SEO, or search engine optimization is the most often the ultimate goal when it comes to getting free traffic to your website. There are many right and wrong ways to go about SEO and also many questionable ways that get argued either way. Here is a guide on how to do SEO for dummies. I am sure you feel like a dummy when it comes to this stuff- I know I did!

First of all, you need a keyword. Choosing a proper keyword to target is essential but I will get to that later...

To target a particular keyword, you should be including it as well as related terms within the content of your website. Most importantly is that you include it once in your page/post title, meta title, and meta description. Once more in the first paragraph(but not at the very beginning!) should be plenty. You can write your content naturally after that.

Backlinking used to be all the rage! A backlink is a one way link from another site to yours that gives you authority in the eyes of google. This system has been abused for many years with automatic backlinking services and google finally pulled the plug on it! Now backlinks are worth much less and some even say they hurt your rank! Sheer numbers of backlinks may not work anymore but what does work is quality. Google especially likes social backlinks and backlinks from other authority sites in your niche because it makes your site look popular.

A few weeks into it, you may have your site ranked on a few keywords and even be getting a tiny trickle of traffic. But you have one huge hurdle coming... The google dance! Your site will immediately drop out of the top rankings and just generally start bouncing around. This can take a few days to a few weeks to settle down and usually by the end of it, your site will be ranked higher than ever before. You just have to tough it out and keep carrying on like you aren't about ready to throw your computer out of the window!

Once you get through all of this, you can just keep building and progressing from there. Keep targeting new keywords and keep creating quality backlinks(you can socially share your content and write articles, for example[like this one!]). Just keep scaling up and sticking to the basics and things will just continue to get better!