SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the process of optimizing a website or web page in order to increase visitor numbers from search engines like Google. SEO involves using keywords in content creation for an increase in site visits through organic searches; then building backlinks as incentives for Google’s algorithms to rank your page highly for those keywords.
SEO has evolved to encompass much more than simply selecting words to target; it now involves technical site audits, keyword research, link building strategies, social media promotion campaigns and much more. A top SEO understands all these components working in concert to boost their clients’ search visibility.
At its core, SEO’s goal should be providing quality information that searchers find valuable. Google has repeatedly stated their desire to display helpful content at the top of search results pages; in 2022’s Helpful Content Update specifically rewards websites which make an effort to produce high quality posts that provide real value to their audience.
An important step to ensure that search queries are being met directly on your page is conducting keyword research, giving an indication of what specific terms people search for when looking up your topic. Utilizing these exact phrases within title tags, meta descriptions and body text will signal to search engines that your topic matches up perfectly with what users are searching for.
Establishing your authority in your niche is of utmost importance as Google strives to display trustworthy, authoritative content on their search results page. They do this by measuring E-A-T (Experience, Expertise and Authority). One effective way of increasing this indicator in your domain search rankings is through having high-quality, authoritative links from other websites in your niche – an easy way of building up this indicator is having lots of quality links from websites within that field.
Your permalink structure can also have a substantial effect on SEO. Short, descriptive URLs with friendly wording help search engines quickly index and crawl your content while also being more user-friendly for visitors who may link back to it.
Search engines need to collect vast quantities of information across the internet in order to populate their massive databases, known as “indexes.” They do this by sending crawlers (also called spiders) out onto webpages to collect all of this data before compiling and using it to display search results.
Search engines provide various SERP features, such as carousels, lists, paragraphs, tables and videos — in addition to featured snippets that pull content directly from web pages for summarization in search results. SEO’s aim is to control what search engines display as results and features; however this can be challenging given that their algorithm constantly evolves.