If you feel like SEO is a daunting topic, perhaps a complex and confusing battle that’s best left to the professionals, take a deep breath and prepare to take a sigh of relief.

In this primer, we’ll walk you through the basics of SEO so that you can wrap your head around things and prepare to implement these techniques with confidence.

SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization,” and the name in itself tells you quite a bit. While nothing new, SEO has certainly grown progressively more competitive over the past couple of decades as more websites, content, and users have come online.

In truth, SEO was born out of necessity. It’s website owners’ response to the ever-changing and extremely advanced search algorithms built by the likes of Google.

Basically, as more content came online, search engines like Google needed a way to organize information in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) to try and show users the most relevant search results. To do that, they began slowly taking into account more and more “ranking factors,” which are elements such as an article’s title, to help them determine what results are most relevant for a specific search term.

Of course, as website owners began looking into the early ranking factors Google was using, many gamed the system using what’s known as “Blackhat SEO” tactics. These techniques basically exploit a known ranking factor and lead to practices like keyword stuffing just to get a page to climb the SERPs.

Fortunately for all of us, Google has become quite wise to these exploits and, thanks to the sheer complexity of today’s algorithms, Blackhat SEO is getting tougher and tougher. Instead, your best bet is learning about and investing in Whitehat SEO, so let’s dig further into that.

In response to Blackhat SEO tactics, like keyword stuffing, Google has grown quite advanced.

While these tactics may have helped websites climb the ranks initially by exploiting a known fact about Google’s algorithm, Google quickly began penalizing sites that used these tactics because of one key principle: They were implemented only with the intent of improving rankings and with no thought as to content quality or a reader’s experience.

This in itself reveals the most critical fundamental of modern SEO: Every aspect of your website should be designed taking a “reader first” approach. Google’s ultimate goal is to create an algorithm that truly gives favor to the websites that are most helpful and valuable to readers, and so that should be your goal.

Truly, if you did this, everything else would come kind of naturally, and that’s why SEO isn’t hard. In fact, it’s really just time-consuming. But, what does creating a “reader first” website entail? Let’s dig deeper into the critical SEO factors so you can gain a better understanding of it.

Build everything around great content.

If you have a blog, every post on that blog should be written with the best attempt to out-perform all of the relevant, top-ranking content currently on the internet.

This means doing a fair bit of research for everything you write so that you can understand and incorporate the key points of the current “best” content on the subject while also adding in unique value, whether that means getting an expert’s opinion on the matter, doing your own digging into more recent studies/fact, and so on.

At the end of the day, your “reader first” approach will have you constantly and consistently striving to create the absolute best article on any topic you try to cover, and this in itself will improve your performance because it means:

• You’ll be naturally incorporating top keywords by answering readers’ potential questions in subheadings.
• You’ll be writing long-form content that’s already rich with semantically related keywords, both short-tail (i.e., “dog training”) and long-tail (i.e., “the best dog training method”).

Prioritize your content’s readability.

Your SEO performance isn’t just about what you write, it’s also impacted by the content you share and the way you structure your own content. For instance, pursuing Image SEO is certainly worthwhile because incorporating graphics is a big part of making an article readable.

Since you’re basing your entire website on user experience, adding graphics — like charts and even stock photos — is a good start, but here is where the SEO best practices begin to come into play, like by using appropriate “alt text” and other tricks.

Strive to offer a great user experience.

As you can see, all the fundamentals of SEO tie into one thing: your user, and that’s exactly how Google wants you to see it. So, the third and final fundamental of SEO requires you to take a subjective look at your website and think about readability and UX (user experience) in a way that goes beyond just your content.

For starters, this means:

• Designing your website with an intuitive menu navigation.
• Offering a responsive website that looks great across all devices.
• Including important links, like Terms of Service, in an accessible place.
• Offering your website in multiple languages, based on your audience.