SEO Glossary of Terms Beginner’s Guide to SEO

On-page SEO can also connect you with customers in your area by surfacing your website in local search results, adding another visibility boost to your business. By adjusting your code to include appropriate title tags, meta tags, meta descriptions, and alt text, you end up improving your HTML components and the overall quality of your sitemap. Improving your search engine optimization can help you boost your ranking, and improve your visibility online.

If you’re wondering how meta descriptions actually work, you’re not alone. Below, you’ll find real-world tips for crafting meta descriptions, plus examples showing what works and what doesn’t. Most CMS platforms like WordPress, Shopify, or Wix, along with SEO plugins like Yoast SEO or Rank Math, let you easily create and edit meta descriptions without touching any code. Most website owners — especially small business owners (fewer than 50 employees or making under $5 million a year) — don’t realize how much power they have over what users see in Google search results.

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Implementing LocalBusiness schema is essential for conveying critical business information—such as your name, address, phone number, and operating hours—to search engines. You can find a meta description by viewing the source code of a web page and looking for the tag within the section. You can also simply search for the page on Google — the snippet that appears right under the page title usually pulls from the meta description. A good meta description starts by answering the user’s actual intent. Think about what problem they’re trying to solve, and frame your snippet around that.

For example, if you are writing a post about the value of a specific product or service, you can link to the product or service page in your blog post. This goes beyond just your content marketing to the deeper levels of your site’s HTML. The on-page SEO factors are those elements that happen on your website. You can also freshen up your content by updating posts, rewriting them to make them more effective, or adding new information and statistics over time. Before we dive into some of the factors of on and off-page SEO, let’s talk about content.

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• SEO focuses on organic rankings, while SEM involves paid advertising.
• Links play a critical role in how search engines evaluate and rank websites.
• Search engine optimization works by optimizing a website for more than 200 search engine ranking factors.
• Backlinks have been a very influential factor of search engine algorithms since the very beginning.
• Popular sites that have a lot of social media engagement tend to rank well for other reasons.

Improving your site’s organic search traffic can reduce the costs of acquiring customers by 87 percent, according to a report by Terakeet, a marketing technology platform 3. The goal is to optimise elements in all three categories and have them operate harmoniously. In this article, you’ll learn why SEO marketing is important and steps you can take to improve your SEO content marketing efforts. The words and phrases that people type into search engines to find what they’re looking for.

Because of this, many businesses and website owners will try to manipulate the search results so that their site shows up higher on the search results page (SERP) than their competitors. Integrate local insights with a robust website content strategy to drive better engagement and conversions. Build content funnels that Google understands — with templates designed to support your SEO strategy. Ideally, your meta description should stay within 150 to 160 characters.

You can also choose additional semantic keywords related to your focus keyword. From time to time, these algorithms and guidelines are updated in an effort to improve the ranking system. For example, Google added E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) to its guidelines and HCU (Helpful Content Update) to its ranking system. First of all, link building is the strategy that aims to obtain links (backlinks) to content. In this perspective, we distinguish natural backlinks from artificial ones. Remember that the algorithm doesn’t evaluate the simple frequency of the keyword, but analyzes the text and other elements of the page to assess if they are consistent with the SEO Anomaly search.

It’s equally important to note that internal links are not just for navigation; they provide search engines with contextual signals. When linking pages, use descriptive anchor text that reflects semantic keywords rather than generic phrases. SEO is a powerful tool that can define your online presence, organic traffic, and business trajectory. Whether you’re just getting started with SEO or looking to refine your existing strategy, having the proper support can make all the difference.

What most of your ongoing SEO efforts should be centered around is driving incremental traffic to the site (people who might not have found and engaged with you otherwise). XML sitemaps can help Google and Bing understand your site and find all of its content. Just be sure not to include pages that aren’t useful, and know that submitting a page to a search engine in a sitemap doesn’t insure that the page will actually rank for anything. As you work through this process, start to think about what you can do for these influencers.