What Is SEO? Learn the Basics of Search Engine Optimization
And Google has confirmed that backlinks remain one of their three most important search engine ranking factors. All in One SEO (AIOSEO) is the best WordPress SEO plugin on the market. Used by over 3+ million users, it is the most comprehensive SEO toolkit that helps you improve search rankings without learning any complicated SEO jargon. In fact, 93 percent of all online experiences start with a search engine.
- Indexing is the process by which search engines, for example, Google, include a site’s content in their “index”.
- Finding out a keyword’s monthly search volume, or the number of times it has been searched online in a given month can make it easier to discover popular topics in your niche.
- If you’re looking for more guidance, check out our SEO podcasts and SEO FAQs for answers to the most common SEO questions.
- Then, compress them before uploading them to your site with a free tool like Squoosh.
- YouTube SEO involves optimizing video content with relevant keywords, compelling titles, descriptions, and thumbnails to improve visibility and engagement on the platform.
Your name, address, and phone number (also known as NAP) are vital to local search engine optimization. That’s because search engines use that information to understand your business’s location and contact information. SEO helps websites like yours improve their online visibility — without the cost of pay-per-click (PPC) or social media advertising. With that kind of visibility, you can reach your target audience at the perfect moment, as they search for products or services you offer. Off-page optimisation centres on exercises exterior of the site that impact its look motor rankings.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) involves promoting websites through paid advertising on search engines, increasing visibility through strategies like pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns. Typically, SEO agencies will use SEO tools like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Screaming Frog to analyze your site’s search engine optimization. Depending on the agency, they might also use paid SEO tools, like Ahrefs BHS Links or Semrush. In the 6th chapter of our SEO guide for beginners, we will discuss backlinks – one of the most important aspects of search engine optimization. If your focus keyword is “best content marketing strategy for small businesses”, it would be crazy to use it in all the on-page elements mentioned above just to tick them all off the list.
Why is SEO marketing important?
Today, I never create blogs below 2,000 words, if my goal is to rank for a focus keyword. If it contains the focus keyword, you let Google know what the page you’re linking to is about. Long-tail keywords tend to have lower difficulty and higher conversion rates. It’s because the query is more specific, so there’s a higher chance the user is further down the buyer’s journey. Your goal is to find relevant keywords with high search volumes and low keyword difficulty – an ideal combination of the three most important factors of keyword research. Besides keyword suggestions, it calculates the difficulty of ranking for the keywords and helps you to analyze the SERP.
technical SEO
Typically, SEO companies will use on-page, off-page, and technical optimizations to improve a site’s visibility, traffic, and revenue from organic search results. On the other hand, some confirmed ranking factors only have a very small impact on the rankings. AI SEO is important because AI usage is growing, with 1 in 10 U.S. users using AI first for online searches. While traditional search engines like Google still dominate search experiences, the growth of tools like ChatGPT is unprecedented.
It’s about weaving primary and secondary keywords naturally into the sentence, without making it feel forced. If a search term matches your description, Google highlights it in bold, giving your snippet extra visibility. But overloading your description with keywords will make it sound robotic — and users can smell that from a mile away. Meta descriptions are important in search engines because they directly influence whether users decide to click on your page. In this guide, you’ll learn what a meta description is, why it matters for SEO, how it works, and how to write and optimize it to actually improve your search results.
As we’ve already discussed, keyword research is still valuable, and technical SEO issues that keep Google and other search engines from understanding and ranking sites’ content are still prevalent. SEO refers to a range of processes you can use to increase a website’s search engine rankings, drive more traffic to the site, and improve its visibility. It accomplishes this with a combination of high-quality content that’s relevant to internet users’ needs and an outstanding user experience. Updating a page regularly suggests to the search engine algorithm that the page is timely, another point in its favour. Updating the page with content that includes important keywords is also helpful. With a team working non-stop on improving Google’s search engine, the focus moved from factors like keyword density to user experience and high-quality content.
Advanced Strategies for Semantic SEO
Pick a webpage, then decide what you want to communicate, the target audience, and what you want someone to do after viewing the page. You may find it helpful to make a list of the pages on your website and rank them by priority, either based on traffic or importance to your website goals. If you’re ready to start implementing SEO strategies into your website, it’s best to implement step by step. Start with one page and work through each step below based on the content on the page. Businesses often work with web developers or IT professionals to improve their sites’ technical SEO. If you have access to your site’s admin panel, you may be able to make these improvements or fix issues yourself.
Off-page SEO is closely related to media marketing, digital PR, and brand management. There are many good resources you can find online, and a good portion of them are free. You can start with our guide on SEO for beginners or take free courses in Ahrefs’ Academy. Link building is something is something that preoccupies the SEO industry. To give you an idea of how this works, here’s a quick overview of a few popular backlink building techniques.