H2 headings should include your keyword and be used to organize major themes, while H3s and H4s are for introducing smaller concepts. Content alone does not attract people to your website if it is not well-researched and optimized. Think about how you can create something interesting that has the potential to be shared, while also being easy for SEO Anomaly Google to understand. Your content will do nothing for your SEO if it is not engaging, valuable, and attention-grabbing. There are endless amounts of content formats to choose from, but, in general, opt for a format that your target audience consumes regularly and that is sustainable for you to produce. In fact, using groups of related keywords will help give your content a better shot at positioning on Google as well as provide more opportunities to answer queries.

what is seo

What does showing up on Google Maps mean for your business

It accomplishes this with a combination of high-quality content that’s relevant to internet users’ needs and an outstanding user experience. Although websites have been around for a little while longer, people started optimizing their sites for search engines in the mid-1990s. The algorithms that search engines used were way less advanced and relied on ranking factors like keyword density to determine the relevance of a page. The ‘trick’ back then was making sure the keyword was being used enough times throughout your page and in your meta tags.

Prepare for the New Algorithm

what is seo

Organic search results show up under paid ads and rank based on hundreds of factors. Research shows that organic search drives 53% of site traffic while paid search brings 15%. By applying SEO fundamentals and best practices, sites can improve their overall user experience and drive more traffic to their products and services. It’s important to understand what people are searching for online, and knowing how to answer their questions will connect you right to them.

Off-page SEO refers to actions taken outside your website to improve search engine rankings. It builds authority and credibility by showing search engines that others value your content. After indexing, search engines rank pages based on relevance, quality, and user experience. Pages that best match a search query appear higher in results, driving more clicks.

what is seo

These work so well that I try to include at least one chart in every post. In fact, here are 4 types of visual content that are super easy to pull off. That’s why I invest a lot of my marketing budget into content design. And this Search Intent optimization helped my post crack the first page of Google within a month. Specifically, you want to link from high-authority web pages to pages that need more authority. A while ago I noticed more and more bloggers writing about voice search.

what is seo

If you do own a website, having a distinct online presence offers more opportunities to increase the visibility of your business online, among many other benefits. Any way you can advertise your business and its products or services through digital channels and technologies constitutes a digital marketing technique or tactic. External links are not the only thing that matters for SEO, internal links (the links within one’s own website) play a large role in SEO as well.

  • We use Ahrefs to estimate how much monthly traffic the top 3 URLs are getting.
  • Your goal with SEO is to influence search engines to ‘trust’ your website, and knowing how they actually rank websites will help you make better decisions.
  • A secure website instills confidence in users and search engines, contributing to improved rankings and reputation.
  • Pages that are linked from other search engine-indexed pages do not need to be submitted because they are found automatically.
  • On-page SEO is everything you can do on the website – from the optimization of content through technical aspects.

Typically, SEO outcomes become visible once a website undergoes crawling and indexing by a search engine. You can learn SEO by starting with the fundamentals, understanding the four pillars of SEO, staying abreast of Google’s SEO policies, and learning new SEO strategies as they develop. With many businesses competing for traffic, ensuring your website appears on the first page of online search results can be challenging.

what is seo

Strategies for Off-Page SEO

For example, if your website is brand new, it doesn’t make sense to try to rank for super competitive keywords with a KD of 90+. You can easily find dozens of trending topics and keywords with a free tool called Exploding Topics. And in my experience, it will sometimes spit out a GREAT keyword that you’d be hard pressed to find in any other keyword tool.