Can you make all things clear about free SEO & website optimization listed in a simple guide for beginners?

Well, the short answer is yes, I can share a short guide for beginners. This post is addressing the very basics of free SEO with website optimization checklist, that covers all related definitions and standard action order to be taken at the on-page/off-page level of your business site or marketing blog pages. And now I’m going to show you where to get started and exactly which areas of your online performance should be focused first and foremost. Ultimately, I hope that my simple intro to free SEO website optimization listed below will help you set the right SEO priorities and finally get down to their actual implementation – right on your web pages (i.e., On-Page SEO). That way, you will set a rock-solid foundation for your further effort, this time to be taken directly outside your site or blog (i.e., Off-Page SEO). All that being said, let’s delve into greater detail.

Introduction to Google’s Free SEO: Website Checklist for Beginners

On-Page Search Engine Optimization

Apparently, you should proceed with optimizing every element of your website’s or blog’s on-page SEO, first and foremost. Once you’ve got everything in place over there, you will be able to complete the overall optimization effort ending up with the rest of basic working stuff taken outside your own site or blog (i.e., link building, social media engagement, brand awareness/site authority, etc.). So, to finally start driving more targeted visitors directly to your site/blog pages, there wouldn’t be too many core elements of on-page SEO that should be optimized before anything else. Here they are:

Keyword Targets

Given that your web copy itself, as well as the primary content-based elements found within your web pages, are to be optimized for the right set of main target keywords, running a thorough keyword research must become your first thing to do over there. Consider completing not only basic keyword analysis (i.e., using good old Google’s Keyword Planner tool), but sufficiently deep competitive research too. For delving into the best keyword findings of your niche competitors, I recommend inspecting every corner of their website using professional analytical platforms like Semalt Analyzer, Moz Explorer, Ahrefs, or SEO Spider.

On-Page Content

While you’re trying to produce only unique content that revolves mainly around the core relevant search terms (i.e., embedded with target keywords “contextually”), remember that your body content is actually written for the readers, not Google’s search crawling bots. That’ why I recommend focusing primarily on the user needs and intents beyond the relevant keyword-based search queries, in line with creating maximum engaging web copy and articles/posts to minimize your potential bounce rate. That way, providing a sufficiently good user experience with genuinely original content of high quality, you can elevate the average time per user visit (otherwise, “user’s dwelling time”), that will at some point give a measurable improvement to your ongoing ranking growth in Google’s free SEO-based website list of relevant search results (i.e., free search listing, or organic SERPs).

MetaData

Based on the general requirements set in Google’s Main Guidelines for Webmasters, your Meta Title Tags (otherwise, Title Tags) and Meta Description Tags (otherwise, Meta Descriptions) should be always unique and contain at least one top relevant core keyword/long-tail expression, each making sense with its relative web page (i.e., main content topic, a given product/service listed or, say, site category/section). Doing so, make sure to meet the basic format requirements to Title Tag/Meta Description length, which are suggested by Google itself to be kept somewhere within a recommended average limit of 55-60 and 150-155 characters respectively. Also, make sure to put your most powerful keyword assets closer to the Title Tag’s beginning for maximizing their ranking effect, in line with getting your Meta Descriptions focused more on long-tail search combinations that would provide a concise summary about each specific web page. That’s it.

Miscellaneous Stuff

• Image ALT Tags – don’t forget to create specific shreds of content giving a clean & clear keyword-based description for each image you have on your web pages. Otherwise, the major search engines (like Google itself) would be unable to “read” and “understand ” what your visual content is all about – and that naturally brings a potential issue with a complete and fully correct indexing of the whole website or blog. Moreover, that would be your another good opportunity to additionally utilize your main target keywords (but don’t overdo with that – otherwise you will trigger a potential issue with “keyword overstuffing”). When optimizing Image ALT Tags, however, don’t forget that nearly the same thing can be done with Image File Names too (the only thing to remember is using lowercase text and making every single word separated with hyphens instead of dashes/downscores). 
• Headers/Subheaders – take a moment to run a double-check on your body page content structure. Ideally, each web page content should be well-structured with H1/H2/H3 Heading/Subheading Tags so that your plain-text writings become easy to scan and digest by every visitor. Doing so, remember that you’re only allowed to have a single H1 Heading Tag for each web page, which should contain the exactly matching keywords or, when applicable, long-tail search terms.
• Custom 404 Page – don’t forget to think well about creating and setting up a custom 404 page. Just make sure to prepare showing up an interesting page or, at some point, even something funny – to soothe the user’s disappointment after clicking on a broken link/non-existing page of your website/blog.

• XML Sitemap – make sure to generate a correct sitemap that will help you make things much easier for the users (i.e., providing good navigation experience through the main sections of your website), and the search engines as well (i.e., giving Google’s crawling robots a short-cut access for indexing purposes). Should you have any difficulties to that point, I recommend using one of those half-automated ways of generating sitemaps, which are offered by many free online tools available on the Internet.