A Complete Guide to Search Engine Optimization

Are you a beginner in SEO? No worries. I will help you overcome the problem of ranking websites in the 1st page of search engines. You will be able to do SEO if you completely study this guide. 

This is a complete guide on SEO for beginners who want to understand SEO best practices, optimization techniques, and strategy making in 2025. All, regardless of professions, can follow this search engine optimization guide. It has eight chapters and you can explore each in detail via clicking on it. Even business owners can learn much about SEO in this beginners SEO guide if they plan to DIY SEO.  

Chapter 1: How Search Engine Works

First, to conquer SEO, understand how search engines work. This will help you become a master at optimizing websites for higher rankings and organic traffic.

Search engines, such as Google, Duckduckgo, and Bing, are like a listen-and-respond service. When a user types something, the search engine returns a response with relevant information to a user. Here comes a real tough grind. How do search engines have access to billions of websites? They can actually read (known as crawling) your website and save it in a specific memory location (indexing). When a user needs information, search engines pick the desired information to show to users. All these search engines have a specific criteria of ranking webpages, which is trained on the basis of machine learning and AI to improve user experience. 

Chapter 2: Basics of SEO

Search Engine Optimization is a wide field with many actionable items. For beginners, or even those who have some experience, mostly miss on the minute details or basics of SEO. But, why?

SEO is 80% strategy, decision-making, and planning. Only 20% is the execution. Many SEOs fail to understand this and miss out on basics and fundamental terminologies and concepts. A study by Mega SEO shows that ⅓ of SEO service providers don’t know effective SEO practices whereas another third offers ineffective services deliberately.

_{Before you head to other advanced chapters of SEO, it is important that you completely understand how basics of SEO work for a website and what are SEO factors. In 2025, SEO has changed a lot because of search engines improving their working models.} 

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Chapter 3: SEO Keyword Research

In SEO, keyword research is always a first step. That’s what matters the most. A keyword is a word that a user searches for in search engines.

A keyword can literally be anything, from simple to complex or one word to a sentence. For a business, you have to ensure finding the keywords that your consumers are searching for. Ahrefs, Semrush, Google Keyword Planner, and many other SEO keyword research tools help us find relevant keywords. When writing for something that is not being searched, it’s sure you won’t rank or get any visits. 

_{In fact, many website owners fall into this trap, and Tim Soulo, the CMO at Ahref, points out that nearly 90.63% of pages on the internet miss out on traffic from Google because of it.}

Chapter 4: Writing Content for SEO

Every article does not follow the core principles of SEO. You have to learn how to optimize a page for SEO. 

Is writing SEO content difficult? Not really. It’s just about understanding the user intent. If you value your user, Google values your content. You will target all short-tail keywords and long-tail keywords, make it appear user-friendly, use high-quality explanations with examples, citations and references. Every webpage should follow Google’s Helpful Content System (integrated by Google with ranking algorithms in 2024) that evaluates how qualitative your webpage content is. It is based on expertise, experience, authoritativeness and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T). 

_{After the March Core Update 2025, the ranking algorithm will improve its performance even more.}

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Chapter 5: On-Page SEO Optimization

In SEO, whatever you do on your own website, is called On-page SEO. It’s like one part of search engine optimization, often listed in the types of SEO. I believe on-page SEO is the soul of SEO and the rest is body.

Whatever actions for SEO optimization are taken in onsite SEO, will specifically be done on the website and you don’t go anywhere else. It can involve anything like SEO writing, internal linking, URL structure optimization, page speed, mobile-friendliness, keyword density management, optimizing headings and titles, external linking, anchor text optimization, and many other things as well. 

_{Ahrefs reports that around 96.55 webpages receive no traffic from Google due to ignoring to optimize for on-page SEO of a website.} 

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Chapter 6: Link Building (Offpage SEO)

Link building is another type of SEO that deals with efforts you take outside your website. It’s also known as Offpage SEO, which is evolving and very important. When someone links to your website on another website, it is called your backlink, and an external link for someone who links to you.

Link Building, simply, is a vote of confidence. For example, your friend has recommended you to get your hair cut by a specific brand. Why does he recommend you for that specific shop when there are many? It’s because he knows that particular shop is trusted and reliable. Backlinks similarly is a recommendation, a vote, or you can say it’s a reference from someone who knows you. In SEO, it works similarly. When a lot of websites link to our website, it shows reliability, authority, or trust-worthiness of our website. The more backlinks a website has, it’s likely that it will rank higher on target keywords. 

_{According to Google, they use links as a determining factor in gauging the relevance of a webpage. This factor is called Pagerank.  While it’s an important factor, still you cannot build backlinks rather you have to earn them by creating high-quality content on your website. A search quality senior strategist, Andrey Lipattsev, confirmed that backlinks are a ranking factor in Google.} 

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Chapter 7: Technical SEO

Technical SEO is a type of SEO that deals with website level factors, and is a very important part of the SEO process, both directly and indirectly. 

Let’s have an analogy to understand what technical SEO is. Your soul is on-page SEO, your body is off-page SEO, and your apparel is technical SEO that actually gives you a shape, architecture or structure. In this, you are supposed to optimize navigation, mobile responsiveness, website speed, schema markup, lazy loading, sitemaps, core web vitals, website security, crawling and indexing. It helps Google better understand your website and its purpose. Google Search Console and Screaming Frog help us identify and fix issues with the technical side of a website.

Chapter 8: Local SEO

To understand local SEO, you should first understand SEO and its process. If you are sure that you know, I would say localization of SEO in a target area or audience is known as local SEO.

Local SEO refers to any kind of SEO optimization that helps you rank a website for a targeted region and specific audience segment. Local SEO is often confused with Google Business Profile, which is not only a way to do local SEO. Any step you take to be visible in your local area will count in local SEO. GBP is one of the platforms for locally being visible to your consumers. If you optimize for local SEO, you can better rank your keywords, increase your domain authority, and improve your website as well.

Bonus: SEO Terms

If you’ve ever read about SEO previously, you’ll be aware that there’s a lot of terminology used in the industry. To keep it simple to start, here are some key terms with concepts you need to be aware of.

Backlinks:
Hyperlinks directing from a page on one website to another.

Keywords:
The words and phrases users type into search engines when searching for specific content.

Long-tail keywords:
multiple-word phrases, which users enter into search engines while trying to find specific items or information. They are considered “keywords with low search volume.

SERPs:
This stands for Search Engine Results Pages. They’re the pages that search engines show in response to a user’s search query.

ALT Text:
Alt text (alternative text) is a short description of an image. It helps blind users using screen readers and also tells search engines what the image shows.

Anchor Text:
Anchor text is the visible, clickable part of a hyperlink. Google uses anchor text to understand the topic and relevance of the page it links to.