That’s why in 2014 Google announced that websites running on HTTPS—Secure Hypertext Transfer Protocol—would get a small rankings boost. HTTPS moves data between browsers in the same way as HTTP but with an added protocol on top—SSL, a Secure Sockets Layer that encrypts data and transports it safely across the web. Websites that skip this step end up with a mass of counterintuitive subdomains and “orphan pages” with no internal links. This isn’t a nightmare just for users; it also confuses crawlers and makes them more likely to abandon indexing your page. Technical SEO—the art of optimizing a website for crawling and indexing—is a vital step in getting a site to rank. Build a site on shaky technical foundations and you likely won’t see results, no matter how high-quality your on-page content.
That’s because websites need to be constructed in a way that lets crawlers access and “understand” the content. The web is made up of an ever-expanding mass of pages connected by links. Search engines need to find these pages, understand what’s on them, and store them in a massive data horde known as an index. Description metadata is the textual description that a browser may use in your page search return.
She has 4 years of experience in content marketing and demand generation, and is passionate about helping others grow their marketing know-how. Receive new SEO, content marketing, and competitive analysis tips straight to your inbox. For example, a product page could meet a transactional search query, whereas a blog post meets informational intent. To create content that meets searcher needs, you must understand search intent. Categorize search intent, and align different intents to different stages in the sales funnel. Generate a list of potential keywords using Google Autofill and Related Searches. But how do you know which keywords are the right ones to target?
Just because they outrank you, doesn’t mean they’ve chosen the best keywords — they could just have a higher domain authority than you. …and scan their category and product pages for potential keywords.
You can repeat this for all your seed keywords (such as “wiener dog” instead of dachshund). To choose the best keywords possible, you also need to factor in buyer intent (aka “commercial intent”). published here is a holistic effort of all pieces of a business, including social media, marketing, web design, networking and copywriting. Google’s goal is to rank search results that answer all of the searcher’s questions so well that they don’t need to return to Google for another answer. Measuring SEO Success with tools like Google Analytics and Ahrefs.