One of the reasons why content updates may have a positive impact on your rankings is that Google notices the frequency of updates and tends to favor frequently updated pages for some queries. The thing is that as an author, you can’t “bluff” your way through 2,000-5,000 words on your topic. And to earn those rankings – to nail that “Expertise – Authoritativeness – Trustworthiness” BHS Links qualifier from Google – you must be a subject matter expert. Think about “how to make the post as relevant as possible”, not “how to stuff the post with keywords so that Google thinks it’s relevant”. Here’s an example of a SERP snippet for our post on “7-step SEO strategy” with the focus keyword SEO strategy.
Search Quality Raters
However, search engines have adapted to this technique and now penalize pages that use keyword stuffing. 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.
Improve Dwell Time
When using different SEO tools like SEMRush, Ahrefs, and Google Search Console, pay attention to new features or updates to existing features that you can use to improve your SEO marketing efforts. For example, SEMRush offers a Google Chrome extension called PageImprove, allowing you to make quick SEO improvements from your browser. As of November 2022, you can sign up to use PageImprove as a beta tester. Creating SEO-friendly content that your target audience finds valuable is the result of consistent effort.
- Click depth is important for pages to be crawled efficiently and for the flow of link equity; therefore does influence ranking indirectly.
- A high bounce rate is not always a bad thing but in general, a lower bounce rate is almost always better.
- It’s essential to practice these techniques on your own website or blog to gain practical experience.
- White hat SEO, on the other hand, refers to all the regular SEO techniques that stick to the guidelines and rules.
- Popular sites that have a lot of social media engagement tend to rank well for other reasons.
- Marketers use SEO and SEM strategies to increase their content’s visibility on search engines and reach audiences who frequently use search engines.
In addition to off-page factors such as links, improving the actual structure of the page can have tremendous benefits for SEO, and is a factor that is entirely in the control of the webmaster. Updating a page’s meta tags (such as the meta description tag) can also be beneficial– these tags don’t have a direct impact on search rankings, but can increase click-through rate from the SERPs. SEO has evolved significantly since its inception in the early-1990s. It began with webmasters manually submitting URLs to search engines and including keyword-rich meta tags. Early search engines, like AltaVista and Infoseek, used these tags to index content. The late 1990s saw the rise of Google, which revolutionized SEO with its PageRank algorithm, focusing on the quality and quantity of backlinks.
Structured data can be added to the HTML of a website to provide contextual information to the search engines during crawling. This information can then be displayed in the SERPs, resulting in an enhanced listing, known as a rich snippet. A meta tag that tells search engines not to store a cached copy of your page. The database search engines use to store and retrieve information gathered during the crawling process. HTML heading tags (H1-H6) separate content into sections, based on importance, with H1 being the most important and H6 being the least important. Headline tags should be used naturally and should incorporate your target keywords where relevant, as doing so may provide a small SEO benefit.
