High-quality content answers user queries, boosts engagement, and increases the chances of earning backlinks. For example, you can include key phrases in your title tags, meta descriptions, and page headings. You can also create quality content, such as blog posts, article pages, and infographics, related to your industry and the services you provide.

Those ranking factors form the basis for successful SEO strategies. They guide you in enhancing your website and content to increase visibility. When you finish this guide, you’ll know the basics of SEO and have a clear plan for boosting your business’s search engine rankings. “Why a page is not ranking for a relevant query in Google Search results” is one of the most common questions you’ll get asked as an SEO.

We refer to them as ranking factors, and they are the focus of an SEO strategy. Advertising with Google won’t have any effect on your site’s presence in our search results. Google never accepts money to include or rank sites in our search results, and it costs nothing to appear in our organic search results. The most natural link building technique is to create a unique and valuable piece of content – a so-called linkable asset – that will attract backlinks. I would say that’s one of the shortest routes to penalization, or at least it invites Google to be suspicious about unnatural link building. Being too narrow and obvious about artificial connections will lead to a good drop in rankings resulting in traffic loss.

In other words, SEO works like a complex feedback system—to surface the most accurate, trustworthy, and relevant results for any given search using input from you, Google, and searchers. Your role is to produce content that satisfies Google’s experience, expertise, authority, and trust requirements (E-E-A-T), which satisfy its searchers’ requirements. So how does Google determine which pages to surface in the search engine results page (SERP) for any given query? The short answer is yes if you run a small to medium-sized website. All you need is some time to learn and practice SEO, plus good SEO tools that offer vast and accurate data.

Link Building (Don’t buy links. Earn them.)

Conduct a content audit to evaluate your content’s performance, relevance, and quality. Good, helpful, engaging content is vital for getting other sites to link to yours naturally. This analysis will inform your on-page optimization strategies and ensure your website meets industry standards.

Our Dallas SEO company delivers results

Zombie pages are pages on your site that don’t bring in any traffic. …then “pogosticks” back to the search results to find something that actually helps them. We have connections with hundreds of high-quality sites and we can leverage our relationships for our clients. This type of ranking puts you in the opportunity to be front and center for your customer. Did you know there are good and bad ways to SEO Anomaly do SEO like the heroes and villains we see in movies? These two sides of SEO are called white hat and black hat, and you can guess what they both mean.

• In simple terms, it’s the amount an advertiser pays each time a Google user clicks on an ad.
• As we’ve explained previously with PageRank, pages with quality links pointing to them also pass more link equity to your page.
• You can also use keyword research tools like Google Keyword Planner and Ahrefs to search for keywords.
• Regularly monitor your keyword rankings, traffic, and conversion data to identify opportunities for optimization and refinement.
• First, develop a strategy, technique, process or concept that’s unique to you.

When users submit a search query, search engines employ sophisticated algorithms to identify the most relevant pages from their indexed database. Start by generating ideas from competitor analysis and your current rankings. Evaluate these keywords based on search volume and difficulty and consider the user’s search intent. Tools like Ahrefs and Semrush are invaluable for this process. In summary, SEO is all about optimizing content, building authority, and improving the overall user experience on your site. On the other hand, social media marketing is centered around building relationships and engaging with your audience on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, X, and LinkedIn.

While paid advertising, social media, and other online platforms can generate traffic to websites, the majority of online traffic is driven by search engines. Black hat strategies let you cut down the complexity of link building, for example. Keyword stuffing helps users to rank one page for many keywords without having to create more content. SEO works by optimizing a website’s content, conducting keyword research, and earning inbound links to increase that content’s ranking and the website’s visibility. While you can generally see results take effect on the SERP once the webpage has been crawled and indexed by a search engine, SEO efforts can take months to fully materialize.