Learn SEO with a Free Roadmap of Reliable Guides & Tools

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a process of optimizing your website with the goal of improving your rankings in the search results and getting more organic (non-paid) traffic. Add structured data to relevant URLs to provide search engines greater context. Use Google’s free Structured Data Markup Helper tool, plus its Rich Results Test tool, to create and verify your markup before installation. How content appears in the search results is based on these factors, plus more than 200 other factors. These ranking factors (which are not weighted equally) cover everything from website security and online reputation to content helpfulness and authority. When it comes to SEO 101, understanding how search engines work is essential.

Improve Your Site’s User Experience

“If it’s over 50-60% of the entire page content, it could damage your growth strategy,” Stoica says. There are nuances to explore regarding duplicate content (and the myths surrounding it), but Olivian Stoica, Senior SEO Specialist at Wave Live Wallpapers, is here to help. And so, the only chance for customers to notice and consider you is by showing up in their search results. What’s more, customers typically prefer going through the majority of the buying process on their own.

It can also sometimes be frustrating, especially if you’re relying on outdated tactics that no longer work. You should now have a great foundation to build on and an idea of what you can do about SEO today. If you want to dive deeper, we have much more to explore, starting with Chapter 1 (SEO what is it, and why is it important?). These types of links are often ignored, and can even get you penalized. In general, the easier a link is for anyone to get, the less likely Google is to value it. Getting others to link to your site can be difficult, but one of the easier ways to get links is to scope out your competitors, and find out who’s linking to them.

The Top 4 SEO Tools

Our free tools are perfect for companies who want more SEO data but also have tight budgets. You will also discover new keywords during this analysis that can be incorporated into your current SEO strategy. Once you’ve taken a look at everything, ask whether there is a good balance between product awareness, consideration, and final sale decision.

Bots that crawl webpages can quickly read alt text to understand what an image contains. For example, when I search for the term ‘sustainable phone case’, these results are shown by Google. Based on my search term and the intent behind it, Google deems these results the best ones found in its index. Just as you perform a competitive analysis to identify market gaps and differentiate your products and marketing efforts, you’ll need to investigate and analyze competitors’ SEO. That way, you can give yourself a competitive edge regarding your site and its content. Image SEO relies heavily on technical and on-page optimizations while local SEO is more about off-page and on-page optimizations.

Let’s finish off with some SEO strategies, best practices, and tips to help you get the most out of your time. You can refer to our more in-depth how-to on keyword research here. SEO is your chance to get in front of potential customers at any stage of their customer journey.

• Keywords are words or phrases that users type into search engines to find information.
• You may pay an upfront fee for your initial audit and existing site optimization.
• All you have to do is search for “contributors” and pick out ones that write in your niche.
• As we mentioned in Chapter 1, search engines are answer machines.
• Every industry and market has unique challenges and varying degrees of competition.

Popular content services include blog writing, video content development and website copywriting services. Before committing to any agency, ask if content development services are offered and, if so, how these services are priced. Another way to learn more about what you can expect in terms of service quality is to ask your professional network whether anyone has worked with a specific agency. You can also ask the SEO agency you’re considering working with for customer references and speak directly with an active customer. Searchbloom offers a detailed dashboard with custom graphs, charts and reports for its partners, or clients. What I saw is a fairly comprehensive look at keywords, ranks, traffic and more data to help you understand how your SEO plan is working for your website.

You can place it into a spreadsheet, and your teams can track it accordingly. The list below is an example of a monthly content plan that takes the above steps into account. Your blog should be a trove of information for your prospective customers. That means not every blog post or web page you create needs to belong to a topic cluster. There’s also value in writing about tangential topics your customers care about. Doing so will help you build authority with Google algorithms.

If you want to go more advanced with your content optimization, you can use something like Clearscope. If you want to be REALLY sure that your page is optimized for SEO, I’d consider using an on-page SEO analysis tool. Which is why, whenever I mention anything related to press releases, I internal link to that page. In other words, you don’t want to greet people with a giant stock photo that takes up the entire above the fold area of your page. Which is why it’s super important to hook people the SECOND that they land on your website from Google. And if that happens often enough, Google will downrank you for that keyword.

Engage with your user base through local listings and relevant online forums, like Reddit or Quora, to build your reputation as a trustworthy information source. Avoid selling or over-promotion on online SEO Anomaly forums, which can backfire by creating distrust. Lack of compelling content is a common reason why a website doesn’t drive leads.