This terminology is quite dated, but it is useful to understand, as it splits practices that can be performed on a website, and away from a website. The algorithmic (‘natural’, ‘organic’, or ‘free’) search results are those that appear directly below the top pay-per-click adverts in Google, as highlighted below. If you have a brick-and-mortar store, more web traffic can even increase in-person visits from potential customers.

  • Early search engines, like AltaVista and Infoseek, used these tags to index content.
  • Much of this falls under the realm of local SEO but there are plenty of brand-buiding strategies that apply to non-brick-and-mortar businesses too.
  • Sure, there are some content marketing essentials to keep in mind like budgeting, tools, and promotion, but you can’t get away from having content people want to read.
  • Leverage browser caching to store frequently used resources locally on users’ devices.

In essence, getting backlinks is a combination of both, with a few helpful hacks along the way. Because our content is arguably better than the competition, we might not need as many links as them, but we would still need a few, let’s say 10 to 20. This is not scientific, but probably a reasonably accurate guess. There are several ways to determine the quality or “authority” of a backlink.

what is seo

Understanding on-page SEO

Optimizing your landing pages with keywords can improve your Google’s Quality Score and increase your site’s visibility. Search engines want to point their users toward sites with an enjoyable user experience. A website that forces them to wait—even just a few extra seconds—can dampen their experience. Best practices for producing relevant SEO content include offering original information, updating facts regularly, and sticking to topics within your website’s area of expertise. With more than two decades of experience, we bring tried-and-true SEO methods to your campaigns. And we have specialists in every aspect of SEO and digital marketing.

what is seo

If not, let your site builder help you out or hire someone with a background in technical SEO. When that’s done, you can start looking at site structure and the content on your pages. After ensuring proper crawling and indexing, focus on user experience factors such as page speed, website security, and mobile-friendliness. Use Semrush’s Link Building Tool to start building quality backlinks.

what is seo

Backlinks

what is seo

They can also appear when Google feels that a “normal” search needs a few local results. For example, if you search for “plumber”, Google knows that you’re probably looking for a plumber nearby. In fact, I usually specifically target terms with lots of ads and a high “commercial intent”. Which means that your organic result has a good chance of getting clicked on. On the other hand, the SERP for “link building” is much less busy.

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You may find it easier to start with the core content of the page and let that inform the rest of your on-page SEO strategy. When writing your content, ensure your target keyword is present in your H1 title to aid higher ranking. Incorporate your keywords naturally throughout the rest of your body text, making sure it is present in the first 100 words. Keyword optimization involves finding phrases, words and language relevant to what your target audience is searching for and including them on your web pages.

It means you’ll notice your page organic rankings going up if your page loads faster and rankings going down if they take too much time to load. Once you know the backlink sources of any domain, you can use various link building strategies like blogger outreach, broken link building, guest posting etc to acquire those links to your site. Make sure to find the right blogs in your industry to get started with your guest blogging journey. You can use the following Google search strings to find relevant blogs and websites in your niche to write guest posts. Here are some useful tips to make your website navigation structure simple to both your website users and search engine crawlers.

I recommend keeping tabs on important pieces of content, rather than just your total website traffic. For more on how to optimize for these, check out our guide to featured SEO Anomaly snippets. Because a lot of your audience won’t read every word from the first to the last. And using helpful subheadings makes it much easier for them to find what they need.

A website that has many high-quality backlinks will typically rank higher than other websites with fewer, and less valuable backlinks. When actively building links, it’s important to avoid black hat activities, and rather focus on more organic link building. On-page SEO is the practice of optimizing individual web pages in order to rank higher and earn greater and more relevant traffic through search engines. On-page refers to optimizing both the content of a page and the HTML source code of that page. Effective on-page SEO helps users quickly find answers to their questions. Some key elements of on-page SEO include creating high-quality, relevant, linkable content, effective use of keywords, optimizing title tags, URLs, meta descriptions, image alt text, and more.