SEO MDN Web Docs Glossary: Definitions of Web-related terms MDN

One of the most important factors in local SEO is optimizing your Google Business Profile because Google evaluates and ranks profiles (rather than webpages) in map-based results. According to Semrush Sensor data from September 2024, Google displays images in the top 20 results for over half of U.S. Technical SEO involves improving the technical aspects of your website to enhance its search visibility.

Besides images, a website may include other multimedia elements such as videos, podcasts, and audio. If you don’t do it, Google will only index one of the versions or get confused, which can negatively affect your rankings. A canonical URL tells search engine crawlers which version of a page they should index. If you have a piece of software, physical product, consulting service or ANYTHING of value that you sell, you can easily turn that into dozens of high-quality backlinks.

Find the best sources of your traffic

In our experience, this helps our clients by decreasing onboarding times, streamlining communication, and improving SEO results. You can go to the Source/medium report, compare two time periods to see a source/medium combination that has the biggest increase in users when compared to the previous time period. It is also a great report to use when analyzing the organic traffic from Google (the pages people visit from the Search are always landing pages). All you need is a backlink analysis tool (like LinkMiner) that will help you find the backlinks of your competitors. If you want to dive deeper into on-page optimization, check out our practical on-page SEO guide for beginners. It covers everything from technical stuff, through content and CTR optimization to monitoring and analysis of your progress.

This approach helps readers quickly grasp the main points and navigate effortlessly through your content. Some writers used to pack their text with key terms, placing them in headings, paragraphs and footers just to rank higher. Failure to keep pace with developments from AI-powered searches such as RankBrain, BERT, and NLP makes a site not as competitive as it once was. Search engines have shifted from basic keyword detection to AI-powered models that analyze intent, context, and meaning, delivering results that feel more intuitive and humanlike.

Title tags

An information retrieval method designed to help search engines identify the correct context of a word. A measurement method businesses use to gauge whether marketing and business objectives, targets, and goals are being reached. When a keyword is placed as high as possible on a web page to influence ranking for a search term. A major Google algorithm update that initially rolled out in February 2011, it was followed by numerous subsequent updates. The goal of Google Panda was to reduce the visibility of low-value content, often produced by “content farms. A free web analytics program that can be used to track audience behavior, traffic acquisition sources, content performance, and much more.

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. Advertisements are almost consistently shown at the very top of a search result, or in a left/right sidebar. Although the basic principle of operation of most of the search engines is the same there are minor differences between them which lead to major changes in their results. For example, for search engines like Yahoo and Bing, on-page keyword factors are of primary importance, while for Google, links and hyperlinks are more important.

• Getting Google to send you traffic is an ongoing process, not a one-time thing.
• Finally, I emailed everyone that linked to the infographic to let them know the image wasn’t working anymore.
• Pages most likely to satisfy the user appear in the first positions of the organic results.
• Add structured data to relevant URLs to provide search engines greater context.
• Search engines aim to reduce the organic search rankings of content that infringes on copyright.

“Black hat” methods raise a site’s ranking at the expense of the search engine’s usefulness. Sites discovered to be using black hat SEO might be penalized or even expelled from a search engine’s index. Like search engines evaluating content based on more than 200 ranking factors, SEO does the same. Search engines like Google publish best practice guidelines, and many professional SEOs share their findings from working on hundreds of sites. Understanding SEO’s definition is only the beginning of understanding how it works. First, you need to learn how search engines work, as their advanced algorithms power the search results and determine where websites appear in the search results.

For many companies, SEO is critical to a successful digital marketing strategy. Crafting a great SEO strategy requires a strong understanding of a website’s core audience, offerings and goals. SEO Anomaly To keep improving, it’s crucial to measure performance using tools like Google Analytics or Google Search Console, watching for increases in organic search traffic and conversion rates.

Any company regardless of size can work to improve its search engine optimization and boost its ranking on the SERP. The more quality content you produce, the more that the search engines have to read and understand what your site is about and how you help consumers. By improving SEO, your business is working to make it easier for search engines to understand and index your content. We’ll also look at some other frequently asked questions about search engine optimization to help you better understand what it is and why it’s important to your business.