What is SEO, how it works & learning SEO in 6 simple steps

The key to an effective SEO strategy is to ensure your website contains engaging and valuable content for your users and that the content is easily searchable. Keeping your content fresh and routinely updating websites can also provide valuable benefits. After all, search engines want to display quality content to their audience. Avoiding poor SEO practices ensures you establish an effective digital marketing strategy for your website. Content optimization, also known as on-page SEO, focuses on enhancing the quality and relevance of your website’s content to improve its ranking on search engines. This involves strategically using relevant keywords, optimizing title tags and meta descriptions, and ensuring SEO Anomaly that your content is engaging and informative.

• For example, this page is optimized around the keyword “SEO strategy”.
• This step is also where you write titles and descriptions that make people want to click on your result… even when you don’t rank #1.
• When it comes to how it approaches search, Google looks at millions of web pages to come up with the most relevant information for users.

The Authority for All Things SEO

First, a search engine like Google sends out robots called crawlers to search the internet for new pieces of linkable content. This content can include websites, videos, documents, and images. The crawlers then “read” the content through its hyperlinks and sitemaps. SEO differs from paid search engine advertising because you optimize your website so that it shows up organically when a user is searching for something. Focusing on user experience and using non-manipulative tactics will likely help your website appear in top results since indexing and crawling constantly evolve. As a result, it is more important than ever to use SEO strategies wisely to make your website visible to your intended audience.

Website Optimization

The Cut has built a real brand that spreads beyond just search engines. They have a newsletter, partner with other brands in the space, and have social media accounts with 1M+ followers. Cadence helped the document processing service provider by securing high-quality backlinks from authoritative industry sources.

High-quality backlinks from reputable and relevant sites significantly boost rankings. However, link-building strategies should focus on organic growth rather than manipulative tactics to avoid penalties from search engines. Technical SEO is the process of optimizing a website’s technical aspects to improve that website’s visibility and ranking on the SERPs. Improving technical aspects can help search engine spiders crawl your website more effectively, and improve the usability of your site. It’s great having well-thought-out and useful content, but if a search engine can’t crawl your website, it’s likely that very few people will actually see it.

A well-written title tag and meta description is your only chance to catch the user’s attention in the SERP. If your blog content area width is 800px, it is an overkill to use 2500px-wide images. One of the most common “mistakes” I see is that people don’t make their headlines clickable, especially when it comes to blogs. If it contains the focus keyword, you let Google know what the page you’re linking to is about.

These pages are generated from a template and populated with data from a database. The challenge is that search engines try to be secretive about how the algorithms work, leading SEOs to rely on trial and error to understand what works best. That said, the SEO community has gleaned many insights, which is why the Google Algorithm Leak of 2024 was not Earth-shattering.

This way the search engine has a whole index or database of results that it can now display for the search queries that it gets. Staying curious and excited to learn about new SEO strategies is key to enjoying the process. This allows you to continually improve your website offerings and create lasting change while helping you stay on top of emerging trends such as search AI. To help bolster your SEO efforts, here’s a collection of free and paid keyword research tools, backlink analysis software, and more. To sum it up, the most important factors for Google ranking are relevancy, user experience, language, and location.

It’s about creating a well-balanced strategy that includes high-quality content, researched phrases, and keywords that your audience is actively searching for. If you understand what your audience wants, you’ll be able to use effective SEO methods to increase engagement to meet your business’s goals. It is important to find a balance between creating content that is valuable to the user and optimizing that content for search engines.

This is especially important when it comes to rich snippets and it’s a great way to instantly boost your content to the top. H2 headings should include your keyword and be used to organize major themes, while H3s and H4s are for introducing smaller concepts. Content alone does not attract people to your website if it is not well-researched and optimized. Think about how you can create something interesting that has the potential to be shared, while also being easy for Google to understand. Your content will do nothing for your SEO if it is not engaging, valuable, and attention-grabbing. There are endless amounts of content formats to choose from, but, in general, opt for a format that your target audience consumes regularly and that is sustainable for you to produce.

The Top 4 Local SEO Ranking Factors to Optimize for in 2025

Discover actionable steps to amplify your brand’s online presence, drive organic traffic, increase lead quality, and accelerate business growth. Understanding is critical to SGE rankings, with a recent study finding that simplifying language improved AI Overview rankings. When possible, use an 8th- to 11th-grade reading level to create easy-to-understand content for users and AI to summarize. Below is our data-backed research into Google’s SGE ranking factors. Don’t get caught up in the change debate just make sure social signals are part of your social media SEO strategy now.

Data privacy

With structured data, websites can provide more information about their content, products or services, and offerings to Google and LLMs. In 2025, SEO success depends on great user experience, mobile-friendly sites, and quality content. Properly optimized images not only improve user experience but also help search engines better understand and index the content, which can lead to higher rankings. As mentioned, search engines continue working on their algorithms to improve their users’ experience. 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.

The caveat is that the backlink profile has to be free of any evidence of link schemes. If your keyword is missing from those areas, you’ll be prompted to add it. Lastly, ensure your shopping cart checkout has minimal steps and is easy to use. Make sure all sign-up forms and interactive elements work, on both desktop and mobile. Site owners can use Google PageSpeed Insights to assess their site speed and performance and compare it to competitors.

On-page SEO refers to optimizing individual web pages to improve their ranking in search engine results and attract more relevant traffic. To excel in voice search optimization, it’s crucial to understand the intent behind voice searches and to provide clear, concise, and direct answers to those queries. This might involve creating FAQ pages, optimizing for featured snippets, or using schema markup to highlight relevant information.

• For example, if you want to rank for “How to learn SEO,” write an informational guide, not a landing page about SEO services.
• Google pulls data from a wide variety of sources in continuously making up its local business index.
• To determine the quality and relevancy of a website, Google uses more than 200 metrics.
• Tools and plugins are available to compress images without compromising quality, maintaining a balance between visual appeal and performance.

In SEO, not all search engines are equal

Good, helpful, engaging content is vital for getting other sites to link to yours naturally. Search engines use automated “crawlers” to find and visit webpages by following links across the web. As they crawl, they gather information SEO Anomaly about each page’s content and structure. Let’s get started and learn how to make your website show up higher in online searches. This comprehensive guide aims to equip beginners seeking foundational SEO knowledge and experienced marketers looking to enhance their strategies. Organic search results are sensitive to a searcher’s location, though seldom as pronounced as in local pack results.

With so many things to optimize and metrics to track, it’s easy to feel choice overload about how to begin. Sometimes a keyword is merely a subtopic under a broader, main topic. Or it might be an alternative way of phrasing that’s not the most popular one. Listings with images and videos receive more clicks, calls, and direction requests, making it a crucial factor for Google Maps visibility. The Q&A section on your GBP allows potential customers to ask questions about your business directly in search results. Once those questions are asked, you or other customers are free to answer those questions.

It means we can better return relevant content even if it doesn’t contain all the exact words used in a search, by understanding the content is related to other words and concepts. We regularly improve our ranking systems through rigorous testing and evaluation and provide notice of updates to our ranking systems when those might be useful to content creators and others. When you include structured data, it can give your content an additional opportunity to rank near the top of search results. The results above appear both on the recipe card at the top of the page and as standard search results. To confirm that your website provides a good experience for users, start by checking your Core Web Vitals.

While not strictly a negative factor, the meta keywords tag was originally used to help software indexing. Having outbound links on your site could add value to your own content which Google may view positively but the links themselves are not a ranking factor. Including a table of contents (TOC) in your content will improve user experience and help Google understand the structure of your content. Latent Semantic Indexing keywords help search engines work out the exact topic. Below I have broken out all of the different page ranking factors you need to consider from an SEO perspective.

The Ultimate On-Page SEO Guide To Rank On The First Page

Our approach targets users first because that’s what search engines reward. This chapter covers keyword research and other methods to determine what your audience is seeking. Meta descriptions appear in search results below the title tag.

It’s just another small way to help Google better understand what the topical focus of your page is. It’s also a way for people with vision issues to know what’s on the page if they use a screen reader, as they will read out the tag. We’ve put together this simple (but actionable) list of the 12 most important factors.

Once you’ve set up ShortPixel to implement WebP/AVIF, ensure it’s displaying correctly on your site. Use this free, mobile-friendly testing tool from SE Ranking to check your site. If your site doesn’t format on a mobile device, you’ll struggle to rank highly. And if you have a Shopify store, check out my Shopify speed optimization tips. URLs are used by Google to understand your site structure and individual pages.

Use the Appropriate Heading Tags: h1, h2, etc.

Your call-to-action should be near the top, and shouldn’t compete with external links. A meta description is a short description that appears in your search snippet. Google can pull information from a page to create that description.

It also enhances the user experience by providing a clear hierarchy. An SEO strategy is a plan to create, optimize, and promote content to improve its visibility in search engine results, attracting more organic traffic to a website. It involves a variety of techniques, such as keyword research, on-page optimization, technical SEO, and link building. Technology is a key element for any on-page SEO strategy, as it determines how users interact with a website.

But it is absolutely worth investing the time and effort into improving load time and making sure your pages load quickly. Anyone who knows anything about SEO knows that keywords are important. You have more characters to work with than a title tag, which you should use to elaborate on what the page is about.

You From Ranking Higher

When talking about on-page optimization, semantic distance refers to the relationships between different words and phrases in the text. This differs from the physical distance between phrases, and focuses on how terms connect within sentences, paragraphs, and other HTML elements. Each web page is made up of different parts—headers, footers, sidebars, and more. Search engines have long worked to determine the most important part of a given page. Both Microsoft and Google hold several patents suggesting content in the more relevant sections of HTML carry more weight.

Basic technical knowledge will help you optimize your site for search engines and establish credibility with developers. Although both are important for rankings and search visibility, on-page and off-page SEO each solve for different SEO factors. For higher pages per session, include internal links strategically throughout your content and offer suggestions for related articles or resources at the end of the page. A positive UX boosts user satisfaction and signals to search engines that your site provides value.

With the right tools and methods, you can be able to uncover those hidden pages that are missing from your website structure. Remember, On Page SEO is not a one-off task but an ongoing process. This description works because it’s short but sweet, aptly describing the appeal of a dress in one sentence. Website navigation plays a significant role in a user’s online shopping experience. If your category pages aren’t arranged logically, it’s more difficult for shoppers to find what they’re looking for, leading to increased user frustration and high exit rates. If you’re using an ecommerce builder like Shopify, you’ll be able to easily tweak these titles from your dashboard or website editor.

• They help Google understand what a page is about and boost its authority, which can lead to higher rankings.
• It’s important to review URLs before publishing a web page because most Content Management Systems (CMS) will auto-generate the URL based on the title of a web page.
• It’s your opportunity to advertise your page and convince users to click your link and visit your website rather than selecting one of the other links.
• Well-written, engaging titles are known to increase click through rate (CTR) and engagement.
• For example, when you write a page around “Paris”, include semantic keywords like “Capital City of France”, “City of Love”, “Eiffel Tower”, etc.

It’s believed that Google looks at user signals (dwell time, time on page, etc.) to influence rankings. So if your SEO Anomaly content is complicated and difficult to understand, your visitors will be heading straight for the back button. Quality matters where the written piece of an article should satisfy expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. By integrating a responsive design, you’ll make it easy to improve your site’s ranking in the search results.

Off-Page SEO: 13 Highly Effective Techniques to Get Backlinks

Optimize your profile by adding photos, responding to reviews, and updating your posts regularly. These steps improve your local ranking and make your business more trustworthy. An optimized SEO Anomaly GMB profile also signals to search engines that your business is active and reliable. This increases the likelihood of appearing in the local 3-pack results, which can drive significant traffic.

Link building strategy

And they might allow you to include a link to your site in your contributed piece. It’s a phenomenal way to build your brand, amplify your content, and reach new audiences. Check out our guide on social media management for more ideas on how to improve your social media results. Then, click the “Backlinks” number in the corresponding row to see all the backlinks to the URL. This will show you URLs that have backlinks but don’t work properly. One of the best ways to find broken backlinks is with the Backlink Analytics tool.

That’s where the idea of writing a complete off-page SEO techniques checklist came from. Hope it’ll lend you a helping hand in your digital marketing endeavors. Off-page SEO refers to actions taken outside your website to improve search engine rankings.

Reputation management

• When it comes to building backlinks, it’s important to focus on quality over quantity.
• In this chapter, I’ll show you four ways to build authoritative links that are working great right now.
• Enroll in the Best Digital Marketing Course or a Prompt Engineering Course to excel.
• The internet is a competitive space, and being discovered through search rankings, backlinks, or brand mentions is critical for visibility.

Keep content concise and visually appealing while maintaining a clear message that resonates with your target audience. Use video SEO strategies to encourage interaction by adding calls to action, responding to comments, and leveraging platform-specific features like hashtags or subtitles. Navigate to the Search Atlas Link Gap Analysis Tool, which identifies the backlink gap between your website and competitors. The Search Atlas Link Gap Analysis Tool provides a list of websites, their Domain Authority scores, spam scores, and the top linking page for each competitor. To identify which websites you should acquire backlinks from, access the Search Atlas’ Backlinks panel. The most important off-page SEO ranking factors are listed below.

Create Newsworthy Content

If it’s a comparison article that mentions several competitors, see if you can convince the author to include your site as well. At the very least you can share each other’s content on social media. The amplified social reach could result in additional natural backlinks. Influencer partnerships increase brand awareness and often lead to valuable backlinks that generate referral traffic.

Local SEO acts as a guide, directing customers to your business online. For businesses serving specific locales, optimizing for local search is not just beneficial; it’s essential. Broken link building offers the chance to step in where others have faltered. By identifying and replacing broken links with your relevant content, you provide value to the linking site while securing a place for your link on their web page.