Learning SEO basics may be relatively easy, but this doesn’t mean it is a simple subject matter. While there is a wealth of resources available, including webinars, blogs, videos, and comprehensive guides for beginners, the answer to ‘Is SEO hard to learn?’ is a nuanced one, and it depends really on how deep you want to get into the technical and adaptable nature of SEO. That said,  some SEO basics are extremely easy to get to grips with and can have a significantly positive impact on your rankings. With this in mind, we’ve also curated a quick guide to help you learn how to start SEO for beginners.

Types of Optimisation

There are four facets to SEO, often referred to as “pillars”.They are:

• On-Page SEO – This involves optimising web pages on your site by using relevant header and title tags, meta descriptions, relevant content and optimised images.
• Off-Page SEO – This involves building a website’s authority and reputation using methods such as social media marketing, link building, and garnering mentions online.
• Technical SEO – This involves making sure that your site is easier for the search engines to crawl and index, by ensuring it loads quickly, is mobile friendly and data is structured well. 
• Content marketing – This interlinks with on-page and off-page SEO, as it involves creating relevant, high quality, authoritative content that encourages the audience to visit your website, or share links to it. 

If you don’t have technical experience or writing experience, the best place to start is with on-page SEO. Below, we’ll take you through the first steps to optimising your website.

Step 1 – Keyword Research

The most simple way to get started with learning SEO would be to learn about keyword research, which identifies the words and phrases your target audience will be using to find the information they need. There are some free tools that can help you with this, including:

• Google Keyword Planner
• SEMrush
• Ahrefs

It’s important to know the difference between short-tail and long-tail keywords. While short-tail keywords are broad terms, and they have a high number of incidences (search volume) there is often lots of competition to rank for those keywords. Long-tail keywords are more specific phrases. While they have a lower search volume, they can often lead to a higher conversion rate, which means more people will act on the content they read.

Step 2  – On-Page SEO

Once you have your keywords identified, you can then enhance the pages that relate to those keywords to help them rank higher. There are various elements to your site that you might need to tweak, including:

• Title tags – These are the titles that appear in the search results. Title tags need to be descriptive, concise and must contain the identified keywords. 
• Meta descriptions – These are a short summary of the content on your page that will appear in the search results. This must be relevant and entice the browser to click on your link.
• Header Tags – Properly formatted content should be broken down into useful headers. It helps readers scan your content, and can assist search bots in crawling your page. 
• Alt text – Your images should be tagged with a description of what they relate to (typically, one of your keywords) as these help with the accessibility of your site and how search engines view it. 
• Links  – Links to other pages of your website where relevant can help a search bot understand how your site is structured. 

Both of these first steps should help you begin to optimise your website.

Keeping it up

While a raft of tools and courses have been developed to teach keyword research, on-page optimisation and even  link building and technical SEO, it’s vital to recognise that SEO is an ever-evolving beast and one that continues ot become more and more important. Keeping up with new developments, such as updates to the algorithm, new technologies, and innovative strategies, is crucial to ensuring your site ranks well, not just right now, but in the future too.

This can be overwhelming, especially if you have no prior knowledge of SEO, which is why many people prefer not to learn SEO themselves but hire those that do. A reputable agency will be on top of the research, innovations, and tried and tested methods to get results. While it’s useful to learn about SEO to the point where you know what to look for in a company that provides such services, outsourcing the more technical aspects will leave you free to focus on what you do best – running your business.