What is SEO? Beginner’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization

Yes, it might be technically possible to rank without links, but more often, links do improve ranking. As long as your site is technically sound enough to be crawled and rendered, quality content continues to be the number one ranking factor. The Yandex ranking factors leak of January 2023 revealed Yandex uses around 690 ranking factors, give or take.

As ranking signals become more complex and reliant on user-submitted information, it makes sense that behavioral signals are made more important as they cannot be nearly as easily manipulated. On-page signals are, of course, incredibly important for SEO – both traditional, and local. These elements align with other search engines and their ranking factors, like Google. Next to content, backlinks are often considered to be the second most important SEO ranking factor. To attract search engines to your content, you also need to consider on-page SEO factors. On-page SEO is the process of optimizing each individual page on your site for a target keyword.

A local business’s listing on a high-quality directory can often show in top search results – which is a huge bonus! These are the SERP results when the keywords “restaurants in Tulsa” are searched for on Google. You’ll see that the first page of Google is almost exclusively filled with online business directories. If your business has more than one location, create a separate, localized web page for each one, including name, address, phone number, office hours, contact details, etc. Individual on-page factors include presence of NAP, keywords in titles, and domain authority.

A link from an authoritative page from an authoritative domain is the holy grail. The overall authority of the page that you are getting a link from also plays a big role. You wouldn’t want a link from this blog if you sold garden furniture online. If your site is penalised you will see huge drops in search visibility. Having a mobile-friendly design is very important to show up in mobile search. If your site has a responsive design and displays well on mobile devices it’ll perform well.

This can be trickier than just looking at your daily rankings but will give you a better idea of the success of your SEO strategy and how you’re perceived. In 2025, SEO will focus less on raw keywords and more so around search intent across diverse platforms like social media and LLMs. As well as this, it’ll be important to produce more video content as discovery platforms integrate these more into their SERPs.

Once that organic traffic lands on your page, you need to convert them. OptinMonster is the world’s #1 conversion optimization kit that helps you drive more traffic, grow your email list, and boost revenue. Finally, linking to your own content can tie pages together for both Google and your visitors, making each page more valuable. If you have an authoritative page with a link to another page on your site, that helps your visitors find the other page and pass on some authority. You’ve likely heard inbound links referred to as “backlinks.” You aim to get as many highly authoritative sites to link back to you. That also means you want to have very few inbound links from low-quality domains.

Apply these SEO statistics to your 2025 search strategy

“Follow” results in bots following the links on your page and passing link equity through to those URLs. Or, if you elect to employ “nofollow,” the search engines will not follow or pass any link equity through to the links on the page. Once you’ve ensured your site has been crawled, the next order of business is to make sure it can be indexed. That’s right — just because your site can be discovered and crawled by a search engine doesn’t necessarily mean that it will be stored in their index. In the previous section on crawling, we discussed how search engines discover your web pages.

Search engines like pages based on different factors to confirm users get the best answers to their queries. Although Mobile-first indexing is not a ranking signal, the content on your website will be analyzed and ranked by Google according to the mobile version of the site – not the desktop one. Optimization for mobile devices started to be a ranking signal in 2015 when Google announced a mobile-friendly update.

• It’s focused on satisfying user intent rather than just targeting keywords.
• Understanding and catering to these intents can significantly boost your content’s relevance and value in the eyes of both users and search engines.
• This generated not only real competition between search engines and SEOs, but produced the myth of the ranking factor.
• Personalization of search results is mostly down to language, location, device, and browsing history of the user.
• That’s why they operate like librarians by reading content across the web and adding it to their library.

Secret Weapon: Understanding the YouTube Algorithm

A month later, the average time doubled and feedback improved noticeably. For one educational blog, the “beginner’s guide” articles initially had an average viewing time of under 30 seconds. In my audits, I SEO Anomaly use DA as an initial measure to assess ranking potential. Domain Authority, developed by Moz, estimates how likely a site is to rank highly in search results. Although Google does not officially use DA, many SEO professionals find it useful.

One result of that is zero-click searches, where search engines show the complete answer to a search query in the search results. This can lead to fewer clicks to your website, but it still pays off to be the website that provides that answer. In fact, this is a good example of the direction in which SEO is going. Shift your focus from ‘just clicks’ and maintaining a specific spot in the search results to building a strong brand and being visible on different platforms. A web page’s title tells people and search engines what it’s about and it’s sometimes the first experience of your site.