Last but not least, you should use the focus keyword in the anchor text of your internal links. Google’s Search Algorithm is used as an umbrella term to refer to all the individual algorithms, machine learning systems and AI technologies Google uses to rank websites. If you’re serious about SEO, you shouldn’t neglect the useful data and insights provided by various SEO tools. They give you a great competitive advantage and save a lot of your time. Off-page SEO is also closely connected to other areas of online marketing, such as social media marketing and branding, which have an indirect impact on building the trust and authority of your website. The goal is to provide both perfect content and UX while showing search engines what the page is about.
In our experience, this helps our clients by decreasing onboarding times, streamlining communication, and improving SEO results. You can go to the Source/medium report, compare two time periods to see a source/medium combination that has the biggest increase in users when compared to the previous time period. It is also a great report to use when analyzing the organic traffic from Google (the pages people visit from the Search are always landing pages). All you need is a backlink analysis tool (like LinkMiner) that will help you find the backlinks of your competitors. If you want to dive deeper into on-page optimization, check out our practical on-page SEO guide for beginners. It covers everything from technical stuff, through content and CTR optimization to monitoring and analysis of your progress.
Table of Contents
However, other websites and blogs would likely mention both SEJ and SER on lists of popular search engine news publications. The rate (expressed in a percentage) at which users click on an organic search result. This is calculated by dividing the total number of organic clicks by the total number of impressions then multiplying by 100. Google is placing emphasis on E-A-T to reduce disinformation online, especially in YMYL niches such as health and finance. In these spaces, building the authority of an author is recommended for a brand to show credibility, even if it currently doesn’t influence ranking. Customer data and behavior analytics tools can give content managers insight into the kind of content site visitors want.
Robots.txt, meta noindex, and meta nofollow
How BHS Links you mark up your images can impact not only the way that search engines perceive your page, but also how much search traffic from image search your site generates. An alt attribute is an HTML element that allows you to provide alternative information for an image if a user can’t view it. Your images may break over time (files get deleted, users have difficulty connecting to your site, etc.) so having a useful description of the image can be helpful from an overall usability perspective. This also gives you another opportunity – outside of your content – to help search engines understand what your page is about. The first step in search engine optimization is really to determine what it is you’re actually optimizing for. This means identifying the terms people are searching for (also known as “keywords”) that you want your website to rank for in search engines like Google.
Chapter 5: Technical SEO basics
If you have a large and complex site, focus on getting the technical SEO right (or hire someone who can). People are searching for any manner of things directly related to your business. Beyond that, your prospects are also searching for all kinds of things that are only loosely related to your business. These represent even more opportunities to connect with those folks and help answer their questions, solve their problems, and become a trusted resource for them. When learning ‘What is SEO’ there are also some do’s and don’ts as well which you should be aware of.
With SEO, you increase the visibility of your website for searches related to your content. So begin with learning how the search engines work and then move to other topics like keyword research, on-page SEO, link building, and technical SEO. Black hat SEO tactics generally work by abusing search engine logic.
- You don’t want to “keyword stuff” and cram your core keyword and every possible variation of it into your alt attribute.
- Other tricks to improve readability are using bulleted lists, and creating short paragraphs to avoid a wall of text.
- SEO companies perform multiple tasks to achieve these goals, including SEO audits, content creation, link building, keyword research, and technical optimizations.
- The more quality websites that are linking to your content, the better your authority will be.
- It is best practice to use your focus keyword in the H1 heading of the page.
Setting meta descriptions, titles, and relevant keywords is simple and built right into the editor. If your meta description exceeds the character limit, Google will truncate it with a “…”. Still, it can make your snippet look incomplete, and unfinished snippets are less attractive to users scanning the search engine result pages. Every page that matters — your homepage, product pages, blog posts, or landing pages — should have its own unique meta description. Reusing the same one across multiple URLs confuses search engine bots and weakens your ability to target specific search intent.
Below, you’ll find real-world tips for crafting meta descriptions, plus examples showing what works and what doesn’t. Most CMS platforms like WordPress, Shopify, or Wix, along with SEO plugins like Yoast SEO or Rank Math, let you easily create and edit meta descriptions without touching any code. Most website owners — especially small business owners (fewer than 50 employees or making under $5 million a year) — don’t realize how much power they have over what users see in Google search results. Reach global audiences and boost visibility in local search results with multi-language landing pages.
Remember that the algorithm doesn’t evaluate the simple frequency of the keyword, but analyzes the text and other elements of the page to assess if they are consistent with the search. That’s why you’ll not only hear about text optimization but also how to optimize images for SEO. As we mentioned earlier, it relies on complex search algorithms that take into consideration several factors. Even though these algorithms are not made public by Google, there are still some basic guidelines you can start from when optimizing a site.