One of the most common “mistakes” I see is that people don’t make their headlines clickable, especially when it comes to blogs. If it contains the focus keyword, you let Google know what the page you’re linking to is about. Here’s an example of a SERP snippet for our post on “7-step SEO strategy” with the focus keyword SEO strategy. To select the focus keyword, you should follow the keyword research principles we covered extensively in the previous chapter – consider its search volume, difficulty and relevance. Ethics: White Hat vs. Black Hat SEO This lesson introduces you to the SEO changes and algorithm updates you need to know about and SEO misconceptions. Remember, the goal of SEO is not just to drive traffic but to drive the right kind of organic search traffic by providing value that matches the users’ search intent. Schema markup can highlight specific information, such as your business’s location, hours, and products, making this data more accessible for voice search queries. Basically, the page seems more relevant to search engines if the keyword seems to occur naturally. Conversions indicate whether your SEO efforts drive actual business results. At the same time, we handle the intricate techniques and tactics of SEO. When another website links to a page on your website, that’s called a backlink. Also called inbound links, backlinks from trusted websites prove to Google that your content is trustworthy. High-quality backlinks are one of many factors Google considers when deciding how high to rank your website in search results pages. Every SEO service provider varies a bit in the type of services offered. So just as search engines have become important in our lives, they have also become integral to many business marketing strategies. In fact, organic search is considered to be the highest ROI channel by 49% of marketers. Some search engines have also reached out to the SEO industry and are frequent sponsors and guests at SEO conferences, webchats, and seminars. New to Marketing? Start here. Guest posting (or guest blogging) is definitely the most popular link building technique. However, the most important criterion is whether or not a site represents a real brand. There’s a lot of techniques that can help you get backlinks while providing value to the users. They’re just not as instant as writing spam comments or buying a bunch of links from Fiverr. Any links intended to manipulate PageRank or a site’s ranking in Google search results may be SEO Anomaly considered part of a link scheme and a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. A sitemap is a structured list of all pages on a website available to be crawled by search engines. Keyword research is a crucial part of SEO that helps businesses understand your audience’s search intent and tailor your content to them. Conducting monthly keyword research to identify quality keywords and update your content with the new keywords helps to stay relevant and keep your content high ranking. Another SEO strategy that SEO experts utilize is optimizing a website’s semantic markup. To increase your digital presence in a local market, FBM attempts to add listings to directories and get your business in local map packs. Sure Oak provides a variety of SEO services to ensure your site is optimized for national and local audiences. To that end, the company focuses on a blend of link building, content creation and technical SEO. Google Search Console (GSC) is a free tool provided by Google that helps website owners, webmasters, and SEO professionals understand how their site is performing in Google Search. For beginners looking to harness the power of SEO, mastering Google Search Console is a crucial step. Algorithmic penalties are automatic deductions in rankings that occur when a website fails to comply with the search engine’s quality guidelines, usually after an algorithm update. These penalties are not manually issued but are the result of the website being evaluated by the search engine’s algorithm. High-quality content establishes your website as a credible source of information, building trust with your audience and authority within your industry. ✅ Make Sure All Important Pages Are Linked Googlebot starts out by fetching a few web pages, and then follows the links on those webpages to find new URLs. The best SEOs and content marketers actively build links to their best content. To stay on Google’s good side, this can be done in a safe, editorial friendly way that makes the Internet a better place. A good place to start with link building is to find out who already links to you. This can help inform your decisions down the road, and give you a relative sense of strength. Google and other search engines can often understand your site better when it’s properly organized with a good URL structure. So there’s a big difference between a backlink from a page that links to 3 resources and a backlink from a page that links to 30 resources. There is no official metric by Google that would represent the authority of a page but there are many metrics by commercial tools that can help you with the estimation. As we’ve explained previously with PageRank, pages with quality links pointing to them also pass more link equity to your page. They are not the same and while the PageRank metric was discontinued, the PageRank algorithm is still a part of Google’s ranking. Link equity (also called “link juice”) is a term used to describe the authority a page transfers to another page through a link. They would normally appear on the 2nd, 3rd or even lower position.