SEO techniques for beginners, ordered by payoff

Learn these six in this order. The order is the point, because doing them backwards is how a first year gets spent on the technique with the smallest return.

1. Find out what your buyers actually type

Before anything technical, before any writing. Open your support inbox, your sales call notes and your site search log. Those three contain the phrasing real people use for your problem, which is almost never the phrasing in your marketing.

Write down thirty of those phrases. Search each one. Keep the ones where the results look like pages you could plausibly beat.

This costs a day and it determines the value of every other day you spend.

2. Give each phrase exactly one page

Write it down as a list: this phrase belongs to this URL. Two pages chasing one phrase split their own signals and neither wins.

When someone later asks to add a page, check the list first. This is the discipline that stops a site turning into forty pages about the same thing.

3. Make sure the page can be found

Three checks. The page returns a 200 and not a redirect chain. The page is not excluded in Search Console. The content appears in the HTML with JavaScript turned off.

Nothing else on this list matters until those three pass.

4. Write the page so it answers the phrase

Answer in the first two sentences. Use the words the searcher used, because those are the words they will scan for. Then be more specific than the pages currently ranking. That is easier than it sounds. A lot of ranking content is written by people who have never done the thing.

5. Link your own pages together

Find the phrases in your existing posts, link them to the page that owns each phrase, and use the phrase as the anchor text. This is free and fully under your control. On a site with any existing authority it moves positions faster than anything else on this list.

6. Earn references from outside

Last, because it is the slowest and because a link into a weak page is wasted. The ways that work involve doing something worth referencing. Original data, a tool people use, a genuinely better explanation of a hard thing.

Buying links from a marketplace is against Google’s guidelines, it is detectable and it puts the whole domain at risk. We do link building by earning the reference, because the alternative has a failure mode that costs more than the links were worth.

What to skip while you are learning

Keyword density. It has not been a useful concept for a long time and worrying about it produces stilted text.

Meta keywords. Ignored by every search engine that matters.

Submitting your site to hundreds of directories. This was an SEO technique in 2008 and is now a way to acquire a link profile that looks bought.

Publishing on a schedule with nothing to say. An empty post costs crawl budget and reader trust and returns nothing.

How to know if it is working

In Search Console, watch impressions on the specific pages you worked on. A page starting to appear for queries it never appeared for is the first real signal, and it shows up weeks before the traffic does.

If a page has no impressions at all after a month, it is either not indexed or not about anything people search for. Those are different problems and both are fixable.