If you want to exclude multiple crawlers, like googlebot and bing for example, it’s okay to use multiple robot exclusion tags. As we mentioned in Chapter 1, search engines are answer machines. They exist to discover, understand, and organize the internet’s content in order to offer the most relevant results to the questions searchers are asking.
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This will show you the websites linking to one or more of your competitors’ homepages, BHS Links but not to yours. Look through the list to find sites that are niche and local directories. If you’re a business serving customers locally, you’ll want to appear on local “map pack” search results too. Essentially, Google will begin showing results from other channels too, not just websites.
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So, if you haven’t yet created a Google Business Profile for your business, sign up for one. For example, if you sell influencer marketing software, you can find relevant publications in your niche by using the string “influencer marketing” + “guest post” on Google. This report will provide a snapshot of your pages’ performance in terms of Core Web Vitals. Use a tool like XML Sitemaps Generator to create an XML sitemap for your website. Read our on-page SEO guide to learn how to optimize the on-page SEO elements of important pages on your site.
Local SEO and general SEO share a common foundation but differ in focus. The search engine optimization process involves optimizing each of these core components of search engine algorithms in order to rank higher in the search results. Since then, there have been hundreds of algorithm changes, driving marketers to constantly adapt their strategies. The history of SEO demonstrates that a comprehensive digital marketing strategy is the best way to stay ahead.
Since website SEO improves the user experience, it can also lead to better engagement and conversion rates, plus increased traffic from other sources—not just search engines. Our approach targets users first because that’s what search engines reward. This chapter covers keyword research and other methods to determine what your audience is seeking. SEO plays a crucial role in ensuring your website reaches the right audience. In addition to search visibility, SEO drives quality traffic, improves user experience, and helps you stand out in search results. Organic searches drive most website traffic, making SEO one of the most powerful digital marketing strategies.
When writing your content, ensure your target keyword is present in your H1 title to aid higher ranking. Incorporate your keywords naturally throughout the rest of your body text, making sure it is present in the first 100 words. Here you can see competitive pages currently ranking in SERP, and get an idea as to whether the content of your page can outrank what is ranking currently. If not, look for alternative keywords that might be more achievable for your business. Internal linking is the practice of adding links to navigate from one page to another within your site. This is helpful from a UX perspective as it helps visitors to move from one relevant page to another and keeps them browsing your site for longer.
Any obvious attempt to manipulate the anchor text of your links may be detected and penalized by Google (more on Google penalties here). This doesn’t mean you should try to get keyword-stuffed anchor texts at any cost. Do not confuse the PageRank algorithm with an old metric of the same name that was used by Google to display the rank of the pages from 0 to 10. Search engine developers realized that if many quality resources link to a certain page, it means the page is valuable and trustworthy. If page A links to page B, we say that page B has a backlink from page A. Last but not least, use the fact that there’s an existing featured snippet and get inspired by what works for your competition.
The best information architecture is intuitive, meaning that users shouldn’t have to think very hard to flow through your website or to find something. People with bad intentions (e.g., e-mail address scrapers) build bots that don’t follow this protocol. In fact, some bad actors use robots.txt files to find where you’ve located your private content. It’s better to NoIndex these pages and gate them behind a login form rather than place them in your robots.txt file.
- You can use them to track these metrics and gain valuable insights about your website’s performance.
- An SEO audit refers to the process of analyzing and identifying the factors affecting your site’s ability to rank on search engine results pages (SERPs).
- Backlinks are links from other websites that point to your website.
- They’ll also provide a starting point to learn the fundamentals, so you can raise your SEO traffic levels to new heights down the road.
- Rather than haphazardly throwing arrows all over the place (and getting lucky every once in a while), you’ll put more wood behind fewer arrows.
For another website to link to yours, there needs to be a good reason. Many content management systems or website builders, like WordPress, offer themes that automatically adjust to different screen sizes. Search engines like Google default to the mobile version of a website for crawling. That means if your website isn’t optimized for mobile devices, it might not perform well in SERPs. Go through this report and act on the recommendations to improve your website’s page speed. Enter your website URL and click “Start Audit” to create a new project.
By understanding user behavior, you can adjust your strategy to focus on what works best. Continuous improvements in technical SEO contribute to steady SEO growth over time. Consistent SEO efforts ensure long-term improvements in rankings and visibility.