Think of it as your site’s window display—a concise and appealing description of what is contained within, with the goal of encouraging people to enter. A good meta description will typically contain two full sentences.
Both those methods will give you some of the LSI or semantic keywords we mentioned earlier. But if you want to find even more of them, you can use LSIGraph to discover longtail terms related to your main keywords. Just type in your keywords, and you’ll usually get a pretty long list.
The SERP presents you with what are called “organic results” as well as “pay-per-click ads” . The organic results are those that are influenced bySEO, while thePPC adsare paid for. Why on earth does a search engine care if you use them or another search engine? That’s right, you aren’t paying them…but someone else is! So the answer to this question is that they care because they make their money from advertising. Description metadata is the textual description that a browser may use in your page search return.
But it could also be a video, product recommendation, and even a business listing. Search engines, use the load time — the time it takes for a user to be able to read the page — as an indicator of quality. Use Google’s Page Speed Insights Tool for suggestions how to improve your pages. Here’s how a typical search engine sees one of our articles. It’s this one, by the way, if you want to compare it with the original. Then, it must scan them to understand their topics and identify their keywords. Every time you use them, their algorithms choose pages that are the most relevant to your query.
That’s because these appear at the top of the search results to give immediate answers to searchers’ questions. Once you have your keywords, there are several places to include them. Again, make a note of any you might want to add to your target keywords. Like SEMrush, Ahrefs includes a lot of tools and has data on trillions of web links. Add suitable keywords to your list of target keywords, or click the Export button to export them into a spreadsheet.
And that’s well worth the time spent becoming an expert in SEO. Again, it makes sense, as the search engine needs a way to assess the company’s location.
To do that, first, open a private or incognito browser window and search Google. Use the terms you think your customers will use to find your site, then check the results. When you do SEO, you’re helping Google’s spiders to crawl and understand your content. You’re also telling Google your content is relevant to certain queries, so your web pages show up in the right search results. People usually type or say words related to what they are looking for. These are called keywords, and as you’ll see, they are an important part of SEO. When people search, Google shows the most relevant results from that catalog.
Every time another website mentions and points their readers to your content, you gain a backlink to your site. Analyzing elements like page length or its structure helps them assess its quality. Based on this information, search algorithms can match a person’s query with pages they consider the most relevant to it. Regardless of what they’re looking for, it’s content that provides it. And the more of it you publish, the higher your chance for greater search visibility.
If it doesn’t, you’ll definitely miss out on organic traffic, as 95% of people only look at the first page of SERPs. Ideally, you want your web page content to appear as one of the top three results. That’s because those positions get almost half of the clicks in SERPs, and more clicks mean more traffic and more potential for leads and sales.
To do that, the search engine has to know what information is out there. Even if your web page isn’t in the top three, it’s still great if it shows up on the first page of SERPs.
They collect things like page speed, title tags, social signals, internal linking, backlinks, and so on. You cannot pay Google or any search engine to occupy any position in the organic results. The page you are delivered to after you enter a search query is called the search engine results page .
Search engines may not always use your meta description, but it is important to give them the option. Title metadata is responsible for the page titles displayed at the top of a browser window and as the headline within search engine results. By increasing your search visibility, you can bring more visitors, and in turn, conversions and sales.
And check out this article for even more information on SEO ranking factors. Optimize for the wrong search intent, and your page will never rank. Then you can choose to keep or whitelist those links (if they’re not really toxic) or remove or disavow them if they are. Google suggests website owners exercise caution with link disavowal. Click on the toxic percentage to see suspect inbound links. The easiest way is just by searching the terms you want to rank for.
When analyzing local websites, Google looks at the proximity to a searcher’s location. With the rise of local searches containing the phrase, “near me,” it’s only fair that Google will try to present the closest businesses first. All this information combined helps customers choose which business to engage. Search engines follow similar principles for both local and global rankings. But given that they position a site for specific, location-based results, they need to analyze some other ranking factors too. Links, also called backlinks, are references to your content on other websites.
One of the simplest is to use the autocomplete function in Google. Start to type, and the suggested phrases are keywords you could consider. Keep track of the keywords you think of in a list or spreadsheet, and keep this handy as you go through the keyword research process. Whichever way you choose to categorize keywords, one of the most important steps in SEO is doing keyword research. As we’ve said, it’s useful to think about what searchers intend to find when they enter a particular word or phrase. That’s called keyword intent, which is like the search intent mentioned earlier. We’ll talk more about how to use the keywords you find in a later section, but for now, we’ll focus on the research process itself.
If you have a #1 ranking, your web page appears first in SERPs. That puts it at the top of the page unless there’s a promoted result or an answer box above it. Off-page SEO means taking action to build trust, authority, social signals, and inbound links. With over 200 ranking factors used by Google in their algorithm, there are a lot of things to consider, and actions that can be taken to try to optimize a website. There are both on-page and off-page ranking factors that determine how well your site is optimized, and therefore how well it ranks. These spiders collect all kinds of information about your website and the pages that make up your site. This allows them to easily determine when to serve a searcher a page on your site.