What Is SEO? Learn the Basics of Search Engine Optimization

It’s about tempting users to visit the page content to learn more. Your meta description tag should end with a soft Call to Action (CTA). To write a meta description for a landing page, focus on clarity, value, and persuasion. This short snippet is your chance to explain what users will get from visiting your page — and why it’s worth their click. So is this a KPI we haven’t met let’s say this quarter, or is it part of a longer-term trend? Again, because that really allows you to start to unpick like what is actually the problem here.

• While keyword use still matters, prescriptive methods like using an exact-match keyword in specific locations a requisite number of times is no longer a tenant of on-page SEO.
• Understand what your company’s stakeholders want from search engine optimization and use those as a baseline for creating specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely goals.
• The best way to avoid being penalized for these types of behaviors is to follow SEO best practices and focus on creating quality content, not taking shortcuts.
• All the hard numbers that represent real customers – the who, what, where, when, why, and how – all of which is needed to make informed decisions about SEO strategies and tactics.

Robots.txt, meta noindex, and meta nofollow

We develop purposeful strategies that reflect your authority and resonate with your target audience, delivering value on BHS Links every scroll. Failure to utilize internal linking and structured data is another major error. Search engines will struggle to comprehend and rank pages without schema markup and making it more challenging to appear in knowledge graphs and featured snippets.

Finally, you might be interested to learn that there is a growing number of excellent AI SEO tools that you can use to optimize your website. These powerful programs are trained with a massive amount of data to make SEO a breeze. When people search the web for the topics you write about, SEO-optimized content will appear higher in the search results.

Acquire relevant, authoritative backlinks.

You don’t have to worry about milliseconds, but don’t expect awesome performance from providers that offer hosting for $0.10/month. If you’re not sure whether your website is mobile-friendly, you can test it with this tool from Google or go to Search Console and see if there are any issues in the Mobile Usability section. It means that most of the websites are crawled and indexed in their mobile version instead of the desktop version. Not only for the obvious reasons but also because the usage of HTTPS protocol has become a minor ranking signal in 2014. In other words, your website may perform worse in Google if you don’t use HTTPS.

Good content also has a greater chance of being shared on social media and attracting links. In February 2011, Google announced the Panda update, which penalizes websites containing content duplicated from other websites and sources. Historically websites have copied content from one another and benefited in search engine rankings by engaging in this practice.

When you type something into Google, Google has to make a decision on which websites to show you. Patrick is a co-founder of Sitebulb, a technical SEO auditing tool. Advertising revenues accounted for more than 76% of the $348 billion that Google generated in 2024.

But to keep things simple for now, here are a few key terms and concepts you should know. It’s important to make sure there are no technical faux pas that prevent Google from accessing and understanding your website. Things can get a bit confusing because many people today use SEM interchangeably with PPC. This can make it seem like SEO is being left out, but that’s not the case. These series of insight articles offer a window into the world of our experiences and our dedicated staff who are constantly defying the limits of technologies, design, management, and marketing.

The first thing you should do is check to see if your WordPress website is SEO-optimized. By doing this, you will discover things you can improve to grow your search engine traffic. Search engine optimization (SEO) is about making strategic changes to your website and its content so that you are featured higher on search engine results pages (SERPs). Search engines are a huge source of traffic for websites, which makes SEO extremely important. By improving search traffic, you will be able to increase sales and conversions on your website.

We know there’s kind of a longer-term time horizon we’re having to work to here, and we’re often asking stakeholders to invest in something that may not see a return for three to six months in the future. This comes from the kind of oppositional nature it’s often put it in relation to channels like PPC. “SEO is just free.” When we all know there’s a huge amount of effort, time, resource cost that goes into it.