What is SEO? A Search Engine Optimization Guide

In Ahrefs, this is automatically calculated with the Traffic Potential SEO Anomaly (TP) metric. And this page has roughly 22,000 backlinks from nearly 2,600 different domains. You can ask your developer to analyze your webpages to identify unnecessary requests. You don’t have to follow the exact outlines these tool provide.

Understand What Searchers Want to See

Violating Google’s spam policies can lead to a penalty that harms your search visibility. The term “SEO” can also refer to a person, such as a “search engine optimization expert” or similar. It’s natural to add links to old blog posts in your new blog posts, but you should also go back into old blog posts and add in links to new posts. If search engines literally can’t find you, none of the rest of your work matters. This chapter shows you how their robots crawl the Internet to find your site and add it to their indexes. Search generates 68% of all web traffic, and first-page Google results earn 27.6% of clicks for relevant searches.

Semrush also offers a suite of other tools that make it the all-in-one companion for on-page SEO. This can fast-track a lot of the key aspects of on-page optimization. Well, it’s 10x easier to hop on a podcast than pitch, write, edit and publish a guest post.

Identify Your Seed Keywords

You begin the keyword research process by adding seed keywords to your keyword research tool. So, it’s important to first identify seed keywords relevant to your industry, business, product, and/or service. Outside the flagship content optimization feature, Clearscope has a few useful performance analysis tools. Meanwhile, Clearscope’s keyword discovery tool uses “intelligent language algorithms” to identify viable keyword options based on topic ideas or URLs. There’s very little Semrush can’t do, but most of its utility caters to keywords, SERP analysis, and page ranking metrics.

• The task list of SEO improvements will show you which issues are the most important ones as eliminating them will have a noticeable impact on your SEO performance.
• These phrases reflect how people naturally search and how competitors are framed.
• To give you an idea, Google, the most-used search engine got around 8.3 billion searches per day in 2024.
• Except for the URL, which you should avoid changing unless absolutely necessary.
• You can earn coverage and backlinks from reputable media outlets and industry publications by providing valuable insights, expert opinions, or original research.

This includes elements like external links, social posts and other website promotion methods. Google Search Console (GSC) is a free tool provided by Google that helps website owners, webmasters, and SEO professionals understand how their site is performing in Google Search. For beginners looking to harness the power of SEO, mastering Google Search Console is a crucial step. Since voice searches are more detailed, long-tail keywords become incredibly important. These are longer and more specific phrases that visitors are likely to use.