What Are Backlinks in SEO & Why You Need Them

By structuring information clearly and implementing semantic SEO principles, websites can improve their chances of appearing in voice search results, especially for long-tail, intent-driven searches. Instead of recognizing them as variations of the same intent, results would be fragmented, often prioritizing keyword-heavy pages instead of truly helpful content. This inability to process conversational queries and user intent made search less effective, something semantic SEO was designed to fix. Pages with a lot of repeated keywords, even when they lack useful information, ranked better than useful pages. Search engines struggled with synonyms, context, and what users actually wanted and so provided unhelpful results. SEO is generally lengthy, typically taking a few months to see noticeable results.

You can uncover them by performing a content gap analysis, and this will give you an ongoing source of content ideas to write about. To check your website (and your competitors’), you’ll need to use some SEO tools. You may also find it helpful to analyze how your competitors’ websites are performing with SEO. You can learn what they are doing well and use those ideas on your own website. Search engine optimization is an ongoing process that touches on many areas of your website. You’ll find a detailed overview in our ultimate guide to WordPress SEO for Beginners.

Well, there’s a lot you can do and it can be divided up into three main areas. The reason that so many (big) companies heavily invest in SEO is the high impact that it can have when done right. To give you an idea, Google, the most-used search engine got around 8.3 billion searches per day in 2024.

Ways to Optimize for Zero-Click Searches

Yet, the link selling industry is quite alive and buying backlinks is a common practice. There is no official metric by Google that would represent the authority of a page but there are many metrics by commercial tools that can help you with the estimation. As we’ve explained previously with PageRank, pages with quality links pointing to them also pass more link equity to your page. 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. They are not the same and while the PageRank metric was discontinued, the PageRank algorithm is still a part of Google’s ranking.

SEO Title Tags: Definition, Tips & How to Optimize

• Search engines are the software program that provides information according to the user query.
• SEO is short for search engine optimization, and though it may only be three letters long, it can make a world of difference in your digital marketing strategy.
• Evaluate these keywords based on search volume and difficulty and consider the user’s search intent.
• Google uses a document of guidelines for its internal Quality Raters to reference when manually reviewing websites.

Could you replace any links or move a link to help guide someone to the next page? Make sure all pages are linked correctly in your header and footer navigation too. A URL slug is the text that comes after the main domain and slash in a web address, like squarespace.com/blog. Write a slug that incorporates your keyword and identifies your website structure when possible.

To write a meta description, you should combine technical best practices (right length, proper keyword use, correct placement) with clever writing (clear benefits, emotional pull, actionable language). Bethan is a B2B marketer and entrepreneur, with over 12 years marketing experience leading to Marketing Director level. Bethan knows what it’s like to start your own businesses, they are a regular speaker at international conferences, and podcast host of “The Brave”. I’ve not met KPIs in the past because, frankly, some of the material we were producing wasn’t good enough and didn’t hit the mark with our audience. Again, understanding that helps you understand what the fix might be. A really good one is lead conversion rate because sales can’t necessarily completely own that in isolation, neither can marketing.

When a user submits a search query, the search engine’s algorithm analyzes the indexed data and returns a list of relevant web pages, ranked by relevance and authority. This process ensures that users receive the most pertinent information quickly and efficiently. Information that appears in the HTML source code of a webpage to describe its contents to search engines. The title tag and meta description are the most commonly used types of meta tags in SEO. A complex computer program used by search engines to retrieve data and deliver results for a query. Search engines use a combination of algorithms to deliver ranked webpages via a results page based on a number of ranking factors and signals.

A well-established geospatial software company needed their website to match the caliber SEO Anomaly of their business. During an initial audit, Cadence found that their URL taxonomy was disorganized, affecting their SEO performance. By creating a more structured site architecture, Cadence helped Google better recognize which pages were most important, improving rankings for the key pages.