What makes up seo

Many people wonder how Google rankings work. As you may know, SEO stands for search engine optimization , which simply means making the web pages more likely to get ranked on a search engine. Appearing in the top 3 results is excellent because your click-through rates skyrocket the closer your get to 1, as shown in the image provided by Backlinko below:. Appearing on the first page at all, within the top 10 results, is also useful.

Sounds creepy, we know. But all that means is they visit web pages. Google has various and deeply complex algorithms to decide which content gets displayed and in which order. Once your page lands on the SERP, though, you have to rely on your page titles and meta descriptions to get searchers to click your link and visit your site.

The most relevant are shown first, with the rest shown over successive pages. One of the goals of addressing SEO ranking factors is to let Google know when your pages on your site are relevant to particular search queries, so people will click the links and visit your site.

And this is super important to understand. Google realized that most searchers come to their platform for just about everything. This is particularly true for the YMYL sites. We do, however, know that they have a large team of human searchers to make sure E-A-T is being measured as accurately as possible. We have also had the joy of helping businesses to improve their Google E-A-T with resulting traffic increases. Ok, but what does any of this mean for you, and how can you increase your E-A-T?

Here are a few helpful tips:. These are all ways that people can increase their E-A-T for higher rankings. And, honestly, a lot of it boils down to using best practices for managing your online reputation.

On-page SEO refers to factors on your own website that you can optimize, such as the underlying code and the content. Both types are included in the top SEO ranking factors. There are a couple of ways to find this.

First, you could search Google using the terms you think your customers will be using. See where your content appears. But SEMrush is just one of your many options. Check out some other keyword research tools in our guide. After all, SEO is mostly about getting that 1 spot specifically on Google. In other words, Google has to be able to visit the URL and look at the page content to understand what that page is about.

If not, then you can use an online sitemap generator. Page speed has been cited as one of the leading SEO ranking factors for years. Google announced a search engine algorithm update focused on mobile page speed that started to affect sites from July Get more tips on mobile-friendly design to improve Google search ranking in our guide to improving your mobile conversion rate.

If you have the team, the time, and the energy, you may want to explore Google AMP accelerated mobile pages. The upside is that your pages load nearly instantly from mobile devices. There have also been rumors that Google ranks sites built with AMP more highly than others.

Then, you need to maintain everything. As you can imagine, this can be a time-intensive project. Data from an Ahrefs study of two million pages suggests that very few sites less than a year old achieve that ranking.

In some cases, the domain name matters. Though Google has penalized exact-match domains those where the target keyword is in the URL , that penalty is generally for spammy sites with thin content. Research from Moz shows that exact-match domains that are deemed to be relevant, valuable, and high-quality can see a ranking boost because of it.

The best route for choosing your domain? Focus on a URL that reflects your business and optimize the heck out of it instead! When it comes to search engine ranking factors, authority matters. Moz has codified this into page authority and domain authority scores, both ranked from 0 to , which tell you how likely a particular page or domain is to rank in search results.

Ideally, those will match up. One negative SEO ranking factor to be aware of is duplicate content. For SEO, fresh, original content is always best. But one of the biggest questions we get at OptinMonster is about how to use LSI keywords to optimize content. These are called LSI latent semantic indexing keywords.

They provide a kind of online word association to help Google know which results to show. That means some LSI keywords will be longer because people tend to speak differently than they type. Using LSI keywords would be one way of making sure your restaurant ranks for both sets of questions. To Google, this is a link from a super-relevant website. So that link still counts as a relevant backlink. Shady link building tactics were all the rage because they worked. There are lots of other black hat approaches that have nothing to do with links like doorway pages.

Far from it. In fact, this approach takes a ton of hard work. But the reason I recommend starting here is the fact that Skyscraper content is relatively straightforward to create and promote. Guest posting as a link building strategy is extremely controversial. But when done right, guest posting is an awesome way to get some early links and exposure for your website.

If you want to learn how to guest post on authority sites in your industry, check out this guide. I knew this would be a helpful resource for my readers. But I also realized that this post would be a Linkable Asset that bloggers in the SEO world would want to share with their audience. Why did it do so well? Unlike most other guides to optimizing content, my post was highly visual.

As it turns out, there are four main types of Search Intents. In that case, your search intent is informational. You want information on how to make that dish. In I published this guide to keyword research. Because keyword research is such a massive topic, I broke the guide down into different chapters:.

Each chapter was a different page on my site. I just want a list of tools… not a multi-chapter guide. But my page only outlined X tools. These relatively simple changes significantly increased organic search traffic to my page… and landed me a 1 ranking:. And if they notice that searchers are skipping over your result to click on another result, Google will see your content irrelevant for that search… and downrank you.

In fact, marketers like Larry Kim have been able to link organic click-through-rate to Google rankings. I actually wrote an entire guide to Pogosticking here. But if you want a quick overview, Pogosticking is when users bounce around the search results to find something that helps them. If you want a real-life example of how user signals can impact search rankings, check out this video:.

Your first step is to make sure that your content aligns with the search intent of your target keyword. Once you have that in place, here are some other things you can do to ensure that Google searchers love your content:.

To be clear: I only recommend working on these things once you have a handle on SEO fundamentals. A search engine ranking factors study found zero correlation between using Schema markup and first page rankings. One thing to keep in mind is that using Schema the right way can increase your organic click-through rate. So even though you might not get a rankings boost, Schema CAN help you generate more organic traffic. But the bottom line is that, for Google to give your site a high E-A-T rating, it needs to be considered a trusted authority in your industry.

For example, Wikipedia probably has the highest E-A-T rating of any website on the planet. The content is written and edited by thousands of people many of which are experts in their field. When it comes to improving E-A-T, there really are no shortcuts. But if you put out high-quality content written by respected experts, your E-A-T is going to be in good shape….

Google has even reported that nearly half of all adults use voice search everyday. In fact, according to Search Engine Land, 1 in 5 searches done on mobile phones are voice searches. In other words: more and more people are bypassing their keyboards in favor of their voice. Voice search is one of the most important trends in the world of SEO and digital marketing. Especially when it comes to local SEO. As more people start to search with their voice, publishers will have to figure out ways to create and optimize content specifically for voice searches.

This update took into account what Google calls Core Web Vitals : a set of factors considered important for user experience. YouTube is the second most popular website in the world. Unlike other social media sites like Twitter , YouTube is also a massively popular search engine.

I hope you enjoyed this little introduction to SEO. In this guide, I wanted to go beyond a simple definition of search engine optimization.

And actually give you a few concrete steps to get started. But considering how much targeted traffic SEO can bring, it can be totally worth the time and effort. So I recommend getting started with the basics: make sure that search engines can fully crawl your site. Then start creating keyword-optimized content.

Finally, use outreach to get backlinks. What Is SEO? SEO Marketing Hub 2. Next Search Engine Positioning. How you mark up your images can impact not only the way that search engines perceive your page, but also how much search traffic from image search your site generates. Your images may break over time files get deleted, users have difficulty connecting to your site, etc.

This also gives you another opportunity — outside of your content — to help search engines understand what your page is about. This is a common mistake businesses make when they redesign their websites. Finally, once you have all of the standard on-page elements taken care of, you can consider going a step further and better helping Google and other search engines, which also recognize schema to understand your page.

Also check out our walkthrough on off-page SEO the factors on other sites that can affect your own site's rankings. Information architecture refers to how you organize the pages on your website. The way that you organize your website and interlink between your pages can impact how various content on your site ranks in response to searches.

Search engines also look at the actual text you use to link to pages, called anchor text — using descriptive text to link to a page on your site helps Google understand what that page is about but in a post-Penguin world especially, be sure not to be overly aggressive in cramming your keywords into linking text. Additionally: the pages on your site that have the most external votes links from other, trusted sites have the most power to help the other pages on your site rank in search results.

Information architecture can be an extremely complex topic — particularly for larger sites — and there are a number of great additional resources below with more specific answers listed at the end of this section, but at a high level the most important things to keep in mind are:. Below are a number of additional resources around information architecture many of these are older resources, but the SEO principles outlined in them still largely hold true :.

There are a number of ways to get links to your site, but as Google and other search engines become more and more sophisticated, many of them have become extremely risky even if they may still work in the short-term. The process of creating and promoting content that will get you links and social shares is a labor-intensive one. Most approaches, however, will require you to walk through some variation of the following three core steps:.

The first thing you need to do in working to get traction for your content, is understand who is likely to link to and share your content. There are several tools to help you identify influencers within your niche who might share your content, but probably the most powerful is BuzzSumo:. More detailed tutorials on using these tools to better understand your niche are included below. The idea in leveraging these tools is to first identify the thought leaders and potential linkers in your space, and then understand what they share and link to.

Find out what their problems are, what types of content they typically share, and start to think about how you can create something they would find valuable and want to share with their audience who would also find it valuable. As you work through this process, start to think about what you can do for these influencers.

How could you help them with their own projects? What can you do unsolicited that would help them achieve their own goals or what could you create or offer that would be of value to the audience they are creating content for and trying to help? Do you have access to unique data or knowledge that would help them do their jobs better? Before you create a major piece of content, you should have already thought about how that content will get shared: who will share it, and why would they?

Next you have to try to understand what your own capabilities are, and what kind of content you can create that will be likely to be shared and promoted by others. Technical SEO for larger, more complicated sites is really its own discipline, but there are some common mistakes and issues that most sites face that even smaller to mid-sized businesses can benefit from being aware of:.

Google has actually created a useful tool here to give you some specific suggestions on what to change on your site to address page speed issues. In some niches, mobile traffic already outweighs desktop traffic. Google recently announced an algorithm update focused on this specifically. You can find out more about how to see what kind of mobile search engine traffic is coming to your site along with some specific recommendations for things to update in my recent post , and here again Google offers a very helpful free tool to get recommendations on how to make your site more mobile-friendly.

Header response codes are an important technical SEO issue. You can use a server header checker to see the status codes that your pages are returning when search engines crawl them.