A sitemap is a structured list of all pages on a website available to be crawled by search engines. Having one is yet another way to let crawlers find all your pages. Today, I never create blogs below 2,000 words, if my goal is to rank for a focus keyword. Think about “how to make the post as relevant as possible”, not “how to stuff the post with keywords so that Google thinks it’s relevant”.

What is local SEO? A complete local SEO guide for businesses

There are lots of schema types that apply to different types of businesses. You can learn more about schema & markup in our guide to schema for SEO. So how does Google determine which pages to surface in the search engine results page (SERP) for any given query?

Choose Keywords With Solid Search Volume

To select the focus keyword, you should follow the keyword research principles SEO Anomaly we covered extensively in the previous chapter – consider its search volume, difficulty and relevance. If you check the keyword “vacuum cleaners” a lot of people are searching for it (223,000 average monthly search volume). One of the biggest mistakes people make with keyword research is that they only look at the numbers they see in the keyword tool. In most tools, the keyword difficulty value is indicated on a scale from 0 to 100. The higher the score is, the harder it is to rank on the 1st SERP for the keyword. Once you find keywords you want to rank for, you’ll need to find out how hard it will be by evaluating the competition.

While SEM includes SEO, people typically use the term in reference to paid advertising. Website optimization is a broad term that refers to technical SEO and on-page SEO practices that serve to get web pages in the best shape for Google. This includes properly structuring content, using headers, titles, and alt text, optimizing for mobile, and taking care of loading times. When you’re first getting started in the world of SEO, content marketing, and inbound marketing, it can be difficult to distinguish between these strategies. While they all involve some content creation and keyword research, they are distinct concepts that build upon each other. You should see SEO not as a complex technical challenge but as a simple way to improve your website’s visibility and user experience.

This is true not only for LinkedIn’s internal search but also for search engines like Google. Meta tags are snippets of text, formatted as HTML code, that describe the content of a webpage. Social media platforms also leverage this meta information when serving content to their users. Similarly, for the garden center, Cadence ensured that every page adhered to SEO best practices by fixing meta tags and headers and adding internal links to key pages.

• But I DO recommend going after keywords with an above-average CPC.
• Free tools that you can connect to Squarespace, like Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools, can help you get started.
• Click “Why and how to fix it” for more information about each one.
• When you do, you’ll send much-needed authority to that low-authority page… which can boost its Google rankings.

Threads Ads Expanding to All Meta Advertisers: What It Means for…

SEO focuses on improving organic search rankings, while search engine marketing (SEM) encompasses both organic and paid search strategies. By leveraging both, businesses can maximize their visibility and reach on search engines. Off-page SEO refers to optimization techniques that are done outside of your own website. The goal of off-page SEO is to get both search engines and searchers to view your website as a trustworthy source, by boosting its authority and credibility. This can be done by other reputable places on the Internet, like pages, sites, and people. But, building backlinks is at the heart of off-page SEO, as search engines use backlinks as an indication of the linked content’s quality.

They can also appear when Google feels that a “normal” search needs a few local results. For example, if you search for “plumber”, Google knows that you’re probably looking for a plumber nearby. In fact, I usually specifically target terms with lots of ads and a high “commercial intent”.