What is SEO, how it works & learning SEO in 6 simple steps

It optimizes your website to get traffic from search engine’s organic (unpaid) rankings. As discussed extensively, SEO is a comprehensive, long-term strategy focused on optimizing individual web pages and content to rank higher in SERPs. The first step in search engine optimization is to determine what keywords you’re optimizing for.

Tip #6: Optimize Your Content for Users

When someone searches for a website, Google will display sites that offer the best value to its users, according to their standards. Websites are ranked primarily based upon the competition between your web pages and other web pages for a particular keyword. The web pages which follow the best practices outrank every other web page in the competition and rank on top for those keywords. The title tag is a header title element displaying the summary of your website’s content on the search engine results page. It also influences click-through rates and is the most important factor of on-page SEO.

Where to find keywords?

SEO works by SEO Anomaly optimizing various elements of a website to make it more accessible to search engines, ultimately improving its visibility and ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs). On-page SEO focuses on optimizing individual pages to improve search visibility and user experience. It involves aligning your content, HTML elements, and site structure with SEO best practices. This ensures search engines understand your pages while making them more engaging for visitors.

As we’ve mentioned earlier, in order to do this, search engines will scan, or crawl, different web content to better understand what the site is about. The process for search engine optimization is easier than it appears to be. Generally speaking, Google and other search engines have structured data of web pages and other content that they know about. But before they are able to do that, search engines first need to crawl and index websites. SEO helps your website appear in those top 5 search results for relevant search queries to increase website traffic to your business – organically.

• If you haven’t already set up and verified it, this guide tells you how to do it.
• The good news is that you don’t have to be an SEO expert to start.
• If you want to check out the search volume and competition levels for those terms, you can use a keyword tool like Semrush or Ubersuggest.
• People intentionally seek out the information SEO helps surface, making it a more user-friendly and consumer-centered marketing tool.

Start your keyword research

Besides the changes you can make to your website (on-site SEO) to rank higher in the SERPs, the other way to influence your website’s ranking position is by using off-site SEO factors. Technical SEO is important because if you have problems with crawling and indexing, it can negatively impact your rankings. Usually, once you get your technical SEO correct, you may not have to deal with it again. As part of the Search team, she enjoys creating content that helps you master SEO. We also offer a variety of SEO courses in our Yoast SEO academy, where you can find 5 free courses to get started.