What is seo

Google claims to have "very high Page Quality standards" for such pages because low-quality YMYL content can directly affect readers' well-being. Google wants to send its users to websites that give a great user experience UX.

The raters look carefully at the quantity and quality of the content, the user-friendliness of the design, and the navigation of the site. The raters also identify explicitly bad content — they will flag content that is low quality, or has no credibility, or is outright misleading.

Google aims to exclude this type of content since it does not give a good user experience for its users. When we talk about ranking factors, we are simply identifying which groups of signals have the most influence on how well a piece of content will perform in Google search. From your perspective, we are identifying which aspects of your content, website, and reputation you can improve to most effectively boost Google's opinion of your content, and thus gain a higher position in the search results.

Here are the main Search Engine Optimization factors you need to get right to help your content to rank higher in Google there are more than , so we have only detailed the most important ones in this guide.

As the name implies, on-page signals are those that Google finds on the page of your website. They are the aspects that you control directly, and therefore the easiest to get right. This is the biggest off-page factor — links to your content from relevant, authoritative sites are a very strong signal to Google that the content is popular and worthy. We can consider links as "votes" — people link to content from their websites or their social media accounts because they appreciate it.

That is why building a reliable backlink profile is one of the pillars of Search Engine Optimization. Sharing on social platforms, and the general social buzz around your content is a signal to Google that the content is useful and appreciated. And when recommending content as a solution to its user, useful and appreciated are high on the list of priorities.

A mention of your brand is a signal to Google, even without a link. Google understands that someone is talking about you when they use your brand name. Obviously, you are looking for mentions with positive sentiment in a relevant context. When influencers in your industry talk about your brand and cite your content, they are essentially vouching for you.

Once again, we are looking for relevancy — approval from an authoritative figure within your industry. Trust signals are things like product and service reviews, positive mentions in forums, comments on your blog posts, etc.

In short, any positive activity by your users around your products, brand, or content. One of the most popular questions is What is SEO and how does it work? The first part of this question was briefly answered above, so let's take a closer look at How Search Engine Optimization works.

This section covers what you can do to improve your chances of being recommended by Google as the appropriate, relevant, and helpful answer to the question a user has asked. We can divide this into three main areas: technical, content, and backlinks. Technical Search Engine Optimization is all about the quality of the infrastructure that delivers your content.

Good technical SEO means that Google will find your content easily, and that content will be easy for it to digest and understand. Meta titles and meta descriptions - These areas of a page determine, in many cases, what Google shows its users in the search results. An accurate meta title that describes clearly and unambiguously what the content of the page offers to the user is supremely important — it is the reason they click on your result or not.

Meta titles and meta descriptions are essentially sales copy that needs to pull the user in, and also help Google better understand the content and purpose of each page. Ideally, the meta title will include the main keywords the user searched for. Heading - The title the user sees when they land on your page is a critical signal to Google.

Like the meta title, it needs to be clear and unambiguous and include the terms the user searched for. Again, this is an important signal to Google, but also reassuring and helpful for the user. Writing style - Keep your writing simple, clear, and focused.

Keep sentences short, break the content into logical chunks, and stay on topic. Help readers get right to the solution to their problem. Organize your content so that the value it provides is easy to identify, understand, and engage with. Rich content - Include rich content such as audio, video, and illustrative images whenever feasible. Google is not capable of understanding the content of images or videos. You could also include a written version to make it easier for users who prefer written content.

Outbound links - These kinds of links lead to sources that confirm the accuracy of your content and that validate your credibility and the credibility of the author. Authorship - Identify the author explicitly where appropriate. If they have great E-A-T, this will bring credibility to the content. Taking it further, your content does not live in isolation.

It is vital to see each piece of content as part of an overall, coherent content strategy. As soon as you do that, you are thinking in terms of content marketing.

As Bill Gates once said: "Content is King," and that is still true. What does that mean for you in terms of Search Engine Optimization? The better the content, the higher positions in SERP you will claim.

That is simple! But what differs poor content from great? Unless your site has only a handful of pages, think about how visitors will go from a general page your root page to a page containing more specific content. Do you have hundreds of different products that need to be classified under multiple category and subcategory pages? A breadcrumb is a row of internal links at the top or bottom of the page that allows visitors to quickly navigate back to a previous section or the root page.

Many breadcrumbs have the most general page usually the root page as the first, leftmost link and list the more specific sections out to the right. We recommend using breadcrumb structured data markup when showing breadcrumbs. A navigational page is a simple page on your site that displays the structure of your website, and usually consists of a hierarchical listing of the pages on your site.

Visitors may visit this page if they are having problems finding pages on your site. While search engines will also visit this page, getting good crawl coverage of the pages on your site, it's mainly aimed at human visitors. Make it as easy as possible for users to go from general content to the more specific content they want on your site. Add navigation pages when it makes sense and effectively work these into your internal link structure.

Make sure all of the pages on your site are reachable through links, and that they don't require an internal search functionality to be found. Link to related pages, where appropriate, to allow users to discover similar content.

Controlling most of the navigation from page to page on your site through text links makes it easier for search engines to crawl and understand your site. When using JavaScript to create a page, use a elements with URLs as href attribute values, and generate all menu items on page-load, instead of waiting for a user interaction. Include a simple navigational page for your entire site or the most important pages, if you have hundreds or thousands for users.

Create an XML sitemap file to ensure that search engines discover the new and updated pages on your site, listing all relevant URLs together with their primary content's last modified dates.

Users will occasionally come to a page that doesn't exist on your site, either by following a broken link or typing in the wrong URL. Having a custom page that kindly guides users back to a working page on your site can greatly improve a user's experience.

Consider including a link back to your root page and providing links to popular or related content on your site.

Creating descriptive categories and filenames for the documents on your website not only helps you keep your site better organized, it can create easier, friendlier URLs for those that want to link to your content. Visitors may be intimidated by extremely long and cryptic URLs that contain few recognizable words.

If your URL is meaningful, it can be more useful and easily understandable in different contexts:. Lastly, remember that the URL to a document is usually displayed in some form in a Google Search result near the document title. Google is good at crawling all types of URL structures, even if they're quite complex, but spending the time to make your URLs as simple as possible is a good practice. URLs with words that are relevant to your site's content and structure are friendlier for visitors navigating your site.

Use a directory structure that organizes your content well and makes it easy for visitors to know where they're at on your site. Try using your directory structure to indicate the type of content found at that URL. To prevent users from linking to one version of a URL and others linking to a different version this could split the reputation of that content between the URLs , focus on using and referring to one URL in the structure and internal linking of your pages.

If you do find that people are accessing the same content through multiple URLs, setting up a redirect from non-preferred URLs to the dominant URL is a good solution for this. Creating compelling and useful content will likely influence your website more than any of the other factors discussed here. Users know good content when they see it and will likely want to direct other users to it. This could be through blog posts, social media services, email, forums, or other means.

Organic or word-of-mouth buzz is what helps build your site's reputation with both users and Google, and it rarely comes without quality content. Think about the words that a user might search for to find a piece of your content.

Users who know a lot about the topic might use different keywords in their search queries than someone who is new to the topic. Anticipating these differences in search behavior and accounting for them while writing your content using a good mix of keyword phrases could produce positive results.

Google Ads provides a handy Keyword Planner that helps you discover new keyword variations and see the approximate search volume for each keyword. Also, Google Search Console provides you with the top search queries your site appears for and the ones that led the most users to your site in the Performance Report.

Consider creating a new, useful service that no other site offers. You could also write an original piece of research, break an exciting news story, or leverage your unique user base.

Other sites may lack the resources or expertise to do these things. It's always beneficial to organize your content so that visitors have a good sense of where one content topic begins and another ends. Breaking your content up into logical chunks or divisions helps users find the content they want faster. New content will not only keep your existing visitor base coming back, but also bring in new visitors. Learn more about duplicate content.

Designing your site around your visitors' needs while making sure your site is easily accessible to search engines usually produces positive results.

A site with a good reputation is trustworthy. Cultivate a reputation for expertise and trustworthiness in a specific area. Provide information about who publishes your site, provides the content, and its goals. If you have a shopping or other financial transaction website, make sure you have clear and satisfying customer service information to help users resolve issues.

If you have a news sites, provide clear information about who is responsible for the content. Using appropriate technologies is also important. If a shopping checkout page doesn't have a secure connection, users cannot trust the site. Expertise and authoritativeness of a site increases its quality. Be sure that content on your site is created or edited by people with expertise in the topic. For example, providing expert or experienced sources can help users understand articles' expertise.

Representing well-established consensus in pages on scientific topics is a good practice if such consensus exists. Make sure content is factually accurate, clearly written, and comprehensive.

So, for example, if you describe your page as a recipe, provide a complete recipe that is easy to follow, rather than just a set of ingredients or a basic description of the dish. We expect advertisements to be visible.

However, don't let the advertisements distract users or prevent them from consuming the site content. For example, advertisements, supplement contents, or interstitial pages pages displayed before or after the content you are expecting that make it difficult to use the website.

Learn more about this topic. Link text is the visible text inside a link. This text tells users and Google something about the page you're linking to. Links on your page may be internal—pointing to other pages on your site—or external—leading to content on other sites. In either of these cases, the better your anchor text is, the easier it is for users to navigate and for Google to understand what the page you're linking to is about.

With appropriate anchor text, users and search engines can easily understand what the linked pages contain. Make it easy for users to distinguish between regular text and the anchor text of your links.

Your content becomes less useful if users miss the links or accidentally click them. You may usually think about linking in terms of pointing to outside websites, but paying more attention to the anchor text used for internal links can help users and Google navigate your site better.

You can confer some of your site's reputation to another site when your site links to it. Sometimes users can take advantage of this by adding links to their own site in your comment sections or message boards.

Or sometimes you might mention a site in a negative way and don't want to confer any of your reputation upon it. For example, imagine that you're writing a blog post on the topic of comment spamming and you want to call out a site that recently comment spammed your blog.

You want to warn others of the site, so you include the link to it in your content; however, you certainly don't want to give the site some of your reputation from your link.

This would be a good time to use nofollow. Another example when the nofollow attribute can come handy are widget links. If you are using a third party's widget to enrich the experience of your site and engage users, check if it contains any links that you did not intend to place on your site along with the widget. Some widgets may add links to your site which are not your editorial choice and contain anchor text that you as a website owner may not control.

If removing such unwanted links from the widget is not possible, you can always disable them with nofollow. If you create a widget for functionality or content that you provide, make sure to include the nofollow on links in the default code snippet. You can find more details about robots meta tags in our documentation. To tell Google not to follow or pass your page's reputation to the pages linked, set the value of the rel attribute of a link to nofollow or ugc.

When would this be useful? If your site has a blog with public commenting turned on, links within those comments could pass your reputation to pages that you may not be comfortable vouching for. Blog comment areas on pages are highly susceptible to comment spam.

Nofollowing these user-added links ensures that you're not giving your page's hard-earned reputation to a spammy site. Many blogging software packages automatically nofollow user comments, but those that don't can most likely be manually edited to do this.

This advice also goes for other areas of your site that may involve user-generated content, such as guest books, forums, shout-boards, referrer listings, etc. If you're willing to vouch for links added by third parties for example, if a commenter is trusted on your site , then there's no need to use nofollow on links; however, linking to sites that Google considers spammy can affect the reputation of your own site. Semantic HTML markup helps crawlers find and process images.

Provide a descriptive filename and alt attribute description for images. The alt attribute allows you to specify alternative text for the image if it cannot be displayed for some reason. Why use this attribute? If a user is viewing your site using assistive technologies, such as a screen reader, the contents of the alt attribute provide information about the picture.

Another reason is that if you're using an image as a link, the alt text for that image will be treated similarly to the anchor text of a text link. However, we don't recommend using too many images for links in your site's navigation when text links could serve the same purpose.

Lastly, optimizing your image filenames and alt text makes it easier for image search projects like Google Images to better understand your images. In addition to daily news stories from our editorial staff, Search Engine Land publishes daily articles from expert contributors that cover SEO issues mainly from an in-the-trenches perspective. In addition to covering SEO generally, Search Engine Land also has search engine optimization areas specifically for the major search engines:.

Subscribe to our daily brief newsletter for a recap of all the latest SEO-related news, tips and tactics from Search Engine Land and other sources all over the Web. How does SEO work? Why is SEO important for marketing? How can I learn SEO? In other words: content with data is still working really well. The bad news is that creating this type of data-driven content can be really tricky. Yes, you still want to cover actionable strategies.

But the main goal is to give someone everything they need to know about a topic on a single page. For someone looking for a massive list of actionable techniques, this is a great piece of content. But what about someone that wants to understand what link building is?

Or why building backlinks is important for SEO? Yup, this guide does contain a few strategies. Pro Tip: Cover new, trending topics to boost the odds that your guide stands out.

For example, this guide to the Ketogenic Diet came out in … just as the keto movement was starting to gain traction. Because this guide was one of the first of its kind, hundreds of bloggers in the Paleo space linked to it and shared it on social media.

One industry study found that one form of visual content infographics was an ideal content format for getting links. There are videos, flowcharts, screenshots and more.

On-page SEO is making sure Google can find your web pages so they can show them in the search results. Well, when it comes to on-page optimization, your title tag is the most important part of your page. Your title tag summarizes what your page is all about.

And when you use your keyword in your title tag, it tells Google that your page is about that keyword. For example, I published this list of 17 SEO tips a while back. See how I really sell my content? Which obviously brings in more traffic to my site. Pro Tip: Use your main keyword in your description.

When someone searches for that term, Google will bold your keyword… which helps your site stand out even more in the SERPs.

For example, for the SEO tips post I mentioned earlier, you can see that I include that keyword in the first words:. In total, I used my main keyword 6 times in my content. Include your main keyword on your page a handful of times.

Just type your keyword into the search bar and check out the suggestions. First, give your image a descriptive filename.

For example, check out this screenshot of the number of comments one of our guides got. Next, use an image alt text that describes your image. Finally, give your image a title. I just copy and paste my alt text here. Even though User Experience is subjective which makes it hard for major search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo to measure , it does indirectly impact your SEO.

And without links and shares, your chances of ranking in Google are pretty much zero. If you want to learn more about UX, this guide is a great starting point. For example, check out this step-by-step SEO audit checklist on my blog.

I covered most of the basics of on-page SEO in this section. But if you feel like you have a handle on the basics and want to go advanced, check out this video on-page SEO tutorial:. The main goal with technical SEO is to ensure that search engines can easily find, crawl and index all of the pages on your website.

But in recent years, technical SEO has expanded to include topics like site loading speed, mobile optimization and more. One wrong move and your entire site could get deindexed. The GSC is packed with helpful features that allow you to submit your sitemap directly to Google, see how many pages are indexed, and lots more. And if this new structure results in multiple pages with similar content, implement canonical URLs.

As the name suggests, this update started to penalize web pages that load slowly on mobile devices.