What Is SEO Marketing? Guide to SEO Best Practices
SEO experts used to closely monitor ranking positions, clicks, website traffic and stats like bounce rates. Naturally, all of this data is still relevant, but there has been a shift in what goals to focus on. Search behavior has changed, and search engines are showing your content in many different ways. You need to focus on the overall perception of your brand and being present in the right places. More people are using AI tools for their online searches and search engines are also investing in providing AI-driven search experiences.
Content optimization
On-page optimization, also called on-page SEO, ensures that search engines a.) understand a page’s topic and keywords and b.) can match it to relevant searches. To optimize a site, you need to improve ranking factors in three areas — technical website setup, content, and links. Google, the leading search engine website, constantly updates its algorithms and indexing processes, so it’s essential to stay updated with current trends. Knowing what Google looks for in indexing and ranking is crucial for keeping your SEO strategies relevant and useful. There would be no point to links if they didn’t direct searchers to something.
- For example, use text and background colors with optimal contrast and have a responsive design that adapts to the device, like desktop vs. tablet.
- Either way, you’ll get an idea of how hard (or easy) each keyword is to rank for.
- SEO, however, has a lot of aspects from on-page to off-page and backlinking to interlinking.
- Optimizing website images can improve load times, accessibility, and search visibility.
- AI is also streamlining content creation and keyword research, helping businesses identify trends and structure information more effectively.
- While all credible links will boost the general authority of your website, the specific page that the link points to receives the most benefit.
In fact, it’s extremely difficult to rank without external links, and the top sites on the internet are typically the ones with the most number of high quality links. Your meta descriptions should offer a compelling reason for users to click your results. A dead-simple way to do this is to use important keywords in your description.
If you don’t have access to GSC, sign up for a free Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (AWT) account. You can optimize server location with a content distribution network (CDN). This creates copies of your site on servers around the world so it’s always served from close to the user. If you find that speed is an issue, you can invest in a CDN later on.
Step 1: Understand SEO Basics
Search engines also look at site structure and design, visitor behavior, and other external, off-site factors to determine how highly ranked your site should be in their SERPs. We suggest thinking of a number of topics that are related to your brand and using these as driving forces in your keyword research and content creation. In recent years, Google has gotten better at understanding that beyond the specific words that pages can be optimized for, there are overarching topics that pages can provide an answer for. Instead of searching for just one keyword upon which to base your SEO strategy, consider the general group of keywords that your page could rank for based on the given topic. You can still choose a top keyword to use in your page title or URL, but think about your pages as providing complete answers to the topic, rather than focusing solely on that one keyword.
The Three Pillars of SEO
It’s more important to choose a domain name that is memorable, easy to type, and aligns with your brand. If it can naturally include a keyword without forcing it, that’s a bonus, but the overall quality and authority of your website play a much larger role in your SEO marketing performance. In October 2019, Google announced they would start applying BERT models for English language search queries in the US.
To capture this audience, integrate natural language phrases and question-based keywords (who, what, where, when, why, and how) into your content. This approach makes it more likely for your content to match voice search queries. As the popularity of voice-activated devices continues to rise, optimizing your website for voice search has become a crucial part of SEO strategy. Each of these factors plays a role in how well your site ranks for relevant search queries.
Identify gaps, outdated information, or underperforming pieces that need improvement. Use this analysis to inform your future content creation and optimization efforts. Before developing new content, assess your existing content assets. Conduct a content audit to evaluate your content’s performance, relevance, and quality. Good, helpful, engaging content is vital for getting other sites to link to yours naturally.
While they’ve never used SEO Anomaly the term “direct ranking signal,” Google has been clear that they absolutely use click data to modify the SERP for particular queries. Like most things with the search engine, we don’t know exactly what comprises RankBrain, but apparently, neither do the folks at Google. Information architecture is the practice of organizing and labeling content on a website to improve efficiency and findability for users. The best information architecture is intuitive, meaning that users shouldn’t have to think very hard to flow through your website or to find something.
