms would be the ones which are not relevant for your website SEO.

Select the keywords or terms that are relevant for your business and would help your website reach your target audience on search engines.

Step 4. Learn to use Long Tail Keywords

Long tail keywords are longer keywords and basically are key phrases with more words in them. Typically keywords or key phrases with 3-4 or more words are long tail keywords.

According to studies these long tail keywords account for 70% and even more of all the web searches that are performed.

You have a better chance of ranking on top with long tail keywords. And when you want to learn SEO fast, long tails are best to target. With LTs you will rank faster and therefore learn more and learn SEO and rankings faster.

LSIs have much lesser traffic volume and are also much easier to rank compared to the other two types of keywords.

Learn to find your Long Tail & other Keywords

What you should do to start your keyword research is build a group or set of keywords which you want to start with on your practice site. Find all or maximum keywords under each of the three types. Start using the ones which little less difficult to rank.

To find your keywords use Google search and type in the words that come to your mind on your topics. Refine your keywords with Google suggestions and auto complete. Look at the competing websites and take keywords from there. Use Google planner or adwords to expand your keywords with many relative and long tail keywords.

Step 5. Start writing content

You need to create or learn to create content for a website. It could be blogs or content about companies and products. You can start with your website for practice.

Start writing content focusing on your keywords. Take one keyword at a time and write blog or pages on that.

Content plays a very important role in ranking. Its importance in search visibility and rankings has been increasing continuously.

If you can develop a practice and skill of writing user friendly and keyword specific content then it will help in your search engine optimization a great deal. Write content in natural language without over focusing on your keywords. Your language needs to be simple eight grade English.

Step 6. On Page SEO part 1: Use Keywords

Now you have your list of keywords for each page. You know which topic your pages would be and which are the keywords that each of that page will be targeting.

But, how do you make sure that the content of each page points correctly and in the best way to that keyword? How do you properly target your keywords for each page? And how do you make sure that the right keyword or keywords are indexed for each page and how to make sure that you are setting them up rightly for rankings?

That is where on page SEO comes.

On page optimization or on page SEO is that part where you use all your targeted keywords at the right places. This also means improving your content to better fit and represent your keywords.

With on page optimization adn by using keywords at places where they should be you tell Google and other search engines what your content is talking about. The techniques tell Google which keywords you are focusing on, targeting and talking about. And so the search engines index these keywords and thereby with your further SEO efforts those keywords start to improve their rankings.

On page actions and activities help in establishing the relevance of a keyword on a web page and improve its ranking on search engine pages so that it is visible to more and more of our targeted audience and also gets more clicks and visits by them.

There are few important places where you can and should use your keywords. The reason for this is that this gives your user a very idea about what the page is about. They can instantly and easily understand what they should expect to read or find on the page.

These are the Title, the URL and the H1 (this is the main header tag on a page).

How do you use your keywords in these three places? By looking at the purposes each of these serve.

URL is the name of the page. The name has to be relevant.

Title is what tells searchers what the page is going to talk about and what all it is about. It introduces a searcher to the topic.

H1 is the main heading of your page. It is like a second Title but it is on the main page and in the content.

Looking at the three purposes you should use your keywords accordingly.

Apart from the three important places there other places too where you can use your keywords. Keywords are also used in content (avoiding over use or stuffing of any keyword).

How to learn on page better and practice it?

Search for your targeted keywords on Google or any other search engine. You will see 10 or 9 results you see on the first page. The first thing to learn is that only the most relevant and optimized pages appear on the first page of search engines.

Second thing to note is that each result is a web page from a SEO optimized website. Each result has 3 components:

So, the second most important thing you learn is that you can attract a search visitor only through these 3 KEY on page techniques.

Now it is upto you only how you use these three things. Look at each of the results and see what keywords have they used in each of the three places.

Key learnings:

How each page is using these differently. What keyword variations or forms are they using. How have they structured their Titles and URLs using the keywords. How many keyword variations or forms did you find from these results.

Step 7. On Page SEO part 1: Improve other on Page factors

There are many other factors and techniques which on page SEO covers and can be used to improve the content, user experience and especially to help the targeted keywords rank.

We talked about H1 and that you need to use your keyword in this primary header tag. However there are five more header tags which can be used on the page and are can be optimized as part of on page SEO.

You can (or should) use H1 only once on any page and in the content.

So, if you want to tell Google that you are focusing on few keywords then what do you do?

You make use of these other five header tags which are H2, H3, H4, H5 and H6.

H2 is the one that is used most by SEOs and can be used few times in the page.

After this there are images and other media files which we use in the content. These are also optimized for each page. There are two ways of optimization of images and media files here. And these two optimization types help improve user experience and help in keywords targeting and ranking.

Optimize the image itself

Optimizing the image means to use properly sized image and other media files like videos. The size of an image matters. Too large or too small images do not give best user experience and are not good in terms of designing. Too large images also impact the speed of the overall website which is not good for its SEO.

Optimize how you use images in content

Optimizing the use of images in content is another thing. When an image is used in content then search engines do not read and understand the images. Users can see the images but you need to make Google understand the use of that image in any particular section of content.

For this the HTML codes used for images have an option of describing briefly what the image is about. This is used in the tag called as alt tag. It is a short form of alternate text tag.

We can use a short sentence about the image in this tag. This tells Google and other search engines that this image talks about and is related to this topic or subject.

It is also advised to use your keywords within these tags for each particular image. The alt tag is another part of on page SEO optimization or image optimization.

Use your keywords in the content

It is not just the 3 meta tags or header tags where you use your keywords. You can and should use your keywords in the content too. But you should use the keywords in a natural way. This means use the keywords only when it is necessary to use these in the section of content to explain properly what you are saying there.

Here you should make a note of one important and fundamental SEO concept.

What is Keyword Stuffing

Keyword stuffing or keyword spamming is when you try to repeat your keywords as many times as you want.

Example to practically understand what is Keyword spamming or stuffing

For example, read this paragraph or line.

This page is about SEO, and here we provide SEO services. Our services are about SEO only and we sell SEO services for your website. We do SEO to make your website rank and we are the best in SEO and provide the best SEO services in India.

This is a 48 word paragraph where SEO is used 7 times.

Now there is a term which is an optimization evaluation and also one of the SEO factors.

That term is keyword density. With this a search engine tries to identify keyword spamming and tries to avoid content which is not natural or user friendly.

Although, the relevance of this in 2022 is debatable, however, it is a clear sign of a content that is not natural or of good quality.

There is an agreed evaluation mark to density. Experts agree upon a 1% going up to anywhere between 3% or a maximum of 5%. What this means that in a content with 100 words the exact keyword should be used 1 to 5 times.

In our example, that percentage is close to 15%. Way to high. And you can also notice by reading it that it does not sound very friendly or of good quality.

So, avoid keyword stuffing, if not for the search engines or ranking, at least for your users.

Step 8. Do necessary Technical SEO of your website

Technical SEO is about how well you prepare your website to be accessed by Google and other search engines. This involves doing various technical things on the website so that your site becomes more search friendly.

This also means doing tasks or taking steps to make it easier for your users to access and read. Technical SEO is also a one-time step but it is more of an ongoing process and a very important one. You are required to check and remove the technical errors as they come.

Again all the technical SEO steps are done so that your site remains indexed, is visible on search engines and can be easily accessed by searchers from the search engines when they click on your SERP position.

It also involves steps to ensure that once your users have clicked your website and are ready to be on your page they have a good experience and can access your website easily.

Technical SEO is also called on site SEO as the techniques used here apply more to the whole website than individual pages.

Submitting your website to Google is the first and the most important technical SEO step. This involves creating a sitemap. It is an xml file and is named as sitemap.xml.

There are many free sitemap generator websites and tools. And you can also manually create your own sitemap (and this is advised). Our complete SEO course trains you thoroughly on this and many more technical SEO steps.

Ensuring your website and its pages load fast is another technical optimization step. This means improving website speed and removing or correcting all the errors which make your site slow.

There are many more technical SEO techniques which you learn in SEO. Few of these are:

Step 9. Mobile SEO

Mobile SEO means optimizing your website for the mobile viewing. People are now increasingly using mobiles to search in Google and other search engines. Doing mobile SEO means preparing your website for those searchers and users. It means making sure that your website designing is suitable for mobile viewing and your website appears as perfect as possible.

So, the designing plays a very important role. Your content and its designing for mobile viewing should be simple and clean. On mobiles we do not have too much width. Think from the size of a smartphone. All the content will be scrolled down, one after another.

Why you need Mobile SEO

You need to do Mobile SEO for two reasons. One is because people are now using mobiles more and more these days. And this trend of using mobiles is ever increasing.

Two, Google has now shifted to Mobile First Indexing. If you go URL inspect and paste any of your indexed URLs then you can see a line saying Crawled as: Googlebot Smartphones.

Three, almost every type of user for every type of queries use mobile for search. However, local searches are mostly or more done by using mobiles.

How to optimize website for Mobiles

The first thing is that you need to optimize your website for various screens. This is best done by having a responsive website design and layout. It is very simple to do and is done in two steps. These are two techniques to make your website fully responsive.

Use this Google tool, to check mobile friendliness of websites. You can check and see the parameters used for mobile friendliness. Also you can open any website and then press 'Control + Shift + i' to check any page for its mobile versions.

Step 10. Improve site speed

Website speed means how fast or slow a website or its pages load in the browser when someone clicks on your page link. The website speed basically depends upon the loading speed of its pages.

Improving website speed is one of the most important SEO factor and is a technical optimization technique.

Loading speed of each page is a very critical factor for ranking and user experience. Even if for a moment we leave ranking factor away, if your page takes ages to load then users will go away upfront. Every additional second of page load time bounces of significant users off your site. Keep your site’s load time under 3 seconds, and even less preferably. Images are one of the heaviest part of a web page.

First of all check your site speed through these following websites:

Use this Google speed checking tool to check what are various speed issues for any website. You will see a score for every website, both for desktop and mobile versions, and how good or bad is that score.

You can also use the following two more tools for this.

https://tools.pingdom.com/

https://gtmetrix.com/

Step 11. Open Google Accounts

When you start doing SEO you will be needing these two Google accounts, for monitoring your search and rankings progress and do lot more. The two accounts are Google Search Console or GSC and Google Analytics (GA). Google Search Console was known as Google Webmaster Tools or GWT till 2018.

For Google Search Console (GSC) go here

google search console

For Google Analytics (GA) account go here

google analytics

Step 12. Submit your site to Google

You need to submit your new website to Google so that it can crawl and index all your new pages. You need to submit a sitemap and also a robots file to Google.

Submit sitemap to Google

A sitemap is an online document which you upload on your server as a unique webpage which lists out all the pages of your website. It is an XML, and not HTML, page. It is called XML sitemap. It is written in plain text with no linking or hypertext.

You can create a sitemap in any HTML editor and it is named as sitemap.xml. This is how it looks like

You need to write the following codes for every web page to prepare your sitemap manually.

<url> to start each page section

<loc> represents your page URL

<lastmod> has the date when you last or latest modified your page or date of its creation whichever is latest

<changefreq> How frequently you change page, monthly, weekly, yearly

</url> to end each page section

Submit robots file to Google

This is the first thing you should submit. This tells Google and other search engines that they are welcome to visit and crawl your website. You can also tell the spiders and bots of all search engines if you do not want them to crawl your site or certain pages in it.

Step 13. Do Off Page SEO and link building

Off page SEO is all what we do in search engine optimization which is not directly or anyway done on our website or content. Building links is the most important part of off page.

These are called the backlinks and are one of the most important factors which make your website rank in search engines.

Backlinks give your website authority and visibility on the Internet. This authority helps your website rank higher for the targeted keywords.

What you do here is follow various link building techniques or practices. These techniques are ways to create or get backlinks from other websites. These techniques are also various approaches of building links.

Listing your business or website on business listing sites, creating profiles on various social media and profiling websites, writing articles on other websites, are all few popular and basic techniques of linkbuilding.

What you need to do here step by step: The Off Page SEO techniques.

Step 14. Track your performance

Once you start doing these and give few months to your site, you will see your website and its pages ranking for many keywords. These would include your targeted keywords, but will also have some new keywords which would be the variations of your targeted keywords, synonyms and few more related ones.

Use GA and GSC accounts to track new backlinks you are getting, keywords and queries for which you are gaining search impressions and rankings.

Step 15. Learn to use SEO Tools

SEO Tools play important role. The first and few of the most important tools are Google Search Console (GSC) and Google Analytics (GA) tools.

Then there are many free, fermium and paid tools. These SEO tools make your day to day tasks easier. They also help in specific tasks from keyword research to optimization, content & linkbuilding and even for social media.

But yes, you do not always need these tools. And GSC and GA tools can give you lot many metrics and parameters and data points to track and monitor your SEO progress.

Here are two resources where you can find detailed references for many such SEO tools.

Step 16. SEO in ongoing & a process

SEO is never finished even when you learn, do and complete all the above steps. As you keep track you might have to do some changes across and using all the important techniques from keywords to on page to content and even technical and link building. This is done to further improve your SEO and progress.