What Is SEO? The Beginners Guide With Examples in 2025

  • 15 hours ago
  • News
  • 0

Good SEO can help ensure your website has the best chance of being displayed to your target audience, increasing traffic and high-quality engagement. In this guide, learn about SEO fundamentals and how to apply them to achieve maximum results on your website. Now that you have a list of keywords that your target customer searches for in Google, it’s time to write content. Fortunately, thanks to the keyword research you just did, this step should be pretty simple.

SERPs tend to include organic search results, paid Google Ads results, Featured Snippets, Knowledge Graphs and video results. As Google grew from a small project at Stanford, it quickly became the world’s most popular search engine. Google’s emphasis on citations—how many websites link to your website? Finding out a keyword’s monthly search volume, or the number of times it has been searched online in a given month can make it easier to discover popular topics in your niche. The goal is to optimise elements in all three categories and have them operate harmoniously.

what is seo

They keep users engaged with your pages, enhance the quality of the information, and provide opportunities for you to rank and generate traffic to their host pages through image results. 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. Google reads this description when crawling the page to understand what it’s about. Even small improvements made consistently will help your site rank higher over time. Search engines take time to find your site, process and understand it, and rank it initially.

Paid results don’t always appear on search engine results pages (SERPs). When they do, they usually appear at the top with a “Sponsored” or “Ad” label. Moz is a full-service, all-around powerhouse tool, whether you are looking for keyword suggestions or want to crawl the website. Keyword research tutorial, explore online resources like Moz’s guide or Google’s Keyword Planner tutorial for effective strategies and techniques.

what is seo

The Google SEO Guide to Keyword Research

  • Plus, learn what an SEO certification is and how it can help you.
  • Although not as important as your title tag, you do want to use your keyword once in your page’s URL.
  • There are also a few subtypes of SEO focusing on specific business conditions such as local SEO, ecomerce SEO, or enterprise SEO.
  • Successful search marketers know that just getting traffic to a site is not enough, what the traffic does once it arrives on the site is just as important.
  • However, search engines are not paid for organic search traffic, their algorithms change, and there are no guarantees of continued referrals.

Search engines use complex algorithms to evaluate various factors, such as keyword relevance, content quality, user experience, and technical optimization, to determine a web page’s ranking. These algorithms are constantly evolving, incorporating techniques like machine learning and natural language processing to improve the accuracy and relevance of search results. A well-optimized website that meets these criteria is more likely to rank higher, attracting more organic traffic. 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.

Build Backlinks

If you do own a website, having a distinct online presence offers more opportunities to increase the visibility of your business online, among many other benefits. Any way you can advertise your business and its products or services through digital channels and technologies constitutes a digital marketing technique or tactic. 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.

We have listed some of the best practices to SEO Anomaly improve SEO and keep you ahead of the competition. There are multiple ways to meet this criteria with AI-generated content. Perhaps you use AI to create an outline, then write the draft yourself, weaving in your (or another expert’s) experience to show credibility.

what is seo

If you don’t have access to a keyword research tool, try brainstorming phrases that someone would search to find what you’re offering and look at which terms competitors rank for. If major corporations are taking up most top spots in a SERP, it’s a good sign you might want to look for a less competitive keyword option. If you’re ready to start implementing SEO strategies into your website, it’s best to implement step by step. Start with one page and work through each step below based on the content on the page. Some of the most important local SEO ranking factors are Google Business Profile, NAP (name, address, phone numbers) citations, customer reviews, and backlinks. Technical SEO is about improving the technical aspects of your website so that search engines can easily find, crawl, understand, and index your pages.

what is seo

If the keyword is still worth pursuing, we add top 3 URLs that rank for the parent keyword. This gives us an easy way to refer to what Google considers best in class and what will be required to outrank them. We have yet to find a free tool that provides accurate keyword ideas that can be sorted and filtered based on a competitor’s URL. The following are two examples of how to structure your keyword research. On top of being beginner-friendly, the audit mentioned above can help uncover immediate wins that can have a dramatic impact on your search performance. For example, a slow website can be detrimental to your rankings.

Join The Discussion

Compare listings

Compare