The progress made by putting SEO techniques into practice will need to be constantly monitored. They will also need to be periodically updated to keep in line with what are “best practices”. You can learn more by reading our guide on how to perform an SEO analysis of your site. When someone does a search on a search engine such as Google, the results are shown organized in pages. The set of these results is called SERP, which means Search Engine Results Page.
Getting first-hand experience will teach you a lot about how SEO works and how to improve your skills! You can also explore our SEO FAQs to get answers to some of the most common SEO questions. So, when you practice SEO, you’ll prioritize certain factors over others. Search engine optimization has evolved since the days of Jefferson Starship, with Google becoming the leader in the industry. That’s why, when talking about SEO, most people are talking about Google SEO.
Optimizing title tags and meta descriptions
As we just mentioned, Google’s algorithm looks at hundreds of ranking factors when deciding which websites to present in the search results and in what order. SEO helps your website appear in those top 5 search results for relevant search queries to increase website traffic to your business – organically. The goal of SEO is to raise your ranking in organic search results.
It’s about weaving primary and secondary keywords naturally into the sentence, without making it feel forced. If a search term matches your description, Google highlights it in bold, giving your snippet extra visibility. But overloading your description with keywords will make BHS Links it sound robotic — and users can smell that from a mile away. Meta descriptions are important in search engines because they directly influence whether users decide to click on your page. In this guide, you’ll learn what a meta description is, why it matters for SEO, how it works, and how to write and optimize it to actually improve your search results.
How to Get Started with SEO
Nevertheless, the work of gaining search engines’ attention was already known by that time. In the unregulated landscape of SEO’s early years, Web developers were already trading and selling links—often en masse—to fool search engines into increasing their sites’ SERPs. There are many ways to improve a website’s SERP, some of which are generally approved of by the SEO industry and some of which are denounced as bad stewardship. “White hat” methods are generally recommended because they enhance a search engine’s accuracy and therefore its users’ experiences. “Gray hat” methods focus on tactics for increasing traffic that are unhelpful to users but not so detrimental as to be widely denounced.
The focus points of SEO in 2025 are still high-quality content and technical factors like site speed, security and mobile parity. But there are more aspects that Google and other search engines deem important. Search engines value these aspects because they want to present their users with websites that provide a proper user experience. A page that takes forever to load, doesn’t exist anymore, or isn’t secure, provides a terrible user experience and will not make users happy. Also, aspects such as crawlability and structured data help search engines understand what your pages are about. This helps search engines understand your relevance and allows them to rank your pages higher.
This approach ensures that one well-optimized page can rank for multiple queries naturally. Each element on a page should have a purpose within semantic search optimization so that search engines can understand the actual meaning of the content clearly. Thanks to semantic search, Google can look at related terms, links, and where those links come from in order to determine if you are looking for information on gadgets or the fruit.
- Some of the best rank tracking tools out there can help you identify the pages ranking well for your keyword, like Ahrefs.
- Search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) techniques both offer ways to increase sales, but they use different approaches.
- Editorial Staff at WebNots are team of experts who love to build websites, find tech hacks and share the learning with community.
- 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.
- To sum it up, the most important factors for Google ranking are relevancy, user experience, language, and location.
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. Creating an XML sitemap can also be a good way for larger pages to help search engines discover and crawl all of the site’s pages. Search results are presented in an ordered list, and the higher up on that list a site can get, the more traffic the site will tend to receive. For example, for a typical search query, the number one result will receive 40-60% of the total traffic for that query, with the number two and three results receiving significantly less traffic. Only 2-3% of searchers click beyond the first page of search results. Thus, even a small improvement in search engine rankings can result in a website receiving more traffic and potentially business.
This can boost brand reputation and encourage visitors to trust and engage with the brand. The word, words, or phrase that an SEO professional or marketer targets for the purpose of matching and ranking for what users are searching for. The words used on webpages can help search engines determine which pages are the most relevant to show in organic results when a searcher enters a query. Search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) techniques both offer ways to increase sales, but they use different approaches.