To keep a site optimized, you need deep knowledge of how search engines “think,” as well as how real people think and react with your web content. This mix of usability, site architecture, and content creation makes search engine optimization feel like a hybrid. Search engines crawl the web, following links from page to page, and index the content found. When you search, the search engine displays the indexed content. If you follow those rules closely when doing SEO for a website, you give the site the best chances of showing up among the first results, increasing traffic and possibly revenue .
Basically – you are feeding Google EASY ANSWERS to scrape from your page. This all ties together very nicely with organic link building. If you are serious about getting more free traffic from search engines, get ready to invest time and effort in your website and online marketing. The first search engines were relatively ineffective as they couldn’t do much more than search for pages that included specific keywords. Search engines have evolved over time and are complex enough to use hundreds of factors in their searchalgorithms. If you create quality content that results in quality links and shares, it will have a positive impact on rankings.
And that’s because each of those actions improves a ranking factor. Outbound links take visitors from your website to an external site. These links pass along value to the external site, because search engines understand the link to be a stamp of approval. That means that every time you link to an external site, you’re giving it the thumbs up for search engines, and providing users with a better navigating experience. On-page SEO (also known as on-site SEO) is the process of optimizing everything that’s on a website to try to improve rankings. If technical SEO is the back end, on-page SEO is the front end. It encompasses content formatting, image optimization, basic HTML code, and internal linking practices.
But optimizing your site can make a difference to which site that is, as rankings fluctuate all the time. Plus, as long as you’re in the top 3, or at least on the first page, you’ve got a chance for people to find and click, which is what you want. If you deliver what they need after the click, that increases your chances of being relevant for future searches for that term.
As we’ve seen, one of the major advantages of SEO is getting more traffic because of better search ranking. That makes SEO an ideal lead generation tool, because when searchers follow links back to your site, you have the chance to convert them to leads, and later make sales. High-quality content usually results in high-quality links from well-respected sites. That passes on link juice, which helps boost your search ranking. As we mentioned earlier, links are one of the top SEO ranking factors.
An authority website is a site that is trusted by its users, the industry it operates in, other websites and search engines. Traditionally a link from an authority website is very valuable, as it’s seen as a vote of confidence. The more of these you have, and the higher quality content you produce, the more likely your own site will become an authority too.
Most search engines use click-through rate as a ranking factor. If people are clicking your result when searching for a specific term, you must be offering something of value, right? Well, optimizing your video with an enticing thumbnail can help.
We all know that having a page rich with content is important for ranking well in search engines. Internal linking refers to a link on a page that points to another page on the same website. Meta descriptions, while not as important in search engine rankings, are extremely important in getting users to click through from the search engine results page to your website. Meta descriptions should use keywords wisely, but more importantly they should include a compelling description on which a user would want to click on. Bill is a content marketing and expert with over 4 years experience working as a full-time consultant. He works specifically with businesses struggling to get the results they want from their blog and content marketing strategy. You can work with him to do the same for your brand here.
For most websites, traffic that comes from search engines (known as “natural” or “organic” traffic) accounts for a large portion of their total traffic. Here’s the truth—only one site can be number one for a particular keyword, and there’s a lot of competition out there.
The important thing to know about using keywords for SEO is that you should vary anchor text keywords for both internal and inbound links. Anchor text is the words that form a link, often underlined in blue. It’s the practice of increasing the search engine rankings of your web pages so that they appear higher in search results, bringing more traffic to your website. Answeringyes to these questions can improve your search engine ranking.
The good news is that on-page SEO doesn’t depend on external factors; you have 100% control over the quality of on-page SEO. First, users abandon sites that take longer to load, as we already know, and mobile users require even faster load times. If your site is slow loading on mobile, bounce rate will increase, and that will negatively impact rankings. Second, there is evidence that search engines prioritize AMP-optimized results in the rankings. But SEO is a moving target, even for experienced digital marketers. Myths abound, algorithms change, and SEO tactics that once worked can suddenly get you a penalty.
Search results are presented in an ordered list, and the higher up on that list a site can get, the more traffic the site will tend to receive. For example, for a typical search query, the number one result will receive 40-60% of the total traffic for that query, with the number two and three results receiving significantly less traffic. Only 2-3% of searchers click beyond the first page of search results. Thus, even a small improvement in search engine rankings can result in a website receiving more traffic and potentially business. Search engine optimization is a key part of online marketing because search is one of the primary ways that users navigate the web. In 2014, over 2.5 trillion searches were conducted worldwide across search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, and Yandex.
For instance, you do not want the word “engineering” to show up three or more times in the URL or have the phrase Northern Lights repeated in the page title and every heading. Readability and usability still trump search engine optimization. Quality content is the number one driver of your search engine rankings and there is no substitute for great content. Quality content created specifically for your intended user increases site traffic, which improves your site’s authority and relevance. On-page optimization, also called on-page SEO, ensures that search engines a.) understand a page’s topic and keywords, and b.) can match it to relevant searches. As you’ll shortly see, adding more content, optimizing image filenames, or improving internal links can affect your rankings and search visibility.
Even targeting the most profitable keywords with the “best” content won’t help you if your pages are not optimized for search engines. The first step in search engine optimization is to determine what you’re actually optimizing for.