So there’s a big difference between a backlink from a page that links to 3 resources and a backlink from a page that links to 30 resources. If you have two links from the same page, the one that appears first may have more value than the second one. Any obvious attempt to manipulate the anchor text of your links may be detected and penalized by Google (more on Google penalties here). An internal link is a link from one page to another within the same website, while an external link is a link from an external website. 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.
How search engines work
In addition to search visibility, SEO drives quality traffic, improves user experience, and helps you stand out in search results. It helps small websites compete with larger ones, drives organic traffic without relying solely on ads, and builds credibility by appearing at the top of search results. Applying the principles of SEO to your website will make it easier to use and enhance the user experience. Google’s E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) guidelines emphasize that content should be written for users, not for search engines.
I now run a strategy consultancy, and I see the problem time and time again, right? I think sometimes we feel under pressure to produce forecasts that are ironclad, that are absolutely solid. These statistics give us a good idea of where SEO is headed in the coming months and years. The specter looming over most SEO-related conversations in 2025 is AI. When ChatGPT and other generative AI tools burst on the scene in late 2023, many predicted that the death of SEO was imminent. Search engines would wither away, with people turning to AI answer engines like Perplexity and Gemini to answer all their queries.
Support other aspects of your digital marketing strategy
SEO, however, has a lot of aspects from on-page to off-page and backlinking to interlinking. SEM stands for Search Engine Marketing, which is just another way of saying search marketing. It’s a broad term that includes both SEO and PPC, all aiming to drive traffic to your site through organic (unpaid) and paid SEO Anomaly efforts. In simple terms, search marketing is about getting visibility and traffic from search engines using both paid and unpaid strategies.
- Unlike paid advertising, this traffic is sustainable and grows when you maintain optimization efforts.
- If you are new to SEO, learning the terminology is the first step to mastering the basics.
- While keyword use still matters, prescriptive methods like using an exact-match keyword in specific locations a requisite number of times is no longer a tenant of on-page SEO.
- All the hard numbers that represent real customers – the who, what, where, when, why, and how – all of which is needed to make informed decisions about SEO strategies and tactics.
- A major Google algorithm change officially introduced in October 2015, although it had been in testing for months before this.
This is also used by your human visitors to better understand what the page is about and if it’s relevant. This means that you can work to improve these factors over time by following best practices for SEO. Another important thing to consider when creating content for your site is SEO keywords and phrases. They should be well-written and on topics that are most relevant to your audience. You will try to optimize this blog post so that when people search for the target keyword “build a birdhouse”, it will show up as a top result. You do this in hopes that the search engine will display your website as a top result on the search engine results page.
An umbrella term for increasing a website’s visibility in search engine results pages, encompassing both paid and organic activities. Organic search results, which are analyzed and ranked by algorithms, are designed to give users the most relevant result based on their query. Demand generation and brand awareness activities that take place outside of a website. Information in the document is a guide to creating quality content and features the concept of E-A-T. How easily the content on a website can be discovered, both internally (by users) and externally (by search engines). How frequently two websites (or webpages) are mentioned together by a third-party website, even if those first two items don’t link to (or reference) each other.
An SEO-friendly website has specific features and characteristics that help search engines understand what the website is all about, increasing the chances of achieving better rankings in the SERPS. Now that you’ve seen what types of backlinks are the most helpful for your Google rankings, it’s time for me to show you how to start building them. In fact, our search engine ranking correlation study found that the number of sites linking to you (not the total number of backlinks) correlated with Google rankings more than any other factor. When users click on these links from other websites, they are led straight to your content. This not only boosts your site’s traffic but also enhances brand awareness, drawing in a broader audience organically.