SEO is widely understood among webmasters and marketers alike as one of the most basic but important online marketing practices that a website can do. With the help of SEO, a business can jump over competitors that aren’t as SEO savvy, but if you’re operating in a highly competitive industry, you can guarantee that most of your competitors use SEO strategy. The good news is that SEO isn’t a black and white system and you can be better at SEO than competitors. That’s why it’s so important that you understand these absolute basics that people around the world are still struggling to come to grips with. 
Expectation of Results
If you as a business invest in something, it’s perfectly natural that you would want to see results of that investment as soon as possible. Sadly, with SEO, that’s not quite how it works – it’s a process involving lots of steps that take time to build traction. If you aren’t an expert in SEO and use an SEO service, a good SEO company will do an audit of your website first, before doing keyword research, changing website copy and then generating regular content while potentially running a paid search campaign simultaneously depending on needs.
The Frequency of Content
Content is great if it is original, fresh and delivers value to readers. Writing blogs sparingly with just one link on each is bad SEO practice and is unlikely to generate regular viewership, page shares and more traffic. Original content needs to be made regularly for you to gain visibility as search engines are more likely to prefer a website that has regular and up-to-date content.
Basic Terminology
What’s the SERP? Would you ever use a doorway page? What about keyword stuffing? Do you know your canonical URLs?
If you can answer all these questions, you probably know your SEO salt. If you don’t, you’re not alone. Not enough people know their basic SEO terminology, and having a good awareness of important SEO terms can be vital when dealing with SEO services and companies. That’s because if, for example, you didn’t know what a doorway page was and agreed to use them in your SEO strategy, you would be committing your website to black-hat SEO techniques and will likely suffer heavy consequences like being blacklisted by Google.
Google Should be Treated as OmniscientWhen people first start learning about SEO basics, it’s quite natural for their mind to start thinking of loopholes to get SEO results quickly. Some of these, like keyword stuffing, constitute as black hat techniques, but some are subtler than that. A common example is linking from different sites – it can be tempting to go for low quality links (e.g. those from untrustworthy sites) en masse, as opposed to working hard to develop good quality links from trustworthy sources with a focus on organic interactions. The days of link farming have passed, and Google have become excellent at spotting techniques used to inorganically bolster SEO campaigns. Behave as if Google know everything you’re doing, and if you want to use a tactic that you think may result in a penalty if you were caught – don’t do it!