What is SEO? A Search Engine Optimization Guide

And it can also give your search engines a better understanding of your content. Start off by creating a few blog posts and work to build a following on social BHS Links media. By creating more engaging and effective SEO-focused content, you can increase your chances of bringing in more targeted organic website traffic. By improving your SEO, you can work to expand your visibility on the search engines. You will try to optimize this blog post so that when people search for the target keyword “build a birdhouse”, it will show up as a top result.

Many of them have been officially confirmed by Google but many remain in the realm of speculations and theories. From the practical point of view, it’s important to focus on factors that have a proven impact but also try to keep a “good score” across all the areas. The only question is whether you are willing to invest some time into learning all the aspects of SEO, or you’ll hire a professional and invest your time into something else. While SEO experts agree that “white hat” is the way to go, there are different opinions on the acceptability of various link building techniques (including link buying). On-page SEO is everything you can do on the website – from the optimization of content through technical aspects. SEO is all the actions you do to make Google consider your website a quality source and rank it higher for your desired search queries.

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While traditional ranking factors still have weight, there’s also the need to cater to AI-driven algorithms when structuring the content and site navigation. Backlinks, or links to your site from other websites, are the third most important Google ranking factor. Backlinks from higher credibility sites are, of course, more valuable than those from lower credibility sites. The more high-quality backlinks you have, the higher you’ll rank. SEO, or search engine optimization, is the lowest-cost and most effective ways to drive traffic to your website.

What Is SEO and How Can It Increase Your Website Traffic?

• With over 3.6M monthly visitors from just SEO (8.4M/month total according to SimilarWeb), Angi has mastered the “near me” service types of keywords.
• Meta tags are snippets of text, formatted as HTML code, that describe the content of a webpage.
• In other words, those seemingly small factors, like keywords in URL, that on their own make up 1%, are not so small.
• Remember to tell Google Search Console what your sitemap URL is, keep it up to date.

Search engines are more likely to rank a neutral comparison page over comparisons from a website building company. Whether your website exists to sell a product, promote your services, or showcase your portfolio, good copywriting will go a long way in helping search engines index your website. Don’t forget to include keywords in copy throughout your website, but don’t go overboard either. Focus on writing useful, helpful content for your customers first. That will allow for keywords to appear naturally anyway while supporting your SEO efforts.

The good news is that you don’t have to be an SEO expert to start. Whether you’re brand new to SEO, or want to learn advanced strategies, this is your hub for SEO knowledge. It’s time to wrap up this Google SEO starter guide with a few advanced strategies and tactics that SEO pros use. This emphasizes to Google that your page is focused on that keyword and topic.

You can actually do more harm than good by trying to use the keyword a certain number of times in your text. It is best practice to use your focus keyword in the H1 heading of the page. Whereas the query “best vacuum cleaners” has a lot less search volume (13,000 average monthly search volume). But the query is much more commercial in nature and will for sure generate more revenue which is why Google is showing buying guides instead of Walmart product page. That’s because the calculations are based on slightly different metrics and algorithms. With the autocomplete feature, you just need to write your seed keyword into the Google search and the suggestions will appear automatically.