SEO Starter Guide: The Basics Google Search Central Documentation Google for Developers

If you’re not sure how to create a sitemap and your website runs on WordPress (which it most probably does), we recommend creating the sitemap with the Yoast SEO plugin. Especially if you have a small website with a couple of well-interlinked pages. It’s basic advice, sure, but it’s amazing how many sites I come across where this is in place. So they’ll have a headline, post snippet and a Click here or Read more button in a vertical line.

External backlinks

And over the years, it has developed guidelines and ranking factors to test pages for signs of quality. To drive organic traffic, your content needs to be created specifically for topics that people actually search for. Otherwise, no one will be able to find your page on Google’s search result pages (SERPs), and you won’t get any organic traffic. The meta description is the description that appears on the SERP below the title tag. Google doesn’t always show the one you’ve provided in the SERP; it likes to build its own based on the query, but it’s still important to optimize for SEO.

• One way to determine intent is by reviewing the top-ranking pages for a keyword (also called doing a SERP analysis).
• Additionally, as the LinkedIn search engine evolves, the SEO best practices change as well.
• For your website to appear in search results, search engines must be able to crawl and index your pages.
• On-page optimization is the process of improving the technical and content aspects of your webpages.
• In this article, you will learn about the process used by marketers to optimize your website for search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, and many others.

Measuring Conversion Rates and Click-Through Rates for SEO Success

To find these golden nuggets of SEO, various keyword research tools are at your SEO Anomaly disposal, each offering unique insights and data to shape your content strategy. Technical SEO is a foundational aspect of any comprehensive SEO strategy. Many keyword research tools like Semrush and Backlinko display search intent of keywords. Making it easier to understand what users are likely looking for. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the practice of enhancing your website to improve its visibility on search engines like Google.

You can check how Google indexes your site, track clicks, and spot any crawl issues quickly. In short, a well-executed local SEO strategy not only increases your digital footprint but also drives real-world sales and enhances your brand’s presence within the community. When your listing appears on Maps, you’re not just gaining visibility—you’re positioning your business to capture high-intent customers at the exact moment they’re ready to act. According to Google, 76% of people who search for something nearby visit a related business within 24 hours, and 28% of those searches result in a purchase. These numbers highlight the immense power of Google Maps as a driver of local business growth. SEO can be a complex and tedious process, especially when you don’t have the expertise and experience.

When you improve your organic click-through rate more people will click on your site in the search results. In fact, podcasts might be the most underrated link building strategy on the planet. For example, a while back I noticed that lots of people were building links from guest posting. So to get more traffic from those search queries, I’d just need to sprinkle those terms into my post. To rank in Google today, you also need to add synonyms and other related keywords to your content. Well, Google doesn’t want to rank sites that are bloated with thin, low-quality content.

If you have more than a few thousand URLs on your site, how you organize your content may have effects on how Google crawls and indexes your site. Specifically, using directories (or folders) to group similar topics can help Google learn how often the URLs in individual directories change.

Just as a crawler needs to discover your site via links from other sites, it needs a path of links on your own site to guide it from page to page. If you’ve got a page you want search engines to find but it isn’t linked to from any other pages, it’s as good as invisible. Many sites make the critical mistake of structuring their navigation in ways that are inaccessible to search engines, hindering their ability to get listed in search results.