Including videos, images, or documents in your posts attracts attention and boosts engagement. Meta tags are pieces of HTML code, but don’t worry—you don’t have to be a programmer to add HTML meta tags to a web page. Here’s a simple explanation of meta tags SEO, with tips for adding meta tags to any website. Start your free trial with Shopify today—then use these resources to guide you through every step of the process. They’re constantly tweaking their rubrics for assessing content—not to mention the many outside influences. From semantic search to featured snippets to AI results, the space keeps evolving.

How search engines work

• Moreover, 95 percent of clicks on Google go to organic search results, according to Semrush 3.
• Certification increases your chances of getting hired because it shows potential employers you’re serious about your work.
• That’s why it’s important to understand search engine optimization (SEO).
• Earning an SEO certification can help develop your skills and put you on a path toward a rewarding career in digital marketing.
• Cathal Melinn is a well-known Digital Marketing Director, commercial analyst, and eommerce specialist with over 15 years’ experience.
• Most SEO tutorials put this step much earlier on in the process.

There’s plenty of link building techniques, hacks and tips (you can check our big list of 60+ link building techniques for inspiration). If you have a post about hiking tips and you have two backlinks, one from a post about outdoor sports and the other from a post about politics, the former backlink is much more valuable. If you want to dive deeper into on-page optimization, check out our practical on-page SEO guide for beginners.

Include Your Main Keyword In Your URL

Black hat SEO attempts to improve rankings in ways that are disapproved of by the search engines or involve deception. One black hat technique uses hidden text, either as text colored similar to the background, in an BHS Links invisible div, or positioned off-screen. Another method gives a different page depending on whether the page is being requested by a human visitor or a search engine, a technique known as cloaking.

Learn all you need to know about technical SEO to build better websites for visitors and search engines. Now that you know all the basics of SEO, you need to start implementing these for your website. Start with the three fundamentals of SEO—backlinks, content, and user experience—and get them right. This is another very important criterion that search engines consider for ranking pages. Just stuffing random keywords to your content is not enough to rank well anymore. Your content should actually be useful and relevant for people that you’re targeting.

External links

Keep tabs on your organic keyword rankings with a tool like Semrush’s Position Tracking. That’s because Google uses page experience signals (in addition to traditional ranking signals, like backlinks) to figure out which results deserve to rank #1 in the search results. And not every topic you target is best served with a written post. I can speak from firsthand experience that content marketing can help you get LOTS of organic (unpaid) traffic. When looking to acquire backlinks, it’s important to use the proper tools and frameworks. If not, acquiring backlinks can become a difficult and time consuming task.

In other words, those seemingly small factors, like keywords in URL, that on their own make up 1%, are not so small. On-page SEO (or on-site SEO) is the set of actions you can do on your website directly to help search engines better crawl and understand your pages and connect them to relevant keywords. Arguably the most impactful way of improving E-E-A-T on your pages is getting more quality links from other websites – backlinks. Understanding SEO’s definition is only the beginning of understanding how it works.