What is SEO in digital marketing?

Compared to SEO, social media is more immediate and dynamic, requiring constant effort to stay relevant. Content posted on social media is quickly overshadowed by new posts, making it necessary to maintain a continual stream of updates to keep your audience engaged. Getting Google to send you traffic is an ongoing process, not a one-time thing. Sometimes, Google chooses not to display your meta description and will generate its own for you.

Robots.txt, meta noindex, and meta nofollow

Review the final layout of your webpage and ensure your content is accessible across mobile and web browsers. We recommend creating a checklist of items to review on each web page before publishing for consistency. Where possible, your target keyword should be present across the following elements of your page. Check any internal links to this page for bounce backs or other errors. Are there links to pages you could add to help visitors find information they need? Could you replace any links or move a link to help guide someone to the next page?

If you’re ready to master SEO practices for the long term, consider taking online courses. In this section, you’ll improve your website’s content, domain authority, and technical elements to make your site more discoverable and beneficial for your target audience. Links are how search engines discover new pages and judge their “authority.” It’s hard to rank for competitive terms without links. PPC, or Pay-Per-Click, is a type of digital marketing where advertisers bid on specific keywords they want their ads to show up for in search results. When someone searches for those keywords, the ads appear at the top of the results page and if clicked on the advertisers pay-per-click.

So the more of these “votes” you have, the higher your site will rank in Google and alternate search engines. It’s almost like having Google and other search engines advertise your products for you. The first thing you should do is check to see if your WordPress website is SEO-optimized. By doing this, you will discover things you can improve to grow your search engine traffic. Search engine optimization (SEO) is about making strategic changes to your website and its content so that you are featured higher on search engine results pages (SERPs).

• Google uses a document of guidelines for its internal Quality Raters to reference when manually reviewing websites.
• Adding a bunch of keywords here won’t help you rank – search engine algorithms have ignored this tag for ranking purposes for years due to abuse (in the form of keyword stuffing).
• Images make a page more enjoyable and easier to read, but search engine crawlers cannot easily understand what an image is about.
• 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.
• Next to SEO there is a branch called SEA or Search Engine Advertising which is always part of Search Engine Marketing (SEM) or marketing through search engines.

When search engines pull data from multiple speciality databases to display on the same SERP. Results can include images, videos, news, shopping, and other types of results. An umbrella term for increasing a website’s visibility in search engine results pages, encompassing both paid and organic activities. Organic search results, which are analyzed and ranked by algorithms, are designed to give users the most relevant result based on their query. Demand generation and brand awareness activities that take place outside of a website.

A comprehensive keyword research can be conducted using Ahrefs’ Keyword Explorer. Backlinks (or inbound links, incoming links) are links from a page on one website to another. E-E-A-T applies to all topics, but it’s more impactful on YMYL topics (Your Money or Your Life) – topics that can potentially impact a person’s future happiness, health, financial stability, or safety.

Search Engine

As well as this, it’ll be important to produce more video content as discovery platforms integrate these more into their SERPs. Advertisements are almost consistently shown at the very top of a search result, or in a left/right sidebar. Although the basic principle of operation of most of the search engines is the same there are minor differences between them which lead to major changes in their results. For example, for search engines like Yahoo and Bing, on-page keyword factors are of primary importance, while for Google, links and hyperlinks are more important. Backlinks from trusted websites signal authority and improve rankings. This increased visibility can drive more organic traffic to your site, as users are more likely to click on links that are accompanied by an AI Overview.

Title Tag

In this way, they can potentially improve SEO by increasing user interaction and reducing bounce rates. Google created the Page Layout Algorithm in 2012 to lower the rankings of websites SEO Anomaly featuring too many ads in this space. The reason for this is that search engines largely perceive links as “votes of confidence” and a means to help understand both what a page is about, and how important it is (and how trusted it should be).

To give you an idea, Google, the most-used search engine got around 8.3 billion searches per day in 2024. So if you have a website, you want to make sure to show up in Google and other search platforms. First, import your target keywords into Semrush’s Position Tracking tool.