What Is SEO? Search Engine Optimization Best Practices

This is why you want to drop your keyword somewhere in the first 100 words or so. In this chapter, I’ll go through actionable techniques that can elevate your on-page SEO game. This’ll help you ensure your content not only attracts but retains its rightful place on the coveted first page of search results. Well, those stock images could be hurting your SEO (or at least they might not be helping it a whole lot). In this chapter I’ll show you how to make sure that your SEO content checks all of these boxes.

If you’re not quite sure about taking on SEO yourself, consider delegating the work to a team member. If you have a person interested in growth marketing, development, or even web design, this would be a valuable skill to help grow their career. But as I said, getting caught often results in a site being completely wiped out from search listings. Often, they also include a company’s phone number or website address. SEO Anomaly Now, if you’re still here with me, you’ve just discovered what’s responsible for your site’s success in search.

The main benefit of SEO is search engine visibility, which can increase brand awareness and site traffic. This is an important metric to track because the higher you rank, the more traffic you can get from search engines. Keyword rankings refer to where your website ranks on a SERP for specific keywords. And be aware that most well-known directories (Yelp, Yellow Pages, etc.) use attributes that tell search engines not to treat the links as endorsements. Keyword research is the process of identifying terms your potential customers use when searching for topics related to your brand, products, or services.

The Best SEO Companies & Services 2025 Rankings

Identifying the terms that searchers use in Google search and other search engines provide direction on what existing content can be optimized and what new content can be created. As mentioned, search engines continue working on their algorithms to improve their users’ experience. The focus points of SEO in 2025 are still high-quality content and technical factors like site speed, security and mobile parity. But there are more aspects that Google and other search engines deem important. Metadata refers to the information that you provide Google to describe what your webpage contains.

On-Page SEO: The Definitive Guide

As you implement these suggestions, you’ll see green lights next to them. So you can see exactly what you’re doing well, and what you need to improve. Yoast SEO helps you improve your WordPress site’s on-page and technical SEO. While there is a paid option, the free plugin is perfect for a lot of beginner SEO needs.

But if you’re new to a topic and you just want to do some initial research, it can be really helpful. But mentioning related keywords, phrases, and entities in your text can boost your SEO. Rather, it’s about understanding what type of information searchers may be looking for. The difference may sound subtle, so feel free to learn more here.

• In a crowded online marketplace, SEO is not just a marketing tactic; it’s an important investment in building a sustainable online presence and staying competitive.
• That’s why we offer a free and Premium version of our WordPress plugin, allowing you to get started with SEO without too much trouble.
• The rest of this guide will walk you through how to implement these optimizations step-by-step.
• Implementing these on-page optimization best practices can improve your website’s search engine visibility and provide a better user experience.

Link Out to Authority Sites

In Ahrefs, this is automatically calculated with the Traffic Potential (TP) metric. And this page has roughly 22,000 backlinks from nearly 2,600 different domains. You can ask your developer to analyze your webpages to identify unnecessary requests. You don’t have to follow the exact outlines these tool provide.