In other words, you don’t want to greet people with a giant stock photo that takes up the entire above the fold area of your page. Which is why it’s super important to hook people the SECOND that they land on your website from Google. When someone clicks on your site in the search results, then clicks back to Google, that’s a signal to Google that your page is a BAD fit for that result. …and you’ll get a score along with a list of detailed recommendations. And I quickly noticed that most of the content on the first page were guides. Back in the day I’d write content that I THOUGHT would rank on the first page of Google.
Then, create content—articles, videos, presentations and other online assets—to answer those questions. First, a backlink from a highly trusted website signals some level of approval and validation, so website visitors are more inclined to view your website in a positive light. Second, highly trusted websites are considered to have more SEO weight as measured by Domain Authority. A backlink from a high Domain Authority website like CNN or the New York Times is more powerful than a backlink from a website created last week. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, SEO was simple for companies to manipulate. Just put your keywords all over your website again and again, and you’ll probably get traffic.
- These pages are generated from a template and populated with data from a database.
- Absolutely insane, and it’s no wonder they have so much organic traffic.
- And besides optimizing my content for that specific term, I also added a handful of LSI keywords like “drive traffic”.
- In summary, SEO is all about optimizing content, building authority, and improving the overall user experience on your site.
Understand SEO basics
Simply put, getting traffic to your website is key to achieving your goals. That’s why it’s important to understand search engine optimization (SEO). Learning about SEO from scratch requires a lot of time and patience. Besides understanding the basics of SEO, you’ll need resources to learn the fundamentals of digital marketing and how search engines work. If you’re just starting your website, what I would do is google the keywords I want to rank.
Include your main keyword:
Adding keywords to your URL helps explain your page content to search engines and users, as well as reflecting where the page sits in your website. For example, squarespace.com/pricing helps search engines categorize the page as a plan pricing page and makes the page content clear for browsers before they even click through. Like search engines evaluating content based on more than 200 ranking factors, SEO does the same. Search engines like Google publish best practice guidelines, and many professional SEOs share their findings from working on hundreds of sites. SEM or search engine marketing is the process of getting traffic from search engines either organically (i.e., without paying) or paid.
They would normally appear on the 2nd, 3rd or even lower position. To make sure your title and description have the right length, you can use our free tool called SERP Simulator. You can either do it manually and try to find the best ratio between quality and file size or automate the whole process with a plugin (e.g. Imagify, ShortPixel, Tiny PNG). Using the right image file format can help you get a better image quality and reduce the file size.
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. This is about ensuring the images on your webpage can be understood when someone can’t view an image and by search engines. Search engines can’t view the images on your pages like your visitors typically would, so they rely on alt text descriptions on your webpage to categorize imagery.
Showing up in their search results aligns with an existing demand—your customers are actively seeking information, products, or solutions. This makes SEO a powerful inbound marketing strategy, where users come to you rather than the other way around. Because searchers already have intent, they are more likely to convert, making SEO an essential tool for attracting high-quality leads. Content marketing is a strategy that involves publishing high-quality blogs, videos, podcasts, and other media to spark interest in your brand, establish its authority, and boost SEO. Technical SEO is a method of optimizing a website’s technical elements to improve its performance in SERPs or Search Engine Result Pages. Not only does technical SEO help improve your search rankings, but it also determines your user experience.
Search engines cater to these users by directing them to sites that offer an enjoyable mobile browsing experience. This includes responsive design, which is when content automatically resizes based on users’ screen size, touch-friendly design, and simplified navigation. Nearly all modern website themes are responsive, but you should always test your website by actually using it on a mobile device.
Perfect for those aiming to elevate their online presence, this course ensures your site stands out in competitive digital landscapes. 7) Local SEOFor businesses targeting local audiences, optimizing for local SEO is critical. This includes using location-specific keywords, creating a Google My Business profile, and ensuring consistent Name, Address, BHS Links and Phone number (NAP) information across all platforms.
A link (or backlink) is an HTML hyperlink pointing from one site to another. SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificates are small files installed on a web server which act as a security measure for websites. Although only a simple text file, not setting it up correctly can seriously mess with your site’s indexing. It’s therefore worth giving this WordPress robots.txt guide a read. Now you just want to submit this sitemap to Google Search Console. If you haven’t already set up and verified it, this guide tells you how to do it.