Paid search is often referred to as search engine marketing or pay-per-click . Search engines give some guidelines for SEO, but big search engines keep result ranking as a trade secret. SEO combines official search engine guidelines, empirical knowledge, and theoretical knowledge from science papers or patents. If you don’t look after SEO, you can get lost among the trillions of links out there. SEO gives you a shot at ranking for the terms which your customers use, so you can do better business.
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. Crawlers don’t “understand” content like a human brain might; they need certain technical structures and markers to effectively rank your content. Luckily, search engines themselves provide tips on how to improve a site’s technical SEO—check out our technical SEO audit infographic here. Technical SEO has nothing to do with content creation, link-building strategies, or content promotion. Instead, it focuses on site architecture and infrastructure. As search engines become more “intelligent,” technical SEO best practices have to adapt and become more sophisticated to match. That said, there are some basic constants of technical SEO to take on board.
If you use too many similar tags for the same content, it appears to search engines as if you’re showing the content multiple times throughout your website. For example, topic tags like “blogging,” “blog,” and “blog posts” are too similar to one another to be used on the same post. While there’s not much you can do to influence what text gets pulled in, you should continue to optimize this metadata, as well as your post, so search engines display the best content from the article. By creating reader-friendly content with natural keyword inclusion, you’ll make it easier for Google to prove your post’s relevancy in SERPs for you. What you’re looking for is a general increase, even a small one, in your rankings for your targeted keywords over time. This nifty tool shows you all the keywords your competitors are ranking for but you aren’t. Type three competitors in the top three fields and your site in the bottom.
Positive user experiences mean site visitors are more likely to visit a page more frequently, stay longer when they do, link back to the page, and share it on their networks. All of these will impact positively on how search engines rank the site. User experience has what’s known as a secondary impact on SERPs. That means that while UX is not one of the main factors on which search engines base rankings, it still plays a role in defining site relevance and authority. From there, the key to ranking for keywords is creating SEO-optimized content.
Keyword research helps search marketers understand what users are searching, what words they’re using to do so, and which of those keywords bring traffic and business to a website. We already know that crawlers use links to move between web pages when indexing; pages without links are inaccessible to search engines. That makes linking—both outward to high-quality sites and internally between a website’s pages—a vital part of good SEO. 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.
As well as simply finding keywords, you can assess ranking difficulty, competitiveness and can filter results in various ways, such as by local search. Keyword Spy is a downloadable keyword tool which helps you to identify competitors’ keywords and find related terms you can use in your own content and marketing. Well, social media amplifies other ranking factors by making your content more visible. The more people link to it, the more it’s seen as authoritative, and the more likely it is to appear in a good position in SERPs. Remember that links, content, and user experience are all major SEO ranking factors. Plus other search engines—yes, there ARE others—like Bing state clearly that social IS a ranking factor for them.
The keyword “Dachshund gifts” gets ~11,000 searches per month on average, according to Ahrefs (a tool you’ll learn about in a seo my website later section). Assuming 35% of those clicks go to the first result , ranking #1 for that keyword would get you 3,850 clicks.
SEMrush is a comprehensive marketing toolkit that includes a lot of SEO tools. Long Tail Pro includes a number of useful keyword research features.
For example, if you want to rank for “arizona real estate”, you might think it’s a good idea to optimize your content for people wanting to move to a house in Arizona. But it might turn out that the people searching for that term are realtors looking for a property they can list. In contrast, low-quality inbound links can hurt your search ranking, so keep those to a minimum. We don’t expect you to incorporate each of these SEO best practices into your content strategy right away. But, as your website grows, so should your goals on search engines.
One important aspect of taking care of SEO is identifying issues that are hurting search engine rankings and reducing the traffic you get from SERPs. Take note of keywords where you have a ranking between 4 and 10. Those are good optimization candidates, as it likely won’t take much to help you achieve a top 3 ranking. With Ahrefs, a good starting point for keyword research for SEO is the Keywords Explorer tool. Type in your terms, choose your country and search, and you’ll get an assessment of important related keywords and how difficult it will be to rank for those terms, known as “keyword difficulty”. SEMrush will analyze the top 10 results and suggest terms to include in your content to improve your ranking. You’ll get in-depth data on search volume and trends, and on the top pages ranking for those keywords.
Then you’ll be able to do some link building to get other websites to link back to your blog. Think of it this way, when you create a topic tag look at this site (which is simple if you’re a HubSpot user, as seen here), you also create a new site page where the content from those topic tags will appear.