When you optimize your site for search, you’re also improving the overall user experience. To show up in search results for relevant keywords, you need to first target those keywords on your site. People don’t search for local businesses in the Yellow Pages anymore.
Although the basic principle of operation of most of the search engines is the same there are minor differences between them which lead to major changes in their results. For example, for search engines like Yahoo and Bing, on-page keyword factors are of primary importance, while for Google, links and hyperlinks are more important. If you’re feeling adventurous, it’s worth figuring out if you can specify a canonical version for your pages. But if you don’t canonicalize your URLs yourself, Google will try to automatically do it for you. Tracking KPIs is important for constantly improving your website.
If it contains the focus keyword, you let Google know what the page you’re linking to is about. Here’s an example of a SERP snippet for our post on “7-step SEO strategy” with the focus keyword SEO strategy. To select the focus keyword, you should follow the keyword research principles we covered extensively in the previous chapter – consider its search volume, difficulty and relevance.
Benefits of Using Search Engine Optimization Services
This style of writing is called “the inverted pyramid writing style”. To make sure your title and description have the right length, you can use our free tool called SERP Simulator. You can either do it manually and try to find the best SEO Anomaly ratio between quality and file size or automate the whole process with a plugin (e.g. Imagify, ShortPixel, Tiny PNG). Using the right image file format can help you get a better image quality and reduce the file size. Big image files are one of the most common factors that cause slow page loading.
Submit an XML Sitemap to Google
Create your free Semrush account to try our keyword research tools. They use programs (called website crawlers or bots) that follow links from known pages to discover new pages. Analyzing your competitors’ SEO strategies helps you identify what works in your industry. By studying their tactics, you can find opportunities to improve your own SEO optimization services.
- There would be no point to links if they didn’t direct searchers to something.
- External links are not the only thing that matters for SEO, internal links (the links within one’s own website) play a large role in SEO as well.
- For example, most top-ranking pages for “avocado seed” are blog posts serving as how-to guides for planting the seed.
- (If you do a quick SERP analysis you’ll notice that the search results are almost identical for all of them).
But thanks to this new algorithm, Google could now understand the topic of your page. A few years ago, Google rolled out a search algorithm called Hummingbird. And considering that Google owns the popular video site, it’s a trend that’s not likely to change anytime soon.
This means you can get more traffic… without needing higher rankings. And I can almost guarantee that you’ll come away with a handful of backlinks. So if you tend to publish a lot of visual content, spend an afternoon executing this search engine optimisation technique. If you click on one of the pages, you can see all of the keywords that page already ranks for. Google’s Hummingbird update allows Google to go beyond simple keywords. And those 373 posts generate 571k+ search engine visits per month.
