When that’s done, you can start looking at site structure and the content on your pages. Alex Chris is a digital marketing consultant, author, and instructor. He has more than 18 years of practical experience with SEO and digital marketing. Alex holds an MSc Degree in eCommerce and has consulted with Fortune 500 companies in different industries. He blogs regularly about SEO and Digital marketing, and his work has been referenced by leading marketing websites.Connect with Alex on Twitter and LinkedIn. As the name implies, technical SEO has to do with optimizing the technical aspects of a website.
Higher rankings lead to more clicks to your website, and that means more potential customers for your business. Keyword research is the process of finding & analyzing what relevant audiences search for in search engines. It most commonly involves link building, which is the process of getting other high-quality websites to link to your website. Search engine marketing (SEM) promotes a business through unpaid or paid results on search engines, often both. Once crawled, pages are analyzed and stored in the search engine’s index, a massive database of web content.
Google SEO Fundamentals
For example, use text and background colors with optimal contrast and have a responsive design that adapts to the device, like desktop vs. tablet. When it comes to SEO, you need on-site SEO to rank — and rank well — in search results. This guide will help you become more data-driven in your SEO efforts.
While small, using an attractive, eye-catching favicon can help make your listing stand out. Using structured data is the most straightforward, least ambiguous way to define your breadcrumbs to Google. Be sure to validate your results using one of the validators mentioned above. Make sure you create descriptive, unique titles that accurately describe what a visitor will find on the page. If you performed a site crawl using a recommended SEO tool (step 1) it should highlight any major issues that might prevent your site from being indexed. If you believe a site/page should be indexed, and it’s not, there are a few basic steps you can perform.
Case Study: Earning 131% more leads with our SEO services
One of the most popular ways to build off-page SEO is through backlinks. Though you don’t have direct control over these off-page factors, there are ways for you to improve your chances of having these factors work out in your favor. In addition to the on-page SEO elements that your organization has control over, there are also off-page SEO factors that can impact your ranking. This goes beyond just your content marketing to the deeper levels of your site’s HTML. This means that you can work to improve these factors over time by following best practices for SEO. Once you have a group of loyal fans and followers, your organization can work to create different types of media to attract and engage new leads.
For example, HubSpot’s SEO Marketing Software includes tools that help you optimize your content and execute your SEO strategy. You’ll get a list of issues to fix ranked based on importance and detailed insight into why those issues matter to prepare you for the future. Search engines follow similar principles for both local and global rankings. However, given that they position a site for specific, location-based results, they need to analyze some other ranking factors, too.
In the previous section on crawling, we discussed how search engines discover your web pages. After a crawler finds a page, the search engine renders it just like a browser would. In the process of doing so, the search engine analyzes that page’s contents.
- This determines the ranking of results shown to the online searcher.
- So in addition to using that term a handful of times on my page (more on that next), I also added a few related keywords to the page.
- Increase your site’s visibility and rankings with search engine optimization, content marketing, and link building.
- Although websites have been around for a little while longer, people started optimizing their sites for search engines in the mid-1990s.
Target localized keywords
The robots meta tag can be used within the of the HTML of your webpage. The following are the most common meta directives, along with what situations you might apply them in. Some individuals believe that if they place a search box on their site, search engines SEO Anomaly will be able to find everything that their visitors search for. Googlebot starts out by fetching a few web pages, and then follows the links on those webpages to find new URLs. Audit your pages regularly to ensure they are well-optimized and aligned with the latest search engine guidelines and user expectations.
You can pitch your business or products to relevant websites or news outlets with the same target audience. If you have subject-matter expertise, consider pitching a guest blog post that points back to your website. You can also focus on your blog and create useful content—such as infographics, case studies, white papers, surveys, or statistics—that others will want to reference. By getting to know your competitors’ SEO strategies, you can formulate tactics that will help you climb the search rankings and overtake them. With high-quality, relevant, and comprehensive content, even small businesses can leverage SEO to outrank larger competitors and reach customers first.