SEO for Beginners: An Introduction to SEO Basics

And without links and shares, your chances of ranking in Google are pretty much zero. One thing to note is that you don’t want to go overboard and use your keyword 100x on every page. That’s a black hat SEO strategy called “keyword stuffing”, which can get your site penalized. That enticing description “steals” clicks from the sites ranking above me. Now I’d like to share a few examples of the type of high-quality content that’s working really well in 2021. To succeed with search engine optimization today, your site needs to put out AMAZING stuff on a consistent basis. You can use the average monthly searches you get in the GKP to figure out which keywords get tons of searches… and which keywords don’t get searched for very much.

National with a local focus

Search Intent (also sometimes called “User Intent”) is the primary reason that someone performs a search. As it turns out, there are four main types of Search Intents. You can easily track changes in organic traffic over time. If you see a chart like this, you’re probably on the right track. I don’t think that HTTPS is a super important ranking factor. In fact, Google has referred to HTTPS as a “tiebreaker”. Google gives a slight edge in the search results for websites that are secure with HTTPS.

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Google ran evaluations and felt confident the impact would be minor. When doing SEO for blog posts, you’ll want to add both internal and external links. They keep users engaged with your pages, enhance the quality of the information, and provide opportunities for you to rank and generate traffic to their host pages through image results. Plus, Google has increasingly been making the SERP more visual. WordStream by LOCALiQ is your go-to source for data and insights in the world of digital marketing. Check out our award-winning blog, free tools and other resources that make online advertising easy. If you're serious about improving search traffic we do recommend reading the Beginner's Guide to SEO front-to-back.

Off-site optimization

If your business is transactional and you have an e-commerce element, you’ll want to set your objectives around tracking sales and lead conversions. However, if you're a non-ecommerce commercial site, you’ll want to focus on lead generations. If RankBrain sees a word or phrase it isn’t familiar with, it uses artificial intelligence to understand it better by connecting it to similar search queries. From this list, listen to each podcast to understand their angle on the topic. Podcasting is becoming very prevalent, but not all have a website. Find podcasts with websites where they promote or reuse the content in written form. Use pitch request lists like Help a Reporter Out or #journorequest hashtag on Twitter, develop a pitch deck for a specific subject matter expert at the company, and identify relevant requests.

One black hat technique uses hidden text, either as text colored similar to the background, in an invisible div, or positioned off-screen. Another method gives a different page depending on whether the page is being requested by a human visitor or a search engine, a technique known as cloaking. This is in between the black hat and white hat approaches, where the methods employed avoid the site being penalized but do not act in producing the best content for users.

For most of us today, when we need something—whether it’s an answer, idea, strategy, or service—we start by asking search engines. So just as search engines have become integral to our lives, so, too, has it become integral to many business marketing strategies. In fact, organic search is considered to be the highest ROI channel by 49% of marketers. This technique is deployed to enhance a site's rankings through activities outside of the website. This type of activity is driven largely by backlinks. Businesses can generate these from partnerships, social media marketing and guest blogging on other sites. Search engines use bots to crawl all website pages, downloading and storing that information into a collection known as an index.

Backlinks from higher credibility sites are, of course, more valuable than those from lower credibility sites. The more high-quality backlinks you have, the higher you’ll rank.