What is SEO in digital marketing?

It is not a direct ranking factor in Google’s algorithm, but they are crucial for boosting your click-through rates, building trust, and increasing user engagement. A well-crafted meta description helps users quickly understand what they’ll find on your web page, aligns with their search intent, and gently nudges them to visit your site instead of your competitor’s. In short, optimizing your site for SEO makes it easier for your target audience to find your content, products, and services organically—without using paid ads. Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of orienting your website to rank higher on a search engine results page (SERP) so that you receive more traffic. The aim is typically to rank on the first page of Google results for search terms that mean the most to your target audience.

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You’ve learned a lot, from SEO’s meaning to SEO’s functionalities, and now you’re ready to bring search engine optimization to your organization’s digital marketing BHS Links strategy. By doing keyword research, you will be able to create content that aligns with your business and gets people to your website. This will enable you to set up an SEO strategy and plan to continue working on this throughout the year.

Quality, well-structured content

That means that optimizing the performance of your WordPress website will improve SEO. There’s a lot involved in WooCommerce SEO, and it’s an ongoing process. That’s why we put together WooCommerce SEO Made Easy, a step-by-step guide to ranking #1 on Google. You will also need to write an engaging title that readers will want to click on and add a meta description to help Google better understand the post. This guide also covers how to apply your keyword research in your business or blog, as well as how to track the performance of your keyword research. We show you how to use them to discover what users are searching for in our guide on how to do keyword research for your WordPress blog.

If you know your way around redirects, optimizing page speed, crawlability, security and structured data, make those your first priority. If not, let your site builder help you out or hire someone with a background in technical SEO. When that’s done, you can start looking at site structure and the content on your pages. In 1998, two graduate students at Stanford University, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, developed « Backrub », a search engine that relied on a mathematical algorithm to rate the prominence of web pages. In effect, this means that some links are stronger than others, as a higher PageRank page is more likely to be reached by the random web surfer.

In addition to these top-ranking factors, there are plenty of others (both known and unknown). But to get a head start with SEO, it makes sense to focus on these aspects first. Keyword research is the process of discovering what search terms your target audience uses. If search engines can’t crawl or index your site properly, your other efforts might go to waste.

Generally speaking, Google and other search engines have structured data of web pages and other content that they know about. Crawling is the discovery process and happens when search engines send search engine crawlers or spiders to find updated and new content. As we just mentioned, Google’s algorithm looks at hundreds of ranking factors when deciding which websites to present in the search results and in what order. SEO helps your website appear in those top 5 search results for relevant search queries to increase website traffic to your business – organically. The goal of SEO is to raise your ranking in organic search results.

SEO Tutorial For Beginners: A Step-By-Step Guide

SEO can support social media, paid advertising, email marketing, influencer marketing, content marketing, and more. It’s important to understand what people are searching for online, and knowing how to answer their questions will connect you right to them. Knowing your audience’s intent and being able to deliver it in a way that search engine crawlers can find and understand is the sweet spot of SEO. A search index is built and updated using a crawler, with items being analyzed and ranked by a series of algorithms. An individual component which contributes to a complex series of algorithms that determine where webpages should appear with the organic search results for a specific query. For years, Google has said that its algorithms “rely on more than 200 unique signals” to help users find the most relevant webpage or answer.

• A theorized and debated (but never confirmed by Google) “waiting period” that prevents new websites from seeing the full benefit of their optimization efforts.
• Some of the affected companies were also “false positives,” penalized for but innocent of using the black hat tactics Google wanted to suppress.
• First you need to understand who your prospective customers are and what they’re likely to search for.
• Start off by creating a few blog posts and work to build a following on social media.
• Organic results are determined by factors like content quality, keyword relevance, and user experience, whereas paid results are influenced by the advertiser’s bid and ad relevance.

Ideally, your meta description should stay within 150 to 160 characters. That’s just enough space to explain what’s waiting on the other side of the click. Go longer, and you risk Google cutting off your message with a “…”, making it look unfinished. Meta description may seem like a small detail — but it can have a big impact on whether users choose your page or someone else’s. Phrases like “Learn more,” “Shop now,” “Get started today,” or “Discover how” can subtly encourage users to click your snippet over others.

What’s important to know for SEO is that having a secure site is in fact a ranking factor. SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificates are small files installed on a web server which act as a security measure for websites. Check that your images are sized appropriately for your website and the space you’ve allotted for it. Poor quality images can make your website look less professional, but large files can slow down page speeds.