Search Engine Optimization SEO: The 4 Types You Need to Know

All you need to do is enter a product keyword or informational keyword into it. But the best all-around free keyword tool is Google’s Keyword Planner. I recommend typing keyword ideas into Google and jotting down any suggestions that come up. Here’s where you drill down into the exact words and phrases that customers type into the search box. Considering that the first result in Google gets around 20% of all clicks, that’s 22,000 visitors to your website each month if you show up at the top. According to the Google Keyword Planner, 110,000 people search for “party supplies” every single month. And now it’s time to put this stuff into practice with a step-by-step SEO tutorial.

We've tried to make it as concise and easy to understand as possible, and learning the basics of SEO is a vital first step in achieving your online business goals. SEO is a channel that drives the traffic you need to achieve key business goals (e.g., conversions, visits, sales). It also builds trust – a website that ranks well is generally regarded as authoritative or trustworthy, which are key elements Google wants to reward with better rankings. It is an umbrella term for the combination of SEO and PPC activities meant to drive traffic via organic search and paid search. Search engines crawl the web, following links from page to page, and index the content found.

Optimizing search traffic: from clicks to conversions

The third step is really the most important step, and that is ranking. Ranking can only happen after the crawling and indexing steps are complete. So once a search engine has crawled and indexed your site, your site can be ranked. When it comes to the share of traffic, roughly 20% to 30% of searchers click on paid results, and 70% to 80% of searchers click on SEO results. So the lion’s share of clicks are actually on the organic results. The strategies below can work for any of the website types listed. However, if the site runs an active content marketing program, specific strategies will work better than others.

SEO Basics: Beginner’s Guide to SEO Success

Set them up to include as little beyond the main keyword for which you want to optimize the page, as possible. As a result, it cannot see an image on the page (note the element marked with an arrow.) It only recognizes its name. If that image contained an important keyword we’d want the page to rank for, it would be invisible to the search engine. But over time, SEOs have identified some of the factors they consider when ranking a page. We refer to them as ranking factors, and they are the focus of an SEO strategy. Relevancy between the search query and the content on a page. Search engines assess it by various factors like topic or keywords.

​​Every SEO participant is not on the same journey.

Search engine optimization is the process of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic to a website or a web page from search engines. SEO targets unpaid traffic (known as "natural" or "organic" results) rather than direct traffic or paid traffic. Unpaid traffic may originate from different kinds of searches, including image search, video search, academic search, news search, and industry-specific vertical search engines. But make no mistake about the factors at the bottom of this list.

There are tools and analytics data that can be tapped into to measure the effectiveness of SEO efforts. Google Analytics can provide comprehensive data around organic traffic. Data includes pages that customers engaged with and keywords used in search. That data can then be cross-referenced with intended actions taken to see how SEO played a role in customer engagement or acquisition. Along with that and the localized content on the website, a user will be more likely to see local search results in their queries. Think of off-page SEO as an online version of word-of-mouth referrals. These SEO activities occur externally and tell search engines that your website is trustworthy and relevant.

In general, the better content you put out there, the higher you’ll rank. But it’s a good rule of thumb to follow as you write content for SEO. Once you get the hang of SEO, you can start targeting more competitive keywords. But when you’re just starting out, stick to long-tail terms. You also have keywords your target audience uses when they’re not specifically looking for what you sell .