If I were to go back to college, I would stop focusing to get the best grades and start focusing on improving my digital marketing skills.
In today’s marketplace, most businesses are dependent on online promotion. Search engines like Google, Yahoo, or Bing are critical sources of traffic (potential customers) that webmasters, marketers, and entrepreneurs are constantly working on.
SEO stands for search engine optimization. This is one of the most popular techniques that businesses leverage to acquire organic prospects. As a student, learning SEO will grant you amazing professional opportunities everywhere you go.
In today’s article, I’ll present several insightful SEO tips and tricks that will help students of all ages understand the basics of SEO. This is a very broad topic. If you want to master search engine optimization and make a professional career out of it, make sure you begin studying it consistently! I would give all the written work to the service Studyсrumb.com
Learn to Research Keywords
Keyword research is the well-known process of figuring out the keywords and key phrases that users type into the search boxes. Before you start optimizing a website or a piece of content for SEO, you’ll need to figure out what users you’ll target.
When someone writes “how to gain self-esteem”, it’s quite clear that this person requires help in attaining more confidence, self-esteem, and happiness.
When you’re researching keywords, you’re basically figuring out whether a certain keyword (or key phrase) has enough “value”. This value is defined by the popularity of the keyword (how many times it is searched for /per month) but also by the number of competitors that are targeting the very same keyword.
Learning to research keywords effectively takes time and patience, but it is definitely approachable to any student who wants to learn SEO. My advice for you is to study keyword research guides while leveraging keyword research tools.
Watch Your Competitors
Studying your competitors’ SEO performance is a great way to learn a lot of tips and tricks. Tools like SEMRush will help you spy on your competition, allowing you to observe their backlinking strategies and the keywords they use to rank their pages. You should also take advantage of Google Keyword Planner, this being one of the most popular SEO tools that also comes for free.
Optimize Your Content for SEO
Writing for SEO is a bit different than the writing you’re probably used to. When you write for the search engines, you need to keep into consideration their algorithms and guidelines. For example, keywords, semantic keywords, internal links, and meta descriptions are some of the elements you’ll need to include in a piece of SEO content.
Nowadays, Google prefers longer content that presents in-depth topics. For that reason, you’ll want to keep your content’s quality as high as possible.
If you’re not a great writer, I’d advise you get reliable help with assignment and allow professionals to take care of the content development process. Investing in outsourcing is often better than doing a mediocre job.
Write Both for Users and for the Search Engines
If you’ll explore more educational resources that explain the basics of SEO, you’ll often find a piece of advice that sounds like this: “Write for humans first, search engines second”.
Here is the translation. Google wants webmasters to produce content that is relevant to users. When an article is over-optimized (too many keywords, irrelevant links, etc.), users will realize that they’re reading a post that is not meant for them. That will make them leave the website and never return.
Guess what. That is a terrible result for the webmaster because he is losing the people that he’s ultimately trying to bring to his site (by performing SEO practices).
The solution is to create a balance between the two aspects. Speak directly to the user, but keep into consideration your keywords and links.
Learn the Basics of On-Page Optimization
There are several “technical” aspects of SEO that you need to acknowledge before starting out. These are often called “on-page optimization” checklists because their role is to help Google and the rest of the search engines discover and index your content. Here are some of the most important on-page SEO elements you need to optimize:
- The page titles
- Meta descriptions (the short text that appears under the headline of your posts)
- Header tags (H1, H2, H3 – these are the subheadings within your content)
- The URL
What you’ll basically need to do is include all the keywords that you’re targeting while also making sure that your titles and descriptions are interesting and valuable. They must arouse curiosity and invoke emotions. Nevertheless, they must also be descriptive, concise, and truly relevant to your target audience.
Takeaways
Search engines will always be an important aspect of the business environment. People are always going to search for information online, and they’ll do so by adding keywords and key phrases into the search engines. If you’re a student that’s passionate about the online promotion environment, start practicing SEO as soon as possible. It takes time, patience, and commitment, but in the end, it will be truly worth it to become SEO Expert!
Image Credit PIC: https://thetipsuk.com/7-seo-tips-for-new-students/
Author BIO: Joshua Robinson is a content developer and an SEO practitioner who works independently as a freelancer. While he was in college, he used to write essay assignments for students, managing to make the ends meet. Nowadays, he’s interested in branding, content marketing, and search engine optimization practices.