Mediaboss Marketing

SEO stands for search engine optimization. In simple terms, it means the process of improving your site to increase its visibility when people search for products or services related to your business in Google, Bing, and other search engines. The better visibility your pages have in search results, the more likely you are to garner attention and attract prospective and existing customers to your business.

Search engines such as Google and Bing use bots to crawl pages on the web, going from site to site, collecting information about those pages and putting them in an index. Think of the index like a giant library where a librarian can pull up a book (or a web page) to help you find exactly what youre looking for at the time.

Next, algorithms analyze pages in the index, taking into account hundreds of ranking factors or signals, to determine the order pages should appear in the search results for a given query. In our library analogy, the librarian has read every single book in the library and can tell you exactly which one will have the answers to your questions.

Our SEO success factors can be considered proxies for aspects of the user experience. Its how search bots estimate exactly how well a website or web page can give the searcher what theyre searching for.

Unlike paid search ads, you cant pay search engines to get higher organic search rankings, which means SEO experts have to put in the work. Thats where we come in.

Our Periodic Table of SEO Factors organizes the factors into six main categories and weights each based on its overall importance to SEO. For example, content quality and keyword research are key factors of content optimization, and crawlability and speed are important site architecture factors.

The newly updated SEO Periodic Table also includes a list of Toxins that detract from SEO best practices. These are shortcuts or tricks that may have been sufficient to guarantee a high ranking back in the day when the engines methods were much less sophisticated. And, they might even work for a short time now at least until youre caught.

Weve also got a brand new Niches section that deep-dives into the SEO success factors behind three key niches: Local SEO, News/Publishing, and Ecommerce SEO. While our overall SEO Periodic Table will help you with the best practices, knowing the nuances of SEO for each of these Niches can help you succeed in search results for your small business, recipe blog, and/or online store.

The search algorithms are designed to surface relevant, authoritative pages and provide users with an efficient search experience. Optimizing your site and content with these factors in mind can help your pages rank higher in the search results.

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SEO is a fundamental part of digital marketing because people conduct trillions of searches every year, often with commercial intent to find information about products and services. Search is often the primary source of digital traffic for brands and complements other marketing channels. Greater visibility and ranking higher in search results than your competition can have a material impact on your bottom line.

However, the search results have been evolving over the past few years to give users more direct answers and information that is more likely to keep users on the results page instead of driving them to other websites.

Also note, features like rich results and Knowledge Panels in the search results can increase visibility and provide users more information about your company directly in the results.

In sum, SEO is the foundation of a holistic marketing ecosystem. When you understand what your website users want, you can then implement that knowledge across your campaigns (paid and organic), across your website, across your social media properties, and more.

Note: We will be launching our updated SEO Periodic Table in 2023!

For a helpful dive into SEO, our Periodic Table Of SEO Factors will introduce you to all the key concepts you need to know, including the elements for successful on-page and off-page SEO, plus the Toxins or tactics that can hurt your rankings.

The table and accompanying report also look at three niches of search:

The Periodic Table of SEO Factors serves as the foundation of this Guide to SEO. Together, these resources will help you learn about SEO and inform your strategy for success.

As a companion to our Periodic Table of SEO Factors, Search Engine Land's Guide To SEO walks you through the fundamentals of optimizing for search so you can develop a solid strategy to drive organic traffic to your site.

In the guide below, we explain these factors in more depth, and highlight tactical tips from experts on search engine optimization that will help your website get more visitors from organic search.

In addition to daily news stories from our editorial staff, Search Engine Land publishes daily articles from expert contributors that cover SEO issues mainly from an in-the-trenches perspective.

Browse our SEO news and expert columns. Sign up to receive Search Engine Lands daily email newsletter featuring a roundup of search marketing news and exclusive analysis and insights.

In addition to covering SEO generally, Search Engine Land also has search engine optimization areas specifically for the major search engines:

Subscribe to our daily brief newsletter for a recap of all the latest SEO-related news, tips and tactics from Search Engine Land and other sources all over the Web.

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What Is SEO - Search Engine Optimization?

Hello there! How did you end up here? You must have been searching for how search engine optimization (SEO) works or something closely related. Whether you used Google, Bing, Yahoo, or any other means to land here on this page, were glad youre here to learn how SEO works.

Keep reading to learn more about how SEO optimization works and how to optimize your site for search in this SEO starter guide. If youre looking for a quick analysis of your SEO, enter your URL here to audit your SEO instantly and receive custom recommendations for making SEO work for you!

Lets get the formalities out of the way (andanswer your question).

SEO stands for search engine optimization, adigital marketing strategythat focuses on improving your websites position in search results on search engines like Google.

Since search engines use hundreds of factors to generate search results Google uses more than 200 SEO works by optimizing your site for these factors, along withgetting your site crawled and indexed.

When you understand how SEO works, you can use different tactics, like keyword research, content creation, and page speed optimization, to increase your visibility (or how high you rank) in search results.

Search engine optimization is the product of search engines search engine companies develop ranking factors and use those factors to determine the most relevant content for a search. However, before a search engine can determine the most relevant content, it must crawl and index it.

Once crawling and indexing happen, a search engine will analyze pages against its ranking factors, like:

Keep in mind that search engines do not publish their ranking factors.

Based on the search engines analysis, your content might appear in organic search results, which means you can start bringing free and relevant traffic to your site!

The difference between organic search and paid search is organic search is free and paid search is paid.

When you submit a search to a search engine, the results display paid and organic listings paid listings will have the word Ad attached to them. Click on a paid listing and the advertiser will pay for that click. Click on an organic listing and the website owner will pay nothing.

While paid search is valuable and has its uses, organic searchs return on investment (ROI) makes SEO a smart investment for any business. Thats why its important to learn what SEO is and how SEO works because you can use that knowledge to improve your sites search result rankings and traffic numbers.

Learn more:Organic Search vs. Paid Search

You can categorize SEO tactics into three buckets:

Both on-page, off-page, and technical SEO aim to make your site more friendly, as well as trustworthy, to users and search engines. When search engine crawlerssee how friendly your website is to them and users, it increases the chances that your site will rank well for different searches.

Learn more:Types of SEO

Every guide on how SEO works should explain the types of SEO strategies, which are:

If you want to make SEO work for your business long-term, invest in a white-hat SEO strategy. While black-hat SEO may deliver quick results, it will eventually result in penalties against your site, whether decreased rankings or removal from Googles index.

Learn more:White-Hat SEO GuideandBlack-Hat SEO Guide

When it comes to learning how SEO works, its often helpful to have an example.

So, say you have two websites: Website A and Website B.

Website A isntresponsive, which means users on tablets or smartphones will have a tough time navigating and using the site. Website B, however, is responsive, which means a better user experience for tablet, smartphone, and desktop users.

For search engines, its an easy decision which website is more friendly: Website A.

Of course, how search engines work is a bit more complicated than that. Today, search engines usemore than 200 different factorsto generate search results, which means a lot of different elements influence your placement in search results.

Congrats! You now know how SEO works. How can you make SEO marketing work for your business, though? And by work for you, we mean help your company increase its rankings and traffic,plusits online revenue.

Well, you can start with these resources, which weve organized by SEO element. Check them out!

Keyword research is critical to how SEO works because keywords signal to search engines a pages topic. Thats why keywords often feature in title tags, header tags, and throughout content. The key, though, is learning how to research and integrate keywords.

Learn how with these guides:

How does search engine optimization work? With content! Content is a core component of SEO. If you want to use SEO to bring traffic and revenue to your site, you need to learn how to develop, create, and promote SEO content.

Heres how to get started:

Header tags, which include title tags, meta descriptions, and more, are another critical SEO factor. Make SEO work for your business by learning how to create SEO- and user-friendly header tags that showcase your contents relevance and usefulness.

Check out these resources to get started:

SEO works with on-page, off-page, and technical SEO. Web design is a big component of technical SEO and requires collaboration with developers and designers. Thats why its important to educate yourself so you can inform designers and developers of SEO best practices.

Explore these resources to get started:

Structured data is a fantastic way to better communicate a pages content. Learn how to use structured data to share information about your organization, authors, page content, and more with these resources for SEO beginners:

Create a faster website that delivers a better user experience with page speed optimizations. Learn how to make this ranking factor work for your SEO with these resources for beginner SEOs and web developers looking to improve their knowledge:

Understand how SEO works even better with these resources on crawling and indexing, which are the basis for SEO and search engine functions.

Optimize for one of the most talked-about SEO ranking factors with these resources for link building:

The Internet has really put the world at our fingertips. We are usually not more than a few clicks away from almost any information we could be looking for. When people are looking for information, services, products, and so on, they go online.

Try to remember the moment you thought, I should really look up how search engine optimization works.

You knew exactly what to do: You got on the Internet and you searched for how SEO works.

What did you do then?

Odds are you clicked on one of the first few results, at least initially. If you didnt find a site that met your expectations, you probably clicked the back button and scrolled down the page until you found what you were looking for.

If your site isnt properly optimized, its safe to assume youre only coming up on the first page for your branded search queries although depending on the name of your business, that might not even be the case.

That means people who dont know you exist but are looking for someone like you will never find you, and youll never even have a chance to tell them why youre better than the competition.

Thats right: Without SEO, youre giving leads away.

The good news is youre making it really easy on your competitors who are doing SEO. Odds are, they are loving you for not putting up a fight.

So, who cares how search engines deliver results? You definitely should!

Why on earth does a search engine care if you use them or another search engine? After all, youre not paying them? Thats right, you arent paying thembut someone else is! So the answer to this question is that they care because they make their money from advertising.

The page you are delivered to after you enter asearch queryis called thesearch engine results page (aka SERP). The SERP presents you with what are called organic results as well as pay-per-click ads (or PPC). The organic results are those that are influenced bySEO, while thePPC adsare paid for.

You cannot pay Google or any search engine to occupy any position in the organic results.

However, the ads on the page are how they make their money. So, the better the results they deliver you, the more likely you and others are use that search engine again. The more people using the search engine, the more ads they can show and the more money they can make. Make sense?

So now you know why search engines work so hard to provide you with great results and why you should care, we can talk about how SEO works in a little more detail.

Search engines havespiders not the creepy kind, but the automated robot kind.

These spiders collect all kinds of information about your website and the pages that make up your site. This allows them to easily determine when to serve a searcher a page on your site. They collect things likepage speed,title tags,social signals,internal linking,backlinks, and so on.

Withover 200 ranking factorsused by Google in their algorithm, there are a lot of things to consider, and actions that can be taken to try to optimize a website. There are both on-page and off-page ranking factors that determine how well your site is optimized, and therefore how well it ranks.

Theon-page factorsare exactly what they sound like: Things that are actually on the page. This includes title tags, content, site speed, page URLs, image alt tags, internal linking, and more.Off-page factors, meanwhile, are almost entirely based on links to your site from other sites.

Its important to keep in mind that these bots are automated computer programs and not actual humans.

As you might imagine, that means they have some limitations.

They cant access a website like you, or I would because they dont actually see the website: they crawl the code of the website. This means they cant see images or videos, nor are they impressed by flashy designs or audio clips.

In fact, they cant even comprehend content like we do!

Clutch has personally interviewed more than 250 WebFX clients to discuss their experience partnering with us.

Optimizing your website for search engines isnt an insurmountable task by any means. If youre a little less technically inclined, you might find it to be challenging, but you can always reach out to a web strategist for help.

WebFX is anSEO agencythat has many years of experience optimizing client websites to make them more attractive to search engines. Whether youre brand new to SEO or want to take your optimization to the next level, were eager and willing to help you out!

Get in touch with an SEO expert at WebFX today to discuss how we can optimize your website with acustom SEO plan. We cant wait to hear from you!

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SEO: What Is SEO and How Does SEO Work? | 2022 Starter Guide - WebFX

Do you have a website? And do you want more traffic? If yes, then theres no doubt about it: SEO should be part of your marketing efforts. Its a great way to get and keep people on your website. But what does it actually entail? In this post, well explain what SEO is and how you can get started!

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Its the practice of optimizing your web pages to make them reach a high position in the search results of Google and other search engines. In other words: People will be more likely to encounter your website when searching online. SEO focuses on improving the rankings in the organic aka non-paid search results.

In the image above, we see the first few results when someone searches for the keyphrase Neptune planet. In this case, Wikipedia is the first result and this means that their page on Neptune ranks #1 on this search term. The idea behind SEO is that when you optimize your page to become the best result, you can climb those rankings and become one of the first results that people see. Which will get you more clicks and traffic to your site!

Although this example only shows us organic results, that isnt always the case. Depending on the search term someone uses, there can also be ads or a rich result at the top, or a few products by Google Shopping. There are a lot of different possibilities. What Google shows can also depend on what it knows about the searcher (the country they live in, for example).

Youve created a website because you want people to buy your product, subscribe to your service, or read your content. Whatever your goal, you want people to visit your website. If you own a donut shop in Amsterdam, for example, you want your website to be number 1 when people Google: donuts Amsterdam. Because the chances of people clicking on your website are much higher when its the top result!

But how do you make this happen? One word: Search Engine Optimization! SEO is a great way to get people to your website for free. Which is especially useful if youre a small business owner who doesnt have a lot of money to spend on advertising.

How high each result ranks is determined by Googles algorithm. And although parts of Googles algorithm remain secret, years of experience in SEO have given us insight into the most important ranking factors. These ranking factors can be divided into two categories:

The ranking of your pages is partly determined by on-page factors. On-page factors are all the things on your website that you have a direct influence on. These factors include technical aspects (e.g. the quality of your code and site speed) and content-related aspects, like the structure of your website or the quality of the copy on your website. These are all crucial on-page SEO factors that you can work on.

In addition to on-page SEO factors, your rankings are also determined by a few off-page SEO factors. These factors include links from other websites, social media attention, and other marketing activities that happen off of your own website. Although not impossible, these off-page SEO factors can be more difficult to influence. The most important of these off-page factors is the number and quality of links pointing towards your site. The more quality, relevant sites that link to your website, the higher your position in Google will be.

Another off-page factor that plays a role in SEO is your competition relating to the niche of your particular business. In some niches, it is much harder to rank than in others. The competitiveness of your market therefore also has a major influence on your chances of ranking.

At Yoast, we practice holistic SEO. With holistic SEO, your primary goal is to build and maintain the best possible website. You dont try to fool Google; Instead, you invest your time and effort in a sustainable long-term strategy. If you work on improving your pages and having a high-quality website, then your chances of ranking will improve too. After all, Google wants to offer its users the best results to their search query, and the best results often have great content and are user-friendly, fast, and easily accessible.

Ranking well in search engines like Google asks for an extensive SEO strategy focused on every aspect of your website and its marketing. The technical side, the user experience (UX), the content on your website: all need to be top-notch. To keep ranking well in Google, you should develop what we call a holistic SEO approach.

A holistic SEO approach isnt just better for your rankings it also helps users find what they need more quickly. And thats better for environmental sustainability too!

At Yoast, our mission is to make SEO accessible for everyone. Thats why we have a few plugins that can help you with that, like our popular Yoast SEO plugin. We have a free and premium version of this plugin. One of the main advantages is that it helps you create high-ranking content. Our free SEO and readability analysis gives you detailed suggestions to create copy humans and search engines enjoy!

The premium version of our plugin will help you get to that next level and optimize your content for synonyms and related keywords and boost your site structure with our internal linking suggestions. Youll also get access to all of our SEO courses, where you can learn vital SEO skills that you will be able to apply immediately!

Premium comes with lots of features and free access to our SEO courses!

SEO is the practice of optimizing websites to make them reach a high position in Googles or another search engines search results. At Yoast, we believe that holistic SEO is the best way to rank your pages because you focus on optimizing every aspect of your site.

Dont use any black-hat tricks, because eventually, this will have negative consequences for your rankings. Instead, practice sustainable SEO with your user in mind, and you will benefit in the long run. Read more on how to rank high in Google or if you use WordPress, make sure to check out our ultimate guide on SEO in WordPress:

Read more: The ultimate guide to WordPress SEO

Marieke is the head of strategy at Yoast and founder of Yoast SEO academy. She loves coming up with new ideas and products to make SEO attainable for everyone, and ensure a healthy growth for Yoast!

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What is SEO? SEO for beginners Yoast

HR Professionals Must Learn to Fuse Technology With Humanity. But How?  The Good Men Project

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HR Professionals Must Learn to Fuse Technology With Humanity. But How? - The Good Men Project

Goran Maurac Zagreb, Croatia

"Before this course, as a CRO consultant, I thought having a good grasp of SEO what a foolish idea. Thanks for the most unbiased, educational and actionable SEO insights. It was fun, too! :)"

George Woodbourne, NY

In the short time that I have been a member, I have found the training resources to be very helpful and relevant to my current SEO situations and questions that I have.

Paul Bend, OR

Unlike other agencies, Bruce Clay emphasizes education. I have taken his class a few times and I just signed up for the online class. Taking Bruces SEO training course gave me a solid understanding of how to do SEO right, and the learning continues. Now I can handle many SEO tasks on my own. In a word, Im a fan!

Robby Paragould, AR

Mr. Clay presents the materials as only someone with a complete grasp of the subject matter and its potential can. Difficult concepts and techniques are presented in ways that even the lowest luddite can grasp. We are absolutely going to benefit from this course and the tools.

Jonathan Kennesaw, GA

SEO seems complicated from the outside, but this helped make it make sense by bringing the ideas all together.

Chelsea Elkhart, IN

I felt like Bruce clearly showed himself as a knowledge leader and a teacher. His instruction was clear, helpful, and overall engaging.

Chris Kennesaw, GA

Topics were discussed that opened up great discussion within our web development team. Very open-ended ideas led to good brainstorming and thinking about the current state of search and the web, as well as speculating on where we are heading and how to plan for that.

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SEOtraining.com - SEO Training Online Program from Bruce Clay