What is SEO? SEO for beginners

It began with webmasters manually submitting URLs to search engines and including keyword-rich meta tags. Early search engines, like AltaVista and Infoseek, used these tags to index content. The late 1990s saw the rise of Google, which revolutionized SEO with its PageRank algorithm, focusing on the quality and quantity of backlinks.

Off-Page SEO and Link-Building

Join us as we equip you with the skills and knowledge to create a portfolio that takes you one step closer to your dream career. The alternative might be to hire an Adwords professional to help set up your initial campaign and to get things heading in the right direction. This may cost a little more, but if it can cut down your time and effort to winning business, it’s worth it. Google Adwords and most other SEM providers offer in-depth tutorials on how to use their SEM tools effectively, and they’re worth going through if you intend to spend money on SEM. And if all that on-page work wasn’t enough, you also need to work on off-page SEO.

But if you want a full list of all the types of SEO, we compiled one here (67 types of SEO to date). Link building is something is something that preoccupies the SEO industry. To give you an idea of how this works, here’s a quick overview of a few popular backlink building techniques. If you’re an Ahrefs user, you can also use the Indentify intents AI feature to see the type of search intent that gets the most traffic. SEO works by creating high-quality, relevant content with good UX about things people search for, and then proving to Google it deserves to rank. For example, if you sell coffee, SEO can help your website show up on the first page of Google when people search for “buy coffee”.

That’s what you want if those parameters create duplicate pages, but not ideal if you want those pages to be indexed. People with bad intentions (e.g., e-mail address scrapers) build bots that don’t follow this protocol. In fact, some bad actors use robots.txt files to find where you’ve located your private content.

Make sure you don’t have “orphaned” pages – pages that aren’t linked to from anywhere else on your site. Ideally, visitors should be able to navigate from your homepage to any other page on your site with only a handful of clicks. Learn all about visual search optimization with Crystal Carter in this Whiteboard Friday episode. Favicons are little icons that appear next to your Google listing on mobile.

External links also help your pages gain exposure, allowing more potential users to reach them and learn about your product or service. By connecting relevant pages to one another, you’ll make your site more navigable and ensure that your users can easily find what they are looking for. Internal linking can therefore drive traffic between your website pages, bringing attention to all of your assets. Many SEO experts consider your meta titles, or title tags, and meta descriptions to be some of the strongest SEO signals that you can send Google. It is therefore critical that you try to include your most important keywords in your title tag.

This applies to the text surrounding the link as well, since links may carry context around them. Namely, a backlink with an anchor text that is relevant to the linked page is more valuable than the one with an irrelevant or generic anchor. If you have two links from the same page, the one that appears first may have more value than the second BHS Links one.

Find More Guest Post Opportunities

• In a nutshell, SEO (search engine optimisation) is the process of optimising your website to get more organic traffic.
• 5xx errors are server errors, meaning the server the web page is located on failed to fulfill the searcher or search engine’s request to access the page.
• From what you’ve read in this guide so far, you know that no page will rank without two factors — relevance and authority.
• For example, you can ask them for a quote to include in the post analyzing your new research.
• One final aspect that you shouldn’t forget about is your business listings.

Search engine optimization is also helpful because of its targeting capabilities. Whether you’re looking to reach people in a specific town (like Los Angeles) or people in the awareness vs. decision stage, you can do so with SEO. The indexing stage is like a librarian reviewing, organizing, and shelving various books in the library. Here, the search engine’s algorithm catalogs the content, which the search engine then relies on to deliver results to searchers. Technical SEO is a method of optimizing a website’s technical elements to improve its performance in SERPs or Search Engine Result Pages. Conversion rate optimization involves using methods such as A/B testing to make changes to websites and measure the impact they have on a site’s conversion rate.

Choose a High-Value Keyword

The higher your site ranks, the more visible your business is, and the more traffic and sales your business is likely to generate. At its core, SEO is the process of making your site rank as highly as possible in Google when someone types in burrito blanket (or whatever it is you sell, promote, or talk about). Optimizing your webpages helps you rank higher and convert more searchers to customers. There are many good resources you can find online, and a good portion of them are free. You can start with our guide on SEO for beginners or take free courses in Ahrefs’ Academy. E-E-A-T (aka Double-E-A-T) is a set of guidelines that Google’s quality raters use to assess the quality of search results.