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<strong>The Beginners SEO Guide - Hosting and Domain Names</strong>

We all know that SEO or search engine optimization is vital to our success and that is why we created this beginner's SEO guide. 

You need to start by choosing the right hosting and a good domain name. 

Most SEO guides don't say much about getting hosting because they don't realize how important this is.

We are starting with hosting for a reason and if you want to gain success through this SEO guide you will need to choose the right hosting. 

The most important part of hosting for search engine optimization is the ability to keep your website or blog up and how secure it is. 

You don't have to spend a fortune and you can even use <a href="https://itxdesign.com/compare-hosting-plans/" title="shared hosting" target="_blank">shared hosting</a> for your website or blog.

The key to the hosting portion is to get a private SSL certificate and a dedicated IP address. These usually don't come with your package unless you upgrade to a more expensive shared hosting package. You can get both of these with the business plan from <a href="https://itxdesign.com/" title="ITX Design" target="_blank">ITX Design</a> or check with the other providers to see if they are an add-on or included in another package.

When it comes to your domain name, it is all about your keyword phrase. Whatever your keyword phrase is, you will do best if you can match it exactly with a domain name with a dot com, dot net, or dot org extension. This will give you the best opportunity to make money online by getting listed high in the search results.

<strong>The Beginners SEO Guide - Your Content</strong>

It cannot be stressed enough how important useful content is. You have to put up content that does not just meet the online SEO guide requirements, but is also useful for the reader. If your reader searches for what you have on your website and finds it, they had better get what they are after or they will leave your website.

Other than making sure you have quality content that the reader can enjoy, you want to use your keyword phrase properly as well. It should be in the URL, for example, the title, each header you use, the first sentence of the first paragraph, the last sentence of the last paragraph, bolded once, and in italics at least once.

This will give you great content the reader can actually use and will help them find it by helping you get listed higher on the search engines. If you don't get this right, none of your other SEO efforts will matter. The content is the most important part of the beginners SEO guide and you have to make sure you only post high quality content for your readers.

A few other things you can add for better SEO is an image with an "ALT" tag that matches your keyword phrase, a link to another page or post on the website or blog that is the keyword phrase, and a link to an external website or blog. If you do these things, you will not have to worry about your on site SEO anymore.
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<strong>The Beginners SEO Guide - Backlinks</strong>

If you have read any other SEO guides, then you are familiar with backlinks. 

These are links coming from another website or blog to yours. They are very powerful and many will tell you how you get ranked high on major search engines. 

First, make sure the backlink uses your keyword phrase as the anchor text whenever possible. Second, get a mix of both high quality or high page rank backlinks. Finally, don't create them too fast.

If you have the anchor text as your main keyword, you will get ranked higher for that keyword phrase. In addition, if they are both high and low quality you will have the necessary balance to gain higher ranking. Finally, if you use the tips in this SEO guide and you don't build your backlinks too fast, you will maintain your ranking for the long term.

<strong>How to Use Search Engine Optimization and Keywords</strong>

Before we get into how to use search engine optimization and keywords, it is important to make sure you have the right foundation set for your project. By foundation, I mean <a href="https://itxdesign.com/" title="hosting" target="_blank">hosting</a>, and that is an important part of your SEO, believe it or not. You need to have a strong foundation with the right features.

VPS, Cloud, or dedicated server hosting are preferred for the best SEO, but you can use shared hosting if you get the right package. Those using shared hosting will see a bump in their SEO if they get a package that provides a private SSL certificate along with a dedicated IP address. Sometimes these are add-ons and they are well worth the money spent.

Now that you have the right foundation, we can move on to how to use search engine optimization and keywords. This is very important because many people have no idea how to get proper SEO or how to choose the right keywords. We are going to look at both of these parts of search engine optimization and keywords separately.

<strong>Search Engine Optimization and Keywords - Choosing your Keywords</strong>

Probably the most confusing part of search engine optimization and keywords is actually choosing which keywords to use. For this, we are going to use the free Google Keyword Tool and the Google search engine. We will pretend that we are looking for keywords within the "Golf" niche.

Since the "Golf" niche is highly competitive, we need to start by breaking it down and choosing a sub-niche of the main niche. Therefore, if we go to the <a href="https://adwords.google.com/o/KeywordTool" title="Google Keyword Tool" target="_blank">Google Keyword Tool</a> and enter "golf" as our search term, we will have a list of potential sub-niches. Make sure to check the box saying, "Only show ideas closely related to my search terms". (If you get a free account with Google, you will get more results by logging in while using this tool.)

After the results come up you want to click on the "local monthly searches" column. This will sort the keywords for you and you will have a list of how much they get searched for every single month in your country. Scroll down the list and pick a more specific part of the main niche. We are using "The Golf Swing" as our main keyword and our niche.

This main keyword gets 246,000 monthly searches. Of course, this is only an estimate, but it is highly searched. Now, we need to put this keyword phrase into Google and see what the competition looks like. There are over 37 million results for this phrase, but when we put it in quotes; we see around 20 million results.

For your main keyword or your niche, this is just fine because we are just trying to find a niche to work within. This is much smaller than just "Golf" and that is what we are after.

Now, go back to the Google Keyword Tool and enter "the golf swing" into the search box. This gives us a list of great keywords we can work with. It is best to separate these keywords into three categories, Hard, Medium, and Easy. You will do this by looking at the search term compared to the results in Google with quotations around the keyword phrase. Here is how they break down.

<em>Hard - over 250,000 results in Google and must be searched at least 3,000 monthly
Medium - over 100,000 results in Google and must be searched at least 1,500 monthly
Easy - under 100,000 results in Google and must be searched at least 600 monthly</em>

This will give you an idea of how much work you will need to put in to grab the top rankings. If we look at the keyword phrase "basics of the golf swing”, we will see that it gets searched 2,400 a month and have 131,000 results when searched with quotations. This falls into our "Medium" category.

<strong>Search Engine Optimization and Keywords - On Site SEO</strong>

Now, using the keyword phrase properly will help give you better ranking on Google and other search engines. You want to use the phrase in all your headers (three are recommended H1, H2, and H3), in the first and last sentence of the content, once with bold and once with italics in the content, and a density of no more than 3%.

This will give you the best chance to rank high with quality content on Google. Remember, this is just the start of search engine optimization and keywords, and you can learn many other things to help you climb up the rankings.