SEO Made Simple: A Step-by-Step Guide for 2021

Well, WordPress users alone publish over 2 million posts every day. That comes out to 24 blog posts every second.

That means that users published around 216 blog posts while you were reading these five sentences.

And that’s only counting WordPress users. If we were to count all blog posts, that number would surely be higher.

This makes it kind of tough to stand out. But you have to if you want to make your blog a successful one.

While I often spend 4-5 hours writing my blog posts, the ten minutes I spend optimizing each post are easily the most important.

No wonder millions of people Google the term “SEO” each month.

On any given day, people conduct more than 2.2 million searches. And that’s just on Google — to say nothing of the other search engines.

Therefore, showing up on the front page of Google can be the deciding factor between a business that’s thriving and one that’s, well, bankrupt.

But what does SEO even mean?

You probably know that it stands for search engine optimization, but what do you need to optimize?

Is it the design? Or is it the writing? Or maybe it’s the links.

Yes, yes, and yes — it’s all of that and more.

But let’s start this SEO guide at the beginning.

Definition: SEO stands for search engine optimization. Which is the art of ranking high on a search engine in the unpaid section, also known as the organic listings.

Alright, let’s translate that to English. Here’s my go at it:

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing your online content so that a search engine likes to show it as a top result for searches of a certain keyword.

Let me break that down even further:

When it comes to SEO, there’s you, the search engine, and the searcher. If you have an article about how to make vegan lasagna, you want the search engine (which, in 90% of all cases, is Google) to show it as a top result to anyone who searches for the phrase “vegan lasagna.”

SEO is the magic you have to work on your article in order to make Google very likely to include your post as one of the top results whenever someone searches for that keyword.

We’re going to dig deep into SEO, but feel free to jump to any section that interests you:

• Overview
• White hat vs. black hat
• Cleaning inside your house and outside: on-page SEO vs. off-page SEO
• On-Page SEO
• Off-Page SEO