In SEO terms, we refer to this process as crawling (reading the web’s content) and indexing (adding the content to the library). Search engine optimization has evolved since the days of Jefferson Starship, with Google becoming the leader in the industry. That’s why, when talking about SEO, most people are talking about Google SEO. Let’s finish off with some SEO strategies, best practices, and tips to help you get the most out of your time. You can refer to our more in-depth how-to on keyword research here. Image SEO relies heavily on technical and on-page optimizations while local SEO is more about off-page and on-page optimizations.

Get Exclusive Marketing Tips!

Learn what search engine optimization is, why it matters, and all the need-to-know basics to start yourself off right. You’ll get the most out of this guide if your desire to learn search engine optimization (SEO) is exceeded only by your willingness to execute and test concepts. Keyword research is the process of finding & analyzing what relevant audiences search for in search engines.

To understand how to do SEO, you need a basic understanding of how search engines work. If you’re great at creating and promoting content, determine which keywords to go after and focus your efforts there. No site does a perfect job of executing against every single aspect of search engine optimization. You can measure your organic traffic easily with most analytics tools – since it’s free and the most-used, we’ll look at how to get this information in Google Analytics. This file likely already exists for your site at yoursite.com/robots.txt. SEO Anomaly You can dive deeper into the process of determining how competitive keywords are in Backlinko’s in-depth guide or by using WordStream founder Larry Kim’s competitive index formula (tip number 3).

Step 6: Monitor Your Progress

Similarly, the more engaging and effective content you have on your site, the more likely your visitors will be to spend some time on your website. Search engine giant, Google will never give away the exact algorithm they use to rank sites. You shouldn’t settle for low SERP rankings when you could be at the top. Search engines want to provide the best service for their users.

SEO Interview Questions and Answers for 2025

• Keyword research tutorial, explore online resources like Moz’s guide or Google’s Keyword Planner tutorial for effective strategies and techniques.
• “Gray hat” methods focus on tactics for increasing traffic that are unhelpful to users but not so detrimental as to be widely denounced.
• Companies with larger budgets may dominate the first page of search results, requiring smaller businesses to focus on long-tail keywords and niche strategies for visibility.
• Once you rank well, you can get consistent organic traffic without paying for visitors.

An easy way to understand the 3 most important factors is to imagine a bowl of soup – the SEO soup. I also recommend manually looking over your sitemap just to double-check that all of your site’s pages are listed here. And depending on your site, you may find issues with duplicate content, page loading speed, robots.txt configuration, and more. You enter your domain into it… and the tool will scan your site for technical SEO problems. Which is why I recommend using a more user-friendly SEO tool, like the site audit feature inside of Semrush.

Make sure that your website is easily navigable, provides a great user experience and clearly presents the information you want to convey. This ensures that you’re on the right track to providing an excellent answer to searchers’ queries. It’s important to note that Google does not release specifics about their algorithm or process, so it’s impossible to know exactly what factors impact indexing and rankings. SEO, therefore, isn’t a perfect science and even when it seems that all optimizations have been implemented, it often requires patience and continual tweaking to see results.