What Is SEO? The Beginners Guide With Examples in 2025

This sets a solid benchmark for how much traffic we could expect to get if we were able to rank our pages in the top 3. Once you’re done, download your mind map to use as a reference for the next steps. It might mean highlighting hands-on experience, certifications, or testimonials.

what is seo

Factors Affecting SEO Negatively

This information includes the website’s content, structure, and links to other websites. It’s important to remember that SEO is only focused on organic ranking. The only way to rank higher with SEO is to ensure you’re satisfying the search engine’s requirements. Compelling page descriptions encourage users to visit your website. These elements affect your search visibility and click-through rates even though users can’t see them directly on your pages. Ensure clickable elements, like buttons and links, are properly spaced and easy to tap.

Relationship with Google

what is seo

One of the most effective ways to learn SEO is through hands on work and guidance in the field. There are a number of helpful resources online, from in-person interest groups to convenient SEO Anomaly online courses, many of them free. Becoming an expert, however, takes time, patience, and a willingness to experiment. A list that would be even better and more complete with a link to my SEO audit post. This time, the link to my competitor’s page is part of a big list of resources.

As marketing strategy

what is seo

Using WordPress as your CMS is like giving yourself a head start when it comes to creating a search engine friendly website. There are a few SEO plugins that do the heavy lifting for you, so you don’t need to worry about breaking anything. Understanding SEO and optimizing your site will help you give search engines the information they need, so you can get the results you want. If you get your SEO right (we’ll see that in a minute), your organic traffic can build over time, whereas paid advertising needs ongoing funding. You can use SEOptimer to track the backlinks that competing websites have, and find out how they’re acquiring those backlinks. Second, focus on the recurring themes in Google’s updates—publishing high-quality information and emphasizing the user experience.

This is a part of SEO called “local SEO” that is especially useful for local businesses, which is a topic for another time. In other words, your site should be mobile-optimized for Google searchers and search engine crawlers (also known as “spiders”). From a Google SEO point of view, your title tag is the most important place to include your keyword. Internal links are links that link web pages together on your website. They are also useful to spread link equity (value passed from one website to another site). Well, on-page SEO is the art of fine-tuning your web content to be both user-friendly and search engine-friendly.

  • Today, I never create blogs below 2,000 words, if my goal is to rank for a focus keyword.
  • Fortunately, there are a handful of free SEO tools that make finding popular keywords a breeze.
  • The Accelerated Mobile Pages technology allows faster content distribution on mobile devices.
  • Both are critical components of any successful digital marketing campaign, and SEO is actually a subset of SEM.

Avoiding poor SEO practices ensures you establish an effective digital marketing strategy for your website. Content optimization, also known as on-page SEO, focuses on enhancing the quality and relevance of your website’s content to improve its ranking on search engines. This involves strategically using relevant keywords, optimizing title tags and meta descriptions, and ensuring that your content is engaging and informative. By delivering high-quality, valuable content that meets the needs of your target audience, you can increase your website’s visibility, attract more visitors, and enhance user experience. Link building is an essential off-page SEO technique that aims to increase the number of high-quality inbound links to your website. These backlinks serve as endorsements from other reputable sites, boosting your website’s authority and credibility in the eyes of search engines.

what is seo

This allows me to take a programmatic SEO approach and create dozens of combinations of different landing pages for job types. They’ve done a great job of identifying what people might be searching for when they are feeling uncomfortable or distressed about something in their personal lives. And when people land on their articles, they become aware of Calm’s meditation app. It’s insane how fast they grew their traffic in 2023 and how it’s sustained itself over the past few years — even through all the Google Core Updates (and the rise of ChatGPT). One of the cool things about Calm is that they are both a mobile app and a web app.