I generally include the keyword a few times on and off your page to give Google a hand. I recommend using a tool to help you find potential keywords, such as Ahrefs or Semrush. Her blog post, “How to Find a Literary Agent,” ranks #1 for the highly competitive head term “literary agent,” above top publishers such as Reedsy and even Wikipedia. All of these conspire to give us fewer chances for ranking for this keyword because the SERP features push us down, and we’re already competing against publishers like G2. Looking directly at the SERPs as you create an SEO strategy is crucial because Google comes up with new SERP features daily. If your pages were not designed according to recent white hat SEO methods, then Gooogle will identify this and lower your site rankings.
When we talk about local SEO, we’re looking to rank in search results that are localized like in Google Maps. When people search for a specific business it often appears with Google maps and a list of the top 3 matching businesses (often called the map pack). The important thing to do in that situation is to follow all of the guidelines we’ve described here.
Relationship with Google
On top of this, its pricing starts at $5,000 per month, so it may not be the right fit for a budget-conscious business. Straight North is an SEO services provider that tailors its SEO plans for businesses of all sizes. It provides the standard services that its competitors offer and it has a client dashboard to show tasks in an SEO plan and the progress of a custom plan. Originally, Fannit charged much more for its advertising campaigns but pulled back when they realized clients were paying more for the service than for the advertising itself. We also considered which SEO Anomaly providers worked best in various business circumstances.
SE RANKING
A strong SEO agency should deliver exceptional competitive analyses while developing effective SEO strategies so your website can outrank competitors. White hat SEO refers to tactics that are aligned with search engine best practices. If an SEO tactic is Google-approved, you are safe to use it for your website. Black hat SEO refers to tactics that aim to improve a website’s visibility in search using more manipulative methods that distort reality. Black hat tactics are banned by Google and could result in a traffic-dropping Google penalty or get your site blocked by search engines permanently.
And considering that Google owns the popular video site, it’s a trend that’s not likely to change anytime soon. Research by Dr. Ellen Langer of Harvard University tested whether people waiting in line to use a copy machine would let a stranger cut in front of them. In other words, pages that link out to awesome resources establish themselves as hubs of helpful content in the eyes of Big G. And pages that link to helpful resources also tend to be higher-quality than pages that only link to their own stuff. And now that your content is optimized for shares, you want to make sure your page’s on-page SEO is good to go. Well, you could re-create that dead resource on your site and replace the dead link in Wikipedia with a link to your site.
In fact, podcasts might be the most underrated link building strategy on the planet. When someone searches for a high-level term (like “search engine optimization”), they’re usually looking for a definition. For example, a while back I noticed that lots of people were building links from guest posting.
XML sitemaps are used by search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yandex, to understand the hierarchy and structure of your site and ensure better crawling. Sitemaps aren’t required, but apart from the above, creating one allows you to access more reporting data about your site. Typically with SEO, you want to get backlinks from other sites, which helps build up your domain and page authority. But manipulating links is against Google’s guidelines, so you could wind up with a link penalty if your site is flagged as involved in link schemes. Earlier, we covered how creating key pages can help improve both Google’s and your users’ perception of your E-E-A-T. Users expect to find links to these crucial pages in your footer, so including them is a good start.
Hence, optimizing for SEO increases your chances of appearing in generative search features like AI overviews, ChatGPT, and Claude AI. When you use high quality images, you give users enough context and detail to decide which image best matches what they were looking for. For example, if people are looking for “daisies” and come across a rogue edelweiss in search results, a higher quality image would help them distinguish the type of flower. Many people search visually, and images can be how people find your website for the first time. For example, if you have a recipe blog, people might find your content by searching for “fruit tart recipes” and browsing photos of various types of fruit tarts. Some websites show the same content under different URLs, which is called duplicate content.
- It will find just about any website related to a term and rank it to answer a searcher’s query.
- Keyword search volume is an important factor in keyword research, but you won’t always want to pick the highest volume keyword possible.
- So, if you want to try it, consider having a dedicated editor to review the machine-made content.
- There are several reasons why businesses will disable their blog comments but most of the time they are afraid of negative feedback or inappropriate things happening in the comments section.
Topic clusters show me how well my keyword-based content categories are performing. Although I also use it for link analysis, typically alongside Semrush (as every SEO tool’s database is different, so it’s not a bad idea to use multiple if you can). Regularly conduct technical SEO audits of your website to check for technical problems that could seriously harm your search performance. There are many image editing tools and website plugins that make it easy to minimize your files without compromising quality. Submitting an XML sitemap to Google tells the search engine which of your pages should be indexed (i.e., added to its database of possible search results).