Basic technical knowledge will help you optimize your site for search engines and establish credibility with developers. 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.
It is crucial to implement the best practices with so many SEO factors influencing your website’s search engine rankings. Applying wrong and outdated SEO strategies will not only harm your rankings but can also impact your traffic and conversions. Technical SEO is the process of optimizing your website’s technical aspects to ensure it meets the criteria of a search engine algorithm. This includes speed optimization, mobile-friendliness, and website architecture. 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. If your website runs on WordPress, you can use one of the top SEO plugins to assist you in these areas.
- Meanwhile, SEM uses paid strategies to increase a website’s visibility on search engines.
- Now, you’re ready to start practicing SEO on your site — and SEO.com can help.
- Search engine optimization works by optimizing the above buckets to meet search engine best practices.
- With 58% of searches coming from mobile devices, Google prioritizes mobile-optimized websites.
Technical SEO: Optimizing the Foundation of Your Website
Thus, it is important to know what SEO keyword research is and perform it efficiently. We have listed some of the best practices to improve SEO and keep you ahead of the competition. Thus, creating SEO-friendly content with these factors in mind can significantly boost your search results. As part of the Search team, she enjoys creating content that helps you master SEO. The reason that so many (big) companies heavily invest in SEO is the high impact that it can have when done right.
Internal vs. external links
One of the reasons why content updates may have a positive impact on your rankings is that Google notices the frequency of updates and tends to favor frequently updated pages for some queries. No matter how successful a piece of content is, there’s a big chance the traffic will gradually decrease unless you keep it fresh and updated. Content length and comprehensiveness basically checks that “expert” box. You must be an expert on the topic you’re writing about, and you must prove it when you write content. Nowadays, ranking for almost any keyword is much harder than it was in the past – most niches are oversaturated. What they mean is that you should find synonyms and related keywords and “sprinkle them” across the page to make sure Google knows what it’s about.
The search engine optimization process involves optimizing each of these core components of search engine algorithms in order to rank higher in the search results. SEM stands for Search Engine Marketing, which is just another way of saying search marketing. It’s a broad term that includes both SEO and PPC, all aiming to drive traffic to your site through organic (unpaid) and paid efforts. In simple terms, search marketing is about getting visibility and traffic from search engines using both paid and unpaid strategies. Search engine optimization (SEO) is the art and science of getting pages to rank higher in search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo.
“The position of the backlink on the page does not play any role in SEO.”
Unlike paid advertising, this traffic is sustainable and grows when you maintain optimization efforts. Once crawled, pages are analyzed and stored in the search engine’s index, a massive database of web content. Indexed pages can appear in search results when users enter relevant queries. As SEO has evolved, so have the ideas and practices (and at times, misconceptions) related to it.
To deliver a great user experience (UX), you must make it convenient, safe, and enjoyable for your target audience to interact with your website. Publishing helpful SEO Anomaly content that’s specific to your target audience is one of the best SEO practices because it can make Google perceive your website as more authoritative and useful. So, look for opportunities to link to related pages when writing your content.