SEO for Beginners Guide: Optimizing Your Site for Success

Nowadays, ranking for almost any keyword is much harder than it was in the past – most niches are oversaturated. What they mean is that you should find synonyms and related keywords and “sprinkle them” across the page to make sure Google knows what it’s about. Once you have a focus keyword, you should use it to optimize your page for the given topic.

what is seo

If you operate a local business, optimizing for local search is crucial. Search engine optimization uses how search works to optimize a site for organic search results. If you’re curious to learn more about Google and its impact on SEO, check out our timeline of Google algorithm updates. Besides learning the different concepts and theories, the only way to find out what works is to apply the various SEO techniques on a website and monitor your rankings.

  • Search engines take many factors into account, from how quickly your website loads to how many people click to your page from search, to rank websites.
  • How often should I post content is a common question most website owners ask.
  • Google doesn’t always show the one you’ve provided in the SERP; it likes to build its own based on the query, but it’s still important to optimize for SEO.
  • Because a lot of your audience won’t read every word from the first to the last.

Structured data & schema: communicating local relevance

AI content creation tools (like Shopify Magic and Jasper) can produce marketing copy from a simple prompt. Improve this copy with keyword optimization tools like Surfer—and just like that, you have a ton of engaging, optimized content ready to add to your website. Next, make sure your images are the optimum size and file format. Google likes large, high-quality images—it just doesn’t love huge file sizes that lead to longer load times.

what is seo

Write Content That’s a 1:1 Match For Search Intent

what is seo

But it also has a cool “Semantic” section that hands you a list of LSI keywords that you can use in your content. I also recommend linking out to related content, which one SEO experiment found to directly impact Google rankings. That way, you can focus 100% on content… without having to worry about keywords, H2 tags, alt text and other on-page SEO stuff. That way, your content is super easy to read no matter what device someone is using. When you use a font that’s 15px, there’s no need to squint, pinch or zoom.

what is seo

How can we help you with your SEO strategy?

It can bring improvements in rankings, traffic, and even backlinks. If your content doesn’t provide a great user experience and isn’t easy to read and understand, it WON’T rank. The key takeaway is that the better you make your content, the less backlinks you will require to rank. This is because Google considers over 200 other ranking signals, including how visitors interact with the SERP and your content.

They are not the same and while the PageRank metric was discontinued, the PageRank algorithm is still a part SEO Anomaly of Google’s ranking. Another great source of keywords with featured snippets is the so-called “People also ask” box that often appears below the featured snippet. Featured snippet (sometimes called “position zero”) is a selected search result that appears above the standard 10 results in Google search. You’ll find more useful information on this topic in a great guide on analyzing third-party performance by Kinsta. If you’re not sure whether your website is mobile-friendly, you can test it with this tool from Google or go to Search Console and see if there are any issues in the Mobile Usability section.

These tags appear in the HTML document containing instructions for rendering a web page and do not appear to users as they browse it. Some types of meta tags (like title tags) might appear on the search engine results page (SERP), though. To add or edit them in your content management system (CMS), simply look for the corresponding fields and enter the appropriate meta information. For example, in Shopify, go to a product page and scroll to the “Search engine listing preview” and make changes as desired.

veröffentlicht am 12.06.2025