However, search engines are not paid for organic search traffic, their algorithms change, and there are no guarantees of continued referrals. An SEO technique is considered a white hat if it conforms to the search engines’ guidelines and involves no deception. As the search engine guidelines111249 are not written as a series of rules or commandments, this is an important distinction to note.
- Regardless of which editor you’re using, you’ll see a small text box appear when you click on the link button.
- That means not every blog post or web page you create needs to belong to a topic cluster.
- When I clearly see which pages are losing traffic, I know exactly where to focus my efforts.
- Link text (also known as anchor text) is the text part of a link that you can see.
- Google’s ranking algorithms now primarily use the mobile version of a site’s content to rank pages, meaning mobile is more critical than ever.
You can use Google developer tools, such as Lighthouse and Google PageSpeed Insights, to dig into the reasons behind the low-scoring URLs. The signals considered when evaluating Page Experience include Core Web Vitals, Mobile-friendliness, HTTPS, and intrusive interstitials. If the percentage of pages scored as ‘Good’ is low, you would want to check each of these signals to investigate the cause. Another valuable SEO tip is to add redirect rules to your WordPress .htaccess file to ensure that users and bots are always redirected to your canonical URLs.
Anchor links are excellent for improving user experience, as they enable readers to get right to the answers they’re looking for. In a lengthy post where some readers may need a portion of your content’s information, this is very helpful and prevents excessive scrolling. You’ve probably come across anchor links, especially if you read a lot of long blog posts. These links enable you to jump around to different parts of the post. This can also be a great way to start conversations with other brands.
How local SEO works
While Google and other search engines focus on your website’s written content, they also crawl your images and media. By optimizing the images on your website, you can enhance your on-page SEO while adding accessibility benefits for visitors. Google drives 63.41% of all US internet traffic, and 42% of online shoppers turn to search engines to research products. With search engines helping users discover brands, search is an important part of running a successful website. You have reliable HTML & CSS resources, as well as JavaScript guides in the “complement your SEO” section. Although using keywords in your meta description isn’t a ranking factor anymore, organic CTR is.
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To see how strong your organic traffic performance is compared to your main competitors, use Traffic Analytics. Focus on building relationships with journalists rather than just asking for links. Getting mentioned in news articles and industry publications is one of the best ways to build powerful links. You already have connections with other businesses, so turn those relationships into links. If you’re doing keyword research with the Keyword Magic Tool, find any keyword’s intent by looking at the “Intent” column. Making content with a similar format can increase your chances of ranking well.
AI tools are increasingly being used to analyze data, predict trends, and optimize local SEO strategies for specific geographic areas. This developing technology is enabling more sophisticated and personalized search experiences and impacting how businesses optimize their local SEO presence. Various local business factors impact AI search results including relevance, distance, and prominence. AI can help businesses improve their content by tailoring local audiences based on user intent and location data. By utilizing AI and optimizing for AI search results, local businesses can increase their local rankings and ultimately conversions from local traffic.
Influence how your site looks in Google Search
Once you’ve found a good head term and perused the filters, take a look at the SERPs. I’d recommend going several filters deep so you can get an approximation of a long-tail keyword. That’s good news — but later down below, I see that Google BHS Links has included a “What to read” search feature. If I were trying to start an SEO strategy in 2024, my first step would be to look for my company’s head term on Google. Boost your website performance with this free 3-part starter pack.
The costs here are more about time and potentially some frustration as you navigate the learning curve. Watch our video tutorial for a quick introduction to SEO, how it works, and why it’s an important digital marketing process. Your ranking will be positively affected if the links come from well-known and trusted sites. If they are paid links or a result of a link exchange, your ranking will be negatively affected. In SEO, this is considered a ‘vote of trust’ and one of the top SEO ranking factors determining a webpage’s position in the search results. When a user types a search query, search engine algorithms look into their index and find the best pages to satisfy the user’s intent.