SEO terms for beginners can be overwhelming, especially if you need to figure out where and how to get started on the topic. That said, your website’s search engine optimization deserves special attention.
With the proper SEO basics, you will achieve the desired goals with your blog posts, even if you write your fingers to the bone. That’s because of Google’s mission to provide only the best content to its users.
Here you can learn which five essential ranking factors you should keep in mind as an SEO beginner to convince both the Google algorithm and your readers and make it to the front row with your texts.
SEO Terms For Beginners: Why?
New to SEO? Many beauty experts need help with the rather technical topic of search engine optimization and prefer to put it on the back burner. Then you might be asking yourself why SEO terms for beginners should be prominent on your to-do list.
Customers need to know that you and your unique offer exist for them to buy your products or services. And that’s where SEO comes in. If you avoid this mistake and tackle the SEO basics immediately, you’ll save yourself a lot of frustration.
Google is still the most extensive traffic supplier for the overwhelming majority of all websites, and that includes the beauty industry. And since hardly anyone clicks on the second page, a top ranking is mandatory in the battle for your target audience’s attention.
So is the Google algorithm the ultimate success for your online presence? No, because even SEO terms for beginners is primarily about optimizing your content for your users. If your target group feels comfortable with you, stays on your website for a long time, and eagerly shares your content, this is also a clear quality signal for Google. And quality gets you a top position in the ranking.
Featured Snippets: Google’s Position 0
When you think of a top ranking, do you automatically think of position one on Google? Currently, so-called Featured Snippets are the accolade for your SEO efforts: Google’s Position 0.
Featured snippets are a unique format that answers a specific search query directly and concisely in the search engine result pages (SERPs). The link to the website is below.
The exciting thing is that this snippet occupies the top organic position – directly below the possible display block – and immediately catches the user’s eye due to its size.
Example of a featured snippet for the keyword “press release“.
How exactly you get one of the coveted Featured Snippets is, as often with Google, not known. However, you have a good chance if your content is geared towards answering questions or problems of your target group shortly and crisply.
This doesn’t necessarily have to be a block of plain text: Among the Featured Snippets, you can also find bulleted lists, best-of lists, or recipes.
SEO Tips For Beginners: Which Ranking Factors Are Important?
According to Google, there are about 200 ranking factors: criteria that influence which position your website appears in the search results. Of course, in the long run, you should implement as many of them as possible if you want to increase the reach of your website.
But not all ranking factors are equally relevant for SEO beginners. Our SEO tutorial for beginners presents the five most important ones that make a difference.
#1. The Technical Framework
Yes, SEO is mostly about optimizing your content. Still, you can’t avoid dealing with a few technical topics initially. For this purpose, free SEO plugins like Yoast SEO are worth their weight in gold for beginners. Here you can set everything necessary with a few clicks.
Use Speaking, As Short As Possible URLs
SEO terms for beginners starts with the domain name. Visitors can classify your website more quickly if the title reveals your business. A primary keyword in the domain is also lovely to have, but not an all-important ranking factor.
More critical is organizing the links to your subpages: everything that happens after the .de or .com. You should keep these URLs as short as possible and give them meaningful names. The user must know at first glance what to expect on this page. Add a maximum of 2 main categories to the URL. Everything else is already too confusing.
Example
Not like this: https://thecontently.com/services/content/seo/our-service/
Better: https://thecontently.com/our-service/
Optimize Your Website For Mobile Views
Mobile first is one of the essential SEO tips for beginners. This is because many search queries nowadays take place on mobile devices. Users visit your cosmetics website via smartphones, tablets, and the like. If you present your visitors with a desktop version with tiny images and even smaller fonts, you shouldn’t be surprised if many bounce back.
Be aware of the specifics of mobile search queries. The user navigates with his finger, and the display is much smaller than on the desktop version. The Internet speed is also often a good deal slower – this is especially true in rural areas. Your website must be prepared for this.
Ideally, choose a responsive theme when creating your website. This way, all design elements automatically adapt to the display size.
With the test for optimization for mobile devices, Google provides a valuable tool. Enter the URL of your website and find out if your website is mobile-optimized or if there is still room for improvement.
Install An SSL Certificate
SSL encryption of your website is a critical security signal for your users. This technology secures our internet connections and ensures that third parties cannot read sensitive data. Indispensable if you sell your cosmetic products via an online store. Thanks to an SSL certificate, your customers can pay directly online without worrying about their data falling into the wrong hands.
Since Google wants to offer its users the best search experience, the search engine giant is highly interested in securely encrypted websites. The Chrome browser even blocks insecure websites, so they can’t be accessed. Thus, SSL certification of your website is not just a ranking factor but mandatory.
Take Care Of Fast Loading Times
Modern customers need more patience and are used to websites loading quickly. This is especially true for Generation Z and Millennials, who grew up in the Internet age and spent hours online daily. As an SEO beginner, you should monitor your load times.
Those who click on your link and wait an eternity for something to happen will go elsewhere for their information in frustration. Google has also recognized this and considers page speed a ranking factor.
Don’t worry: You can optimize your website at the last millisecond. But you should ensure fast loading times so that visitors feel comfortable on your website and are happy to return.
Create An XML Sitemap And A robots.txt File
Sounds like something out of a science fiction movie? It refers to two files that play an essential role in the technical framework of your website.
XML Sitemap
Set up a sitemap with the Yoast SEO plugin and upload it to Google Search Console. As the table of contents of your website, the sitemap shows Google all subpages. This makes it easier for the bots to crawl your content – the prerequisite for you to appear with your content in the search results.
robots.txt file
With a robots.txt file, you tell the search engines which directories can be read and which are not. Make sure you put the robots.txt file in the domain’s root directory. Otherwise, it will not be found and considered by the search engines. With the meta tag noindex, you can exclude individual subpages from indexing – for example, if they are still under construction and, therefore, should not go live.
#2 SEO Terms For Beginners: Optimize Your Snippets
Snippet means “snippet” and refers to the preview of a website in the search results (SERPs) in online marketing. Indeed you have found an entry in your online search that immediately tempted you to click on it. Because the information presented precisely matched your search intention and was raised appealingly.
A snippet consists of a meta title and meta description. The meta title is to be understood like a headline and can also contain information about your website, e.g., the domain name. The report summarizes what you offer your readers in the article and should be formulated in an animating way to attract potential users to your website actively.
One more reason snippets can be included in our SEO guide for beginners. They’re like a teaser for your content that makes visitors want to visit your website, so they can’t help but click. In fact, with an ingenious snippet, you can, in some cases, generate more traffic than better-positioned competitors get.
You can support the snippet optimization by using different unique characters and emojis to make your entry in the SERPs more eye-catching. SISTRIX provides a free SERP snippet generator on its website to help you tweak the perfect layout of your snippets.
With all your enthusiasm, avoid creating false expectations in the preview. This leads to a high bounce rate, which in turn hurts the SEO performance of your website as a wrong user signal.
#3. SEO Terms For Beginners: Appropriate Research Keywords
A high-reach website picks up users with solid content that offers added value, e.g., through instructions, guides, checklists, or product information. But how do you, as an SEO beginner, ensure that your texts are found? Quite simply: with the right keywords.
Keywords are words that users enter into the Google search box to get to your website. This already gives you an important clue as to what keyword research is all about: speaking your customers’ language. So instead of optimizing your website for terms that are second nature to you, you need to find out what your users are looking for.
You can only assume that laypeople are familiar with some of the technical terms of the cosmetics industry. Therefore, try to get into the heads of your ideal customers during keyword research to find the most common terms for your users’ search intent. For example, maybe you rank high for “microdermabrasion,” but your customers search for “exfoliation with crystals” instead.
Find one main keyword per page and 1-2 secondary keywords as needed. It is essential to integrate these naturally, so the reading flow is smooth. Artificial-sounding texts that look like spasmodic SEO from 100 meters away are genuine customer care.
Want to delve further into the topic of keywords? In this blog article, we’ll introduce you to several free SEO tools that even beginners can use intuitively: Create keyword research for free.
#4 Link Your Content
Meaningful internal linking is essential for SEO beginners for two reasons. First, you improve the user experience and make navigation easier for your visitors. Second, you signal relevance to search engines when an important subpage has many inbound links. This will then be ranked better in the SERPs.
But external links, so-called backlinks, are also valuable support for your online visibility. Google is smart enough to recognize purchased links and rigorously punishes this dishonest form of link building. Refraining from cheating and striving for natural growth when building links is essential.
That’s why you should start with the quality of your content: If you put brilliant beauty content online, others can’t help but link to your website. This way, you get backlinks from high-quality sources, namely from thematically related sites of the beauty industry.
Of course, you should also link to external content from reputable sources from time to time. This is useful, for example, to offer your visitors further information on a topic and thus create additional added value.
#5 SEO Terms For Beginners: Work On The Optimal User Experience
When it comes to search engine optimization of your cosmetics texts, it’s not just about being found but, more importantly, about being read. Of course, you need well-researched, helpful content. But it would help if you also structured it to offer your users a pleasant reading experience.
Structure Your texts
Subheadings
A trivial but effective tool in the fight against text deserts: Use subheadings to structure your website texts in content and appearance.
This is in line with our reading behavior on the screen, where we tend to skim texts roughly at first. The more “scannable” your content is, the better.
Paragraphs
Paragraphs significantly improve the reading experience. They help your visitors to read the text more concentrated, understand it better, and remember important things more easily. It would be best if you neither wrote block-like long paragraphs nor “tore” your text by too many small sections.
Treat a paragraph like a unit of thought: it bundles your knowledge about a specific aspect of the topic. As soon as a new idea begins, a new section follows.
Visuals
If you have the opportunity, you should also integrate video content. Well-made videos boost traffic, increase dwell time, and are shared more frequently on social media. Thematically appropriate images, infographics, and tables are ideal for livening up your texts and giving your readers a new impulse.
Apply The Headline Hierarchy Correctly
One SEO tip for beginners you probably still need to get on your radar is to take care of the proper headline hierarchy. Headings make it easier for search engines to understand what the content of your page is about. The reader, too, by the way.
However, a search engine can only tell what is the main heading, a subordinate heading, or body text by looking at the HTML markup. For this reason, it is crucial to define headings as such in your website texts.
In most popular website systems like WordPress, Wix, and Jimdo, the heading structure (H1 to H6 level) is already created. You can easily assign the heading hierarchy using the text tools.
When assigning your headlines, you proceed hierarchically, not chronologically. Per the text, you give only one main heading (H1), your headline. After that, several H2 headlines can follow, which contain further subsections with H3-H6 as needed.
Use Classic Navigation
Navigation has a significant impact on how users behave on your website. The more confusing and fancy the menu, the harder it is for visitors to find their way around.
So that users can spend less than half an eternity looking for the right menu items, you should stick to a classic design. In most websites, the menu is either in the header or the upper left corner.
Be careful to keep it manageable and avoid drop-down menus if possible. It’s better to have a concise menu where the menu items are named only with the most important keywords (e.g., About, Offer, Blog, Contact).
If your website has many secondary functions, you can place them in the footer. But be careful: this area can also be overlaid, so keep it manageable with individual categories.
Don’t Forget Image SEO
The eye eats with you – this motto from the catering industry can easily be applied to your website. High-resolution, thematically appropriate images loosen up text deserts and are essential to creating a successful website.
What many SEO beginners need to learn: You can (and should!) also optimize images for search engines.
Name Image Files Sensibly
Stay away from generic file names like “Foto_01_02_2022”. From an SEO point of view, this offers an exciting opportunity for indexing by Google. Therefore, place appropriate keywords in your image’s file name, title tag, and alt tag. This way, you make it easier for search engines to read what is on the image, and you will be displayed with your keywords in the image search results.
Google now recognizes the connection between the content of a text and the images used. If both fit together, it will give you an additional plus point for your website traffic.
Compress Your Images
No one wants to look at pixelated images these days. Make sure you use a high-quality resolution to increase your sales chances and to emphasize your idea as a professional beauty provider.
At the same time, your image files should be a manageable size. Otherwise, they will take up a lot of space on your web space and negatively affect page speed with their long loading times.
Compress your images according to the maxim “as small as possible, as large as necessary.” This can be done before uploading with online tools or in the backend with plugins. The WordPress plugin Imagify is a so-called Image Optimizer, which you can set to optimize images automatically according to your specifications when uploading. Perfect for SEO beginners!
SEO Terms For Beginners: Patience Pays Off
You optimized your texts a few days ago, but still, only a little is happening in the ranking. If you think you can achieve short-term success thanks to SEO, you will inevitably be disappointed. High visibility and an extensive range do not come by chance but result from continuous work.
You do yourself and your nerves a big favor if you understand SEO as a process. To make it to the top of Google, patience is required. Trust that the energy you invest will eventually pay off for you. And it will if you stay on the ball and pay attention to the SEO basics.
You should give yourself and your content project at least six months. If the desired results still need to materialize, it’s worth taking a self-critical look at your website using analysis tools. Your topics may not be as interesting for readers as you think. Or are visitors already bouncing off your homepage because your navigation is too convoluted?
What content works well, and what flops with your users? Use statistics to improve your website and learn from your content continuously. Also, make sure to place the image in the right place in the text. Eventually, you’ll get a feel for hot topics, master the most important ranking factors by heart, and go from SEO beginner to SEO pro!
Is your website different from where you want it to be? With our know-how, we help beauty experts like you to implement the SEO basics successfully and to perform better in the Google ranking.
