It’s a broad term that includes both SEO and PPC, all aiming to drive traffic to your site through organic (unpaid) and paid efforts. In simple terms, search marketing is about getting visibility and traffic from search engines using both paid and unpaid strategies. Building up backlinks—that is, getting your website linked to from a trusted, high-traffic site—bolsters your site’s standing in the eyes of consumers and search engine ranking algorithms.

A major Google algorithm that launched in April 2012, it was followed by a series of updates and refreshes. The goal of Penguin was to reduce the visibility of overly-optimized sites, or sites that excessively abused certain spammy tactics (e.g., building low-quality links, keyword stuffing). In 2016, Penguin started running in real-time as a part of Google’s core algorithm. The amount SEO Anomaly of time that elapses between when a user clicks on a search result and then returns to the SERP from a website. Short dwell time (e.g., less than 5 seconds) can be an indicator of low-quality content to search engines. This text is intended to provide contextual information to people and search engines about what the webpage or website being linked to is about.

A snapshot of a webpage as it appeared when a search engine last crawled it. A technology that temporarily stores web content, such as images, to reduce future page loading times. A navigational element that helps users easily figure out where they are within a website. The most popular search engine in China, Baidu was founded in January 2000 by Robin Li and Eric Xu. The science of making computers perform tasks that require human intelligence. Rather than following a set of programmed rules (like an algorithm), an AI computer system is basically a digital brain that learns.

Website optimization

• After indexing, search engines rank pages based on relevance, quality, and user experience.
• A major Google algorithm update that initially rolled out in February 2011, it was followed by numerous subsequent updates.
• Keyword research will help you generate a list of potential keywords that will help drive leads to your business.
• Top SEO companies recognize the skill gaps within most SEO programs and complement them.

However, if you look at the search results, you’ll notice that all the pages ranking for “best squat rack” are reviews and buying guides, not product pages. In other words, Google considers it a commercial, not a transactional keyword. Many keyword research guides recommend focusing on the so-called long-tail keywords – keywords that are more specific and usually consist of more words. Besides the keyword suggestions, professional tools offer other useful SEO metrics and insights to evaluate the keywords and pick the best ones. So they can save you a lot of time and give you a competitive advantage. In the last 25 years, search engines moved from pure text-based evaluation to the machine learning age.

SEO tools to implement what you’ve learned

Staying informed and adaptable ensures businesses can keep up with the demands of evolving SEO and maintain their online visibility. SEO has significantly changed over the years, adapting to technological advancements and search engine updates. Understanding what is SEO today involves recognising how its strategies have shifted from keyword stuffing to prioritising user experience and content relevance. This evolution highlights the need for continuous learning and adjustment in SEO practices.

A concept in internal linking is that Google treats links differently if there are two links on a web page pointing to the same page. It was thought Google would consider the anchor text from the first link to have more influence. Any activity, including backlinks and website built on a domain previously is known as domain history.

AI-driven updates like RankBrain, BERT, and MUM now prioritize topic depth. By building content around real-world context, defined entities, and clear intent, you naturally stay aligned with how search algorithms evolve. Google’s RankBrain algorithm uses machine learning to better understand search queries – optimizing your content for RankBrain can help boost your SEO. ”, traditional search engines would treat it as an entirely separate query from “fastest way to lose weight” or “quick weight loss methods”. Google’s Knowledge Graph is what enables search engines to connect the dots between different entities.

With search engines like Google, the process consists of crawling, indexing, and ranking. The crawler is an online bot that scours the web to collect all the pages out there and save them in a gigantic database called the index. This index is constantly updated with new pages or updated versions of existing ones. When someone searches online, the search engine calls on the index and uses complex algorithms to determine which pages are relevant to show. This determines the ranking of results shown to the online searcher.