What is SEO? Beginner’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization

Certain topics, such as medical and financial queries, can be especially challenging to rank for in Google. In truth, there are thousands of articles, guides, and tutorials published about SEO every year. Most of these guides are either very introductory or broad, or go to the opposite end of the spectrum and cover a very specific topic. The majority of real businesses have physical brick & mortar premises. I have used positive social velocity to bring Penguin penalised sites back to the #1 spot. Domains that have a low click-through rate across their pages will have less visibility.

Internal Links

In essence, while distance is a factor, your strategic planning can ensure that you still stay in sight and in mind for your local audience. It’s all about playing to the strengths of your location and aligning your local SEO strategy with Google’s local search ranking factors. Google considers the distance between the searcher and your business when determining local search rankings. While you can’t change your physical location, you can focus on targeting keywords that include your city or neighborhood to improve local rankings.

Referral Traffic:

• Get the most value from local SEO by focusing on appearing in the standard organic search results, as well as working on your Google Business Profile listing.
• Click-Through Rate measures the percentage of users who click on a link to your site in search engine results pages (SERPs) out of the total users who viewed the link.
• Just enter your URL into the SEO Analyzer and it will return a list of suggestions to improve your rankings.
• Unfortunately, Google won’t directly tell you what your competitors rank for, but a handful of 3rd party SEO tools do exactly that, making the work much easier.

Refer to our dedicated tutorial on keyword research to explore keyword research techniques and strategies. With most web traffic now coming from mobile devices, mobile-friendliness is another aspect of page experience. Choosing the right image format (JPEG, PNG, WebP, AVIF) is essential for optimization. JPEGs are typically better for photographs due to their balance of quality and file size, while PNGs are suitable for images requiring transparency. Refer to our dedicated tutorial on link-building techniques to build quality links for your website. Anchor text, the clickable text in a hyperlink, should vary naturally to reflect how people genuinely link to your content.

This includes using CDNs, optimizing your application code, optimizing database queries, SEO Anomaly and ensuring you have fast and responsive web servers. Start by measuring your TTFB with a tool like WebPageTest, as well as the TTFB of your competitors, to see how you need to improve. TTFB is likely the quickest and easiest metric for Google to capture. Google’s various crawlers will all be able to take this measurement.

Most of the time, search engines don’t care about the WHOIS info of your domain name. That’s because they don’t have access to all WHOIS data, especially for ccTLDs, and that makes it unreliable. Whether you’re looking for a quick overview or an in-depth analysis, this guide on how search engines work serves both purposes. Below, you’ll find an overview of how search engines work, along with the option to explore crawling, indexing, ranking, and penalties in depth. Our database for the Ranking Factor analyses are always the first three organic search results pages.