If you know your way around redirects, optimizing page speed, crawlability, security and structured data, make those your first priority. If not, let your site builder help you out or hire someone with a background in technical SEO. When that’s done, you can start looking at site structure and the content on your pages. In 1998, two graduate students at Stanford University, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, developed „Backrub“, a search engine that relied on a mathematical algorithm to rate the prominence of web pages. In effect, this means that some links are stronger than others, as a higher PageRank page is more likely to be reached by the random web surfer.
How Does Google Makes Money?
Google introduced a filter in 2012 that reduces the visibility of sites reported for numerous DMCA-related takedown requests. This content isn’t used in ranking algorithms, but is often displayed as the “snippet that appears in the search results. Accurate and engaging descriptions can increase organic click-through rate. A major Google algorithm that launched in April 2012, it was followed by a series of updates and refreshes. The goal of Penguin was to reduce the visibility of overly-optimized sites, or sites that excessively abused certain spammy tactics (e.g., building low-quality links, keyword stuffing). In 2016, Penguin started running in real-time as a part of Google’s core algorithm.
Intentionally provocative content that is meant to grab people’s attention and attract links from other websites. The process of searching for information (e.g., text, images, video) from a large database and then presenting the most relevant information to an end user. An authoritative central resource (e.g., page or article), dedicated to a specific topic (keyword), that is continually updated and linked to, and also links out to topically-relevant webpages. HTML tags are specific code elements that can be used to improve the effectiveness of SEO for webpages and websites. A SEO Anomaly major Google algorithm change officially introduced in October 2015, although it had been in testing for months before this.
When search engines pull data from multiple speciality databases to display on the same SERP. Results can include images, videos, news, shopping, and other types of results. An umbrella term for increasing a website’s visibility in search engine results pages, encompassing both paid and organic activities.
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. When I started out, I worried too much about using the main keyword. Now, search engines can read context when I include variations and keep the writing natural. I have seen many articles get lost on page three of search results because they were too vague or poorly structured for search engines to assess properly. Even the best ideas can go unnoticed if the content is not optimized. Making sure your material is SEO friendly helps it get noticed and receive more organic clicks.
Perform final checks and publish your content
Having an XML sitemap is a plus, and can greatly improve the way search engine spiders crawl and find content on your website. Check out the free Technical SEO Site Audit Checklist to quickly check your own website’s technical SEO performance. By optimizing your website’s content, structure, and technical aspects, SEO helps improve its ranking on search engines. A higher ranking leads to more visibility and traffic, which can translate into more leads and sales. This can be achieved through several tactics, such as keyword research, on-page optimization, technical optimization, and link building.
- The more relevant and interesting your content is, the more likely others will be to link to your content and share it on social media.
- You need to make sure that these users are able to view, read, and navigate your website from their mobile devices.
- This can lead to fewer clicks to your website, but it still pays off to be the website that provides that answer.
- The web pages which follow the best practices outrank every other web page in the competition and rank on top for those keywords.
- For example, a well-optimized blog post can be shared across social media platforms to drive immediate engagement, while SEO efforts promote long-term visibility in search results.
As it turns out, high-quality backlinks tend to share the same key traits. Enhanced search listings can bring you more traffic by standing out on SERPs, or by adding your store to local search results and in Google Maps. As you can see, there are a lot of things you can do to make your content search engine-friendly. You’ll find these and many other actionable tips in our checklist on how to optimize your blog posts for SEO like a pro. Finally, you might be interested to learn that there is a growing number of excellent AI SEO tools that you can use to optimize your website.
Broken Link Building
This helps you reach your target audience and engage more potential customers. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and is the all-encompassing process of helping your website rank higher in the search engine results. On the other hand, if you search for something like “Atlanta Falcons,” your results will be different. Because this search is mostly tied to the professional American football team by that name, the top results relate to that. If you were to search the word “shoes,” for example, you’d likely find a substantial number of the top results are ads.