SEO Starter Guide: The Basics Google Search Central Documentation

Now we know what is SEO, let us have a closer look at SEO SEO Anomaly Search optimization in depth. Because of the ever-changing search engine algorithms and fierce competition. Next, navigate to the “Prospects” tab to see a list of suggested prospects for your link building campaign.

That’s why I recommend trying a few tools that specialize in bubbling up burning questions that people have. Unlike most SEO case studies, this post contained a detailed, step-by-step process. A hook is an angle, a data point, or something controversial that will encourage people to naturally link to you. But the real value is tracking your impressions and clicks over time.

Because some clicks go to other websites, your Visibility is lower than 100%. If you still can’t find it, you likely don’t have one and need to create one. Most website platforms handle basic SEO functionality out of the box. It’s hard to put even basic SEO best practices in place without one. Each branch on the map becomes an internal link, which is a link from one page on a website to another.

4xx errors are client errors, meaning the requested URL contains bad syntax or cannot be fulfilled. One of the most common 4xx errors is the “404 – not found” error. These might occur because of a URL typo, deleted page, or broken redirect, just to name a few examples. Non-text media forms (images, video, GIFs, etc.) should not be used to display text that you wish to be indexed. While search engines are getting better at recognizing images, there’s no guarantee they will be able to read and understand it just yet. Sometimes a search engine will be able to find parts of your site by crawling, but other pages or sections might be obscured for one reason or another.

Guided by industry experts, you’ll engage in hands-on activities and real-world examples that simulate common SEO tasks, building practical skills to prepare you for the job market. This module introduces you to the fundamentals of On-page SEO—what it is, why it matters, and how it fits into a broader SEO strategy. You’ll start by exploring the key areas of SEO and how On-page optimization complements technical and off-page efforts. Then, you’ll dive into the core elements that make a page search-friendly, including metadata, title tags, headings, URLs, and structured content. You’ll also explore how AI is changing content creation and optimization, including how to use AI tools and prompts ethically and effectively in your workflow.

What Is SEO? A Search Engine Optimization Guide

• Voice searches are typically more conversational and longer than text searches.
• SEO often involves the concerted effort of multiple departments within an organization, including the design, marketing, and content production teams.
• This type of SEO focuses on both the page’s content and HTML source code, including title tags, header tags, and meta description, so that it appeals to web users and search engine crawlers.
• First you need to understand who your prospective customers are and what they’re likely to search for.
• There are numerous issues that can cause problems at each stage—crawling, indexing, and ranking.

The 40% in question refers to a large number of websites (many of which received manual actions) that published unhelpful AI-generated content, which Google ultimately viewed as spam. We need only look at Google’s recent 2024 update, which, combined with its previous efforts, aimed to “collectively reduce low-quality, unoriginal content in search results by 40%” as an example. Again, it makes sense, as the search engine needs a way to assess the company’s location. In the second example, I’ve targeted my primary audience (crafters) first and placed the theme of cats in the right context from the get-go. (The ‘right’ context is to use these cat-themed designs to produce home crafts.) As you can see Google has registered words like “crafters,” “designs,” and “Cricut,” more than others. There are nuances to explore regarding duplicate content (and the myths surrounding it), but Olivian Stoica, Senior SEO Specialist at Wave Live Wallpapers, is here to help.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Starter Guide

The alternative might be to hire an Adwords professional to help set up your initial campaign and to get things heading in the right direction. This may cost a little more, but if it can cut down your time and effort to winning business, it’s worth it. Google Adwords and most other SEM providers offer in-depth tutorials on how to use their SEM tools effectively, and they’re worth going through if you intend to spend money on SEM. And if all that on-page work wasn’t enough, you also need to work on off-page SEO.

Google’s approach to AI-generated content is rooted in its commitment to rewarding high-quality, original content, irrespective of how it’s produced. The key criteria for content evaluation remain centered around the principles of expertise, experience, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T). Google emphasizes the importance of content quality over the method of creation, whether it’s AI-generated or human-written.

When doing keyword research, what should you pay attention to besides the search volume and difficulty of the keyword?

Anyone who works in the digital marketing domain, be it the backend developer, content writer, editor, content coordinator, UI/ UX designer, can benefit from this concise SEO tutorial. Search Engine Optimization or SEO is the practice of increasing organic traffic on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). If you want to rank number one for all the keywords, you need to apply SEO to increase your rank.

For example, let’s say you track one keyword, and all the top positions in Google are occupied by pages on your website. Because your website gets all possible traffic from that keyword, your Visibility is 100%. This metric in Ahrefs’ Rank Tracker shows what percentage of all clicks for the tracked keywords land on your website. Before we dive into how to do SEO, it’s worth taking a minute to understand how to track and measure SEO performance. This is never easy, and what we’ll cover here is a very high-level overview.