What is SEO: A Complete Guide to Search Engine Optimization

Second, links should help you prove to Google that you’re a trustworthy brand, and links from mediocre sites won’t let you attain that position. Yet, the link selling industry is quite alive and buying backlinks is a common practice. If you have a post about hiking tips and you have two backlinks, one from a post about outdoor sports and the other from a post about politics, the former backlink is much more valuable. Image compression is a process that removes some unnecessary image data while preserving image quality. Last but not least, make sure the physical location of the server is as close to your target audience as possible (e.g. if you target the US market, don’t have a server located in Germany).

SEO Basics: How to Do SEO for Beginners

Professionals can offer insights, strategies, and efficiencies that may be hard to achieve alone. This page on my site is optimized around the keyword “Channel Description”. Semrush did a massive Featured Snippet study (they analyzed a whopping 80 million keywords).

Keywords are relevant search terms that you want your page to appear for, and strategically adding them to your content can help you rank higher. For the next two sections, I spoke with Zoe Ashbridge, the senior SEO strategist and co-founder at forank. (Bonus, she also writes for HubSpot!) She has nearly a decade of experience in digital marketing and SEO.

A meta description is an HTML tag used to describe the content of a web page. It’s important for SEO because Google might use them as snippets for your pages in the SERPs. High-quality content is at the core of a successful SEO campaign.

Backlink strategy & link building

The grocery store can track website traffic, keyword rankings, and user interactions. Regular assessment can refine your strategy to reach the target audience better. In addition to off-page factors such as links, improving the actual structure of the page can have tremendous benefits for SEO, and is a factor that is entirely in the control of the webmaster. Updating a page’s meta tags (such as the meta description tag) can also be beneficial– these tags don’t have a direct impact on search rankings, but can increase click-through rate from the SERPs. High-quality content allows you to incorporate keywords naturally, without resorting to keyword stuffing. By focusing on topics that matter to your target audience and using keywords effectively, you can improve your visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs) for those queries.

This allows you to continually improve your website offerings and create lasting change while helping you stay on top of emerging trends such as search AI. Undoubtedly now more than ever before, local results are being influenced by real-world data. This interactivity is how searchers interact with and respond to local businesses, rather than purely static (and game-able) information like links and citations. A search engine like Google has its own proprietary index of local business listings, from which it creates local search results. Because Google will continue leveraging RankBrain to promote the most relevant, helpful content, BHS Links we need to focus on fulfilling searcher intent more than ever before. Provide the best possible information and experience for searchers who might land on your page, and you’ve taken a big first step to performing well in a RankBrain world.

• This guide contains five detailed templates that make creating super high-quality content much easier than starting from scratch.
• Having a website set up for SEO success will help Google crawl and index your pages.
• SEO is the combination of three services including On-page SEO, technical SEO and Off-page SEO.
• Every change you make will take some time to be reflected on Google’s end.
• First, Google really knows what kind of content they want to see for each query and if you check the top results, you will often see similar results.
• This module introduces you to the fundamentals of On-page SEO—what it is, why it matters, and how it fits into a broader SEO strategy.

Adding schema markup can enhance your search result appearance with rich snippets, such as star ratings, FAQs, and event details, making your listing more clickable. There are usually six levels of headings in HTML content, with the “H1” heading referring to the title. Typically limited to 160 characters, this description can deliver additional information that convinces a user to click through to the content.