If you’ve read anything about SEO before, you’ll know there’s lots of industry jargon. But to keep things simple for now, here are a few key terms and concepts you should know. To stay current with the latest SEO best practices and algorithm updates, follow reputable industry blogs, attend conferences, and participate in online communities.
Mobile-friendliness
- He also speaks to website eowners every day looking for backlinging opportunities.
- This type of SEO focuses on both the page’s content and HTML source code, including title tags, header tags, and meta description, so that it appeals to web users and search engine crawlers.
- Keyword research is the process of discovering search terms (i.e., keywords) that relevant audiences type in search engines.
- Your portfolio is your first impression, your foot in the door—it must engage your audience and stand out against the hundreds of others they might be reviewing.
SEO involves various techniques, from keyword integration, sitemaps creation, and meta tags to link building and producing high-quality, engaging content, to name a few. The goal is to reach the top of search engine results pages (SERPs), specifically on Google, Bing, and Yahoo, among others, when users input certain keywords. If you’re new to SEO, you may wonder how to create an SEO strategy. Here’s a step-by-step process to follow as you seek to improve organic traffic.
Don’t Ignore Voice Search
In other words, Google considers it a commercial, not a transactional keyword. Many keyword research guides recommend focusing on the so-called long-tail keywords – keywords that are more specific and usually consist of more words. Your goal is to find relevant keywords with high search volumes and low keyword difficulty – an ideal combination of the three most important factors of keyword research. Besides the keyword suggestions, professional tools offer other useful SEO metrics and insights to evaluate the keywords and pick the best ones. So they can save you a lot of time and give you a competitive advantage. In the last 25 years, search engines moved from pure text-based evaluation to the machine learning age.
Google’s Hummingbird update recognizes variations of keywords, improving your content’s relevance and ranking. Keyword tools, such as Google Keyword Planner or SEMrush, help you find keywords with the right balance of search volume and competitiveness for your content. Image Alt Text provides better image context/descriptions to search engine crawlers, helping them to index an image properly. It improves website accessibility for people with poor vision or those using screen readers. Also known as robots or spiders, these are automated software programs that search engines use to scan or ‘crawl’ websites on the internet, collect information, and create an index.
SEO is about making improvements to your website’s structure and content so its pages can be discovered by people searching for what you have to offer, through search engines. Organic Searches refers to unpaid listing in Search engine result page (SERP). These results are based on multiple factors such as keyword relevance, domain authority, page authority, backlinks. Effective keyword research lets you find topics your audience cares about and understand the search intent (the goal behind the SEO Anomaly search), so you can create effective content.
Search intent
SEO means optimizing your website to rank for keywords and phrases relevant to your business. Because, ultimately, SEO isn’t only about being found on search engines and driving traffic to your website. It’s about providing a great experience and generating leads and revenue.