Search engine optimization is a necessary part of running a website.

Whether you are trying to draw in customers and earn money or just want to be helpful with useful blog posts, SEO dictates the who, where, what, how, and why of search engine results.

While it might be an uncomfortable pill to swallow, SEO is not something that you can just breeze through. Even the smallest sites with the most niche subjects can still struggle if they do not have solid SEO backing them up.

In this guide, you will learn more about how to tackle search engine optimization in a way that makes sense and gets you the best possible results.

Whether you are brand new to SEO or have experimented with it already, improving your SEO makes a massive difference to your site’s performance.

The Basics of SEO

You can’t improve SEO until you know what it is and how it works. In simple terms, SEO dictates how search engines understand your site. The more optimized your website and its content are, the higher you will tend to place in search engine rankings.

This means that you appear higher when users are searching for relevant content, which means more eyes on your website and often more traffic.

While this can sound simple, SEO can cover hundreds of individual techniques and tools that all have their own use cases.

There are dozens of ways to directly influence your site’s SEO potential and even more that involve using other sites to boost your own.

This, unfortunately, can make SEO look a lot more complex than it really needs to be at first.

The Aims of SEO

Making SEO improvements to your site can mean a lot of individual things, but the end result is almost always the same.

The point of trying to improve your SEO is to make your site more optimized for search engines – which means doing things that fit with those search platforms’ algorithms.

Whatever steps you take, the overall goal is to improve your search engine ranking potential. However, you do not want to rank for just anything. Part of SEO involves identifying relevant keywords that your audience will use.

By targeting these keywords, you increase your presence in search results for those specific kinds of searches, helping you target audiences with an actual interest in what you offer.

This, naturally, makes SEO an incredibly powerful tool for any business or blog site – but only if it is done right.

While it is easy to see the benefit of a higher ranking, there are plenty of ways to ruin your SEO and sink your potential.

This makes it important to go in with a decent understanding of how SEO works, what is expected of a typical SEO project, and the right ways to approach your SEO efforts.

How Does SEO Work?

As mentioned earlier, SEO is a pretty broad term.

It can include many different tactics and practices, but the overall goal is the same.

SEO works by optimizing your website to appeal to search engines – this means the content, the keywords, and even the meta information buried in certain pages.

It can also cover things like getting more major sites linking back to your own or making sure that users can easily navigate from one page to all other pages.

All of these impact the way that search engines see your site, which changes your rankings. In general, higher rankings for a keyword means that you appear higher in Google’s search results when a user searches for that keyword.

The point of SEO is to rank as high as possible for any keywords that users tend to use while searching for products, services, or sites like your own.

This puts you in a more dominant position within Google search results and gives you a better chance at capturing new users.

This explanation is only a basic breakdown, of course. Throughout the rest of this guide, we will explain how to properly improve SEO and push your rankings higher.

What to Consider When Building an SEO Strategy

One thing that many new SEO approaches struggle with is priorities. While it is easy to get caught up in the smaller details, SEO needs good foundations to succeed.

If you want to improve on your SEO and secure a better set of Google rankings, then you need these foundations to be as good as possible.

The more niche elements can be important, but without something solid propping them up, they are little more than filler.

1) The Indexing Process

The technical side of your SEO is a major consideration, especially early on.

For a website to rank anywhere, it needs to undergo three distinct steps that are all influenced by technical tweaks.

First, search engines need to find the site. Then, they need to scan them and understand more about them, such as keywords and main topics.

Then, they need to index the site, adding it to a database of other websites that can appear in search results.

While this sounds simple, these technical elements are not just something that search engines do automatically.

They are heavily based on your own technical SEO – something that we will cover slightly later on.

2) Your Site’s Goals

When looking to improve your SEO, it is vital to keep an eye on your site’s overall goals.

Your site’s purpose has a major impact on your approach and the kind of results that you can expect.

This includes:

• Who your audience is
• What your main selling points are
• What kind of content you are publishing
• How you are going to market your brand

If you are struggling with any of these, your SEO will suffer because you will not have a clear direction to follow.

For example, target keyword research needs an obvious direction for you to focus on based on what you are actually trying to sell to your users.

Without that, you will struggle to pick a starting point and get the results that you want.

3) Your Own Limitations

One site can’t do everything.

It does not matter how much you optimize your content or how many people you know – there will always be something that you simply can’t do.

This could be something major, like not being able to break into a certain audience because your products are not quite relevant enough.

It also might be something smaller-scale, like not having enough of a presence online to get mentioned by larger publications.

It is important that you keep your goals relative to your business size and try to stay realistic. For example, if you are a small business focusing on your local area, you might not have a need for international exposure.

Do not bankrupt yourself by chasing an SEO pipe dream that is not even viable at your business’ current size.

Improving Your SEO

With the basics out of the way, it is time to talk about the actual SEO itself.

As mentioned earlier, SEO can involve a lot of moving parts and can be an almost modular task, depending on how you do it. This means that there are a lot of elements that you may or may not decide to focus on based on your goals.

Throughout the rest of this guide, you will get an in-depth understanding of the different focuses involved in SEO.

Alongside that, you will get a breakdown of how to improve your SEO potential while still using tried and tested techniques.

Technical SEO Elements

If SEO is the heart of any website, then technical SEO is the heart inside that heart. Technical SEO refers to anything that you are doing to your own site for SEO purposes.

This could be something like fixing broken or dead links and boosting page load times or changing the metadata of a page so that it appears differently in search engines.

Whatever the case, technical SEO refers to any element of the site that directly improves your search engine ranking potential.

In practice, though, there is a lot more to technical SEO than simply tweaking individual components.

Your site is like an organism, and every part that you change alters the way that it behaves in search engines.

This means that approaching technical SEO well requires some planning and an understanding of the different elements that it can involve.

General Technical Quality

The most important part of your technical SEO is your site’s overall quality.

This does not just mean its looks but the actual technical proficiency that went into creating it. In order for a website to be considered a good resource for users, it needs to be a good experience.

If the page loads too slowly, for example, or has constant errors, then it is going to look bad in front of users.

Not only does this dramatically reduce the chance of users wanting to keep using that site, but it also means that slower sites are going to rank lower overall, even if the content on them is good.

This is often a good reason to consider hiring a web developer if you can afford one. If you are trying to improve the technical aspects of your site, then it can be a struggle for those who are not used to dealing with code and site creation.

However, with some quick learning (or help from a professional coder), a lot of the most notable technical flaws can be fixed.

Site Loading Speed

The loading speed of a website is one of the biggest technical factors.

It is an easy thing to overlook since it does not affect the quality of your actual content, but a site that loads slowly can massively hurt the way that you rank.

Search engines will give priority to faster-loading sites, and if you are lagging behind, you will fall further and further down the list.

Google and most other search engines focus on the user experience, and loading speed is a direct factor in how good this experience is. If your site loads slowly, then users are having a worse time engaging with it – meaning reduced rankings.

How to fix loading speed

Loading speed issues can usually be found in the coding or through the page having to load large files.

In general, you want to minimize the number of on-page (i.e. not embedded from another source) images, videos, and files that your pages are relying on, as well as their sizes.

This, naturally, is going to change depending on the type of site that you are working with and what kind of content is involved.

In other words, slow loading times are either because the site is hosted poorly or because the page/site itself is trying to load a lot more than it probably should be.

Website Navigation

Your internal link structure is another massive part of your site’s quality.

If the links do not work or do not connect the way that they should, then the whole thing is going to feel a lot less user-friendly.

Sloppy navigation impacts both users and crawler bots since both use internal links to get around. If search engines cannot find links around your site, or the links are contained in images that they cannot see, you are compromising your navigation.

Beyond that, poor navigation can mean that users leave faster and explore the site less, something that can impact your SEO rankings if Google notices consistent cases of users “bouncing off” your site.

How to fix navigation

Fixing navigation can, unfortunately, mean a lot of different things.

Often, you need to focus on changing link anchor text to be relevant to the page that it is targeting – such as changing “click here!” to “click here to see (page name)!”

On a more technical level, keeping links visible means putting them in obvious places and allowing important pages to be reached easily.

This might mean reworking your navigation bar or ensuring that all major pages have links in the footer of every page.

The idea is that no page is more than a couple of clicks away from any other, and all the major ones are immediately available.

URL Structures

While URL structures might not seem important, they can really matter in certain situations.

Search engines do not really like long strings of words in a URL or when a URL goes dozens of levels deep for no specific reason.

Simplifying your URLs can make them easier for bots to follow and can make the pages more SEO-friendly in certain situations.

This is only a minor part of technical SEO, but it is one worth mentioning if you want to get the best possible results from your site.

How to fix bloated URL structures

In general, it is best to keep the URL structure as short as possible. The fewer words, the better, and avoid unnecessary additions where possible.

For example, instead of “https://www.sitename.com/article/blog/authorname/december/articlename,” you could simply have “https://www.sitename.com/blog/articlename.”

While this is a very minor issue, it can snowball into a much larger problem once you start relying on those URLs as part of your backlinks since it becomes much more of a problem to change them.

Dead and Broken Links

A dead link sends a user to a web page that does not exist, whereas a broken link sends users to a web page that is no longer there.

While these are both different, they offer the same problem: both users and site bots are being sent to somewhere that does not exist anymore.

This can be a problem for two reasons. First, it damages the user experience overall, and second, it might mean that an important link simply does not work.

If a major navigational link is broken, search engines might not be able to crawl your site properly, and users will not be able to navigate to the resource that they want.

How to fix dead and broken links

The simple solution to this is to make sure that all your links are actually leading to something.

There are various SEO tools that allow you to easily identify broken or dead backlinks on your own site, but these may not even be necessary.

Simply look through your site and see if any links are broken or point to a page that has been moved.

Once you find them, all you need to do is update the link or make the destination page active again.

Duplicate Content

Duplicate content is a huge problem.

Duplicate content typically refers to when a website is using the same content in more than one place or when multiple sites are using the same content.

In either case, this can damage the quality of a website, especially if there are significant amounts of duplicate content present.

How to fix duplicate content issues

The main issue with duplicate content is that search engines can’t generally tell which version of a piece of content is the “real” one.

Canonical tags can help with this if the duplicate content is all on one site since it allows you to mark one example as the original.

However, in other cases, you may need to get the other pages deindexed, especially if the duplicate content is triggered by accident (such as a main blog page and the individual blog post triggering the warning).

If the duplicate content is spread across multiple sites, this can get trickier. The best option is to simply create brand-new content.

Replacing the duplicate content with original content is always the safest bet, even if you simply re-word the article to say the same thing in a different way.

Sitemaps and Robots.txt

Both sitemaps and robots.txt are a major part of technical SEO but can often be overlooked.

In reality, the presence of both can have a massive impact on the way that search engines perceive a site and how they can interact with it.

The sitemap is a directory of the pages on your website. It makes it easy for bots to quickly find the pages and index them.

Robots.txt is a file that tells bots which parts of the site are not accessible to them, keeping them away from chosen pages. Together, these files are essential for controlling how a bot finds and interacts with your website.

How to fix missing sitemap/robots.txt issues

Both sitemaps and robots.txt files are easy to implement and do not take a lot of work. Really, the solution is to simply add both of them.

Both are relatively easy to generate, although it is important to tweak robots.txt if you want to hide any URLs from bots.

Content Marketing Elements

While technical SEO focuses on on-page SEO, content marketing is both on-page and off-page.

The point of content marketing is to use content as a tool to drive users back to your own website. The most common examples of this include guest posts, blog posts, and press releases.

Each of these uses unique strategies and methods, but the idea is the same: to market your site in online spaces that your target audience frequents.

This is not the only point of content marketing, though. It can also provide backlinks – links that point back to your own site and boost SEO.

This is done via natural links, where another website chooses to link back to you without asking, or paid link building, where you pay a third party to do the linking for you.

Content-based marketing and building links can be a massive part of improving your search engine rankings, so it is important to get them right.

Content Relevance

Perhaps the biggest element to consider is how relevant content is to your target audience’s searches.

The point of good SEO is to rank for the keywords that people are actively searching for, not the ones that you want them to search for.

When creating content to boost SEO – either on your own website or with link building on another – you need to make sure that the content is actually relevant to the users who are using it.

This is done through keywords, as well as the relevant context surrounding those keywords. For example, a blog post about pet care is going to perform well if your target audience is regularly looking up terms related to pet care.

On the other hand, if that same blog post is targeting “how to look after fish,” it is less likely to perform as well because it is not as specific.

A more extreme example might be writing an article about AI-generated artwork while you are trying to attract users looking for physical art supplies. “Art” and similar keywords might be shared, but the content itself is not relevant to their needs.

How to fix content relevance issues

There are several different factors that go into content relevancy, so fixing this can be tricky.

The easiest way is simply to do proper keyword research and identify what the most relevant words and phrases are based on the content that you are trying to promote.

However, you also want to make sure that the context is the same. After all, you are trying to get that content to appear in your target audience’s search results so they can click on it and see the information that they need.

If the article does not relate to their search, they have no reason to click on it, and then the search engines are not likely to put it in front of them.

Poor-Quality Content

High-quality content is essential for a good content marketing campaign. If the content is low quality, unoriginal, and has no value, then you are not likely to get anywhere with it.

Content value is measured in a few key ways by search engines: relevancy to the user’s search intent, a low bounce rate (meaning that very few users immediately leave), and various other harder-to-judge factors.

In simple terms, you want high-quality content that offers users something of value rather than simply being a glorified advertisement or filler content.

How to fix low-quality content

The easiest way to deal with low-quality internet content is to avoid writing it.

If you are going to publish a piece of content, you want to make sure that it is good enough that a reader would choose to engage with it regardless of any outside marketing.

Low-quality online content will not do that and can really damage the reputation of your site. While content value is a hard thing to judge, you want to look at your content from the perspective of an outsider.

Does the content actually offer proper practical value? How much is taken from other articles online? Are there any reasons that a user would want to engage with the rest of your site when they are done reading?

You want content that actually fills a lore and ideally keeps users engaged with your website in general.

Creating high-quality content is not necessarily that hard. Just try to make original, worthwhile, useful, and/or entertaining content that adds value to the internet.

Poor Content Structure

The structure of a piece of content is also vital. A poorly-structured piece of content is going to confuse search engines and may struggle to rank highly.

If search engines can’t figure out what the content is actually about, they will not be able to judge things like relevancy or the keywords that it would properly rank for.

For example, if your content is meant to target a keyword phrase like “hats” but has an entire middle section about cars, you are sabotaging your own SEO potential.

How to fix poor content structure

Content structure is largely about organization.

The easiest way to fix a piece of content that is poorly structured is to reorganize it so that the topic is more clearly laid out.

In some cases, this might not change much. In others, it might completely alter how valuable the content is to your SEO, especially if it has a lot of backlinks coming to it (or leaving it to point back to your main site).

A reader will not want to read something disjointed and vague, and search engines know that.

Using Tags in Content Structure

Also, remember that search engines hate walls of text.

It can make the pages feel a lot less user-friendly, and search engines will struggle to accurately understand the topic of a page, which can impact the way that it ranks.

This is why many people opt for lists, or headings, or anything else that breaks up the text into more manageable sections.

This is not just to make the content look nicer. It is a vital part of your content’s structure and will massively help its overall SEO ranking.

Image Optimization

While we already mentioned images as part of the page loading issues, there are other factors at play.

The most obvious is the metadata tags, which can completely change how search engines perceive the image and its relevancy.

Search engines cannot see images in the conventional sense, and so they have to use their own means of judging whether an image is relevant.

This is based on the meta tags that you can input, which describe the image’s contents.

Without accurate (or any) meta tags, the search engine has no idea what the image is. This means that it has no SEO impact, and any links contained within those images have absolutely zero context surrounding them.

How to fix image issues

The solution to this is simple: always use accurate, well-written meta tags for every image.

Make sure that the keywords are relevant to the image and the page that the image is on, and avoid things like empty phrases that add no value (i.e. “photo by anton_m”).

Alt text can also help with users who use screen readers or other tools that can’t display images since it provides a text description of the image’s contents.

Using accurate alt tags can help the search engines better understand the image and will improve the page’s SEO if used correctly.

Link Building Elements

Link building is the king of off-site SEO and has a massive effect on search engine rankings.

Building links involves the creation of high-quality backlinks that point to your website from other sources, boosting the search engine perception of your site.

These backlinks can come from a variety of places and do not all have the same effect – but they all need to be relevant.

Link building has effectively become its own industry, complete with dedicated news sites and link building agencies

However, not building links (or misusing links entirely) can cause a lot of harm to your SEO potential.

Not Link Building

The biggest mistake you can make is not attempting any kind of link building.

Sites that have a strong link profile naturally appear more relevant in the eyes of search engines because other sites have deemed them valuable.

Search engines can’t just ignore this, so sites with a better link profile tend to rank higher for relevant search terms.

This is not just based on how many pages or sites link back to you, though. Their quality and authority also matter.

For example, a link from a high-profile site with a large number of followers will be more valuable than one from a lesser-known blog.

This means that the goal of any link building strategy should be to target relevant, high-quality sites, ideally with a decent following and a high level of relevance to your site.

How to start link building

The easiest way to break into building links is through the content-focused marketing elements that we covered earlier.

Write content that is good enough for other sites to link back to, or write something that can be turned into a guest post.

Whether you are waiting for organic traffic and links or actively link building by approaching other sites, a solid content-based marketing strategy is an essential step in boosting your rankings.

Always go for a diverse set of links. A lot of links from one site will not be any more powerful than a single link, so spread out and find more sites.

Not Targeting the Right Links

While it is fine to simply target high-authority websites, it is not fine to target the wrong kinds of links.

For example, if you are trying to boost the SEO of a website selling gardening supplies, it makes no sense to have a bunch of links coming from car dealerships or clothing stores.

This is especially important if your content is niche since your link building campaigns need to be targeted accordingly.

The less relevant the links are, and the less reliable the linking sites are, the weaker the benefits become.

This means much lower amounts of organic traffic overall and less SEO success as a whole.

How to target the right links

Link building should always be about reaching your organic traffic audience based on where they actually are.

More specifically, you need to target sites, links, keywords, and general concepts that are both relevant to your audience and something they have an interest in.

For example, if you sell hiking equipment, you would want to target keywords and sites that hiking enthusiasts in your audience are actively using.

You do not want to just pick terms at random because there is no guarantee that your audience is looking for them.

If you have not done it already, keyword research is vital for finding out which keyword phrases your users are typically using.

This can also give you future keyword ideas for other SEO campaigns, so there is no reason not to research their keyword choices as soon as you can.

Broken Links

While broken and dead links were mentioned already, they can also be a problem with the content you use for building links.

If you place (or pay for) web content on another site that links back to your own, there is always a chance that the link may break due to changes on either end of the arrangement.

This can be a problem because a broken link has no value for search engines.

Even worse, if the page containing the broken link is on a site with a strong link profile, it could wipe out a major part of your SEO potential.

If a link no longer works, then Google will simply ignore it the next time it crawls your site.

How to fix broken or missing links in link building

There are two ways that links from another site can break: you did something to your site’s URLs, or the owner of the linking site changed something about the content.

With the former, you can either redirect that old URL or try to get the site owner to update the link to the new URL.

With the latter, it all depends on what caused the change.

Sometimes, this is purely accidental, such as content getting tweaked and the link accidentally being changed.

In other cases, it might have been intentional. Technically, unless you had some kind of contract, a site owner can simply remove or change a link if they wish.

How you fix this depends on why the change occurred and what you can do to mitigate the damage.

Either way, if it is not your own fault, contact the site owner and try to get the issue fixed as soon as possible.

Link Spam

Link spam is one of the biggest problems facing SEOs.

Building links is very much a quality-over-quantity game, and this is a major part of it.

If a link appears suspicious, or if there are a lot of low-quality links, search engines can penalize the recipient.

While this will not happen if you only have a few spammy links in your link profile, it can be devastating if there are dozens of them.

Spam links are generally either highly irrelevant, come from a very poor-quality and untrustworthy site or both.

This makes the overall value of the link profile very low, which can really hurt a site’s rankings and eventually get you de-indexed if you have clearly used quantity over quality.

How to fix link spam

Google cares about their search results being a good user experience, with spam being directly against this.

The simplest option is to just not rely on spam links. The more high-quality links you have, the less you need to worry about spam.

If the links were not gained willingly, then you can remove them through a specific multi-step process that involves contacting the site owner and then breaking the link directly if they do not respond.

Beyond this, however, the best option is simply to use good practice.

Ensure that your content is relevant, useful, and not too promotional, and focus on building a natural-looking link profile with a range of different sources.

If you do not actually seek out spam links and take care with the links you do aim for, you should be fine.

Black Hat SEO

Black hat SEO refers to any unethical practices that can improve your rankings.

Black hat techniques are typically frowned upon and can actually negatively impact your rankings if used improperly (or at all).

This is because search engines tend to have a very low tolerance for spam-like or aggressive techniques and will quickly punish anyone who uses them.

This can include things like purchasing links from other websites, setting up private blog networks, or doing anything else that tries to manipulate search engines.

These usually get your site penalized by search engines or even delisted and deindexed entirely so that it can no longer appear for users.

In general, you should never use black hat techniques. While a few can be powerful, you run the risk of seriously damaging your site and rankings if you are not careful.

Other Search Engine Optimization Techniques

While the techniques listed here are some of the best ways to overhaul your SEO, they are far from the only ways.

While it is understandable that you might want to improve SEO rankings directly, it can also help to have a more solid foundation to work with when dealing with SEO as a whole.

The techniques below are smaller or less direct steps that you can take to develop a stronger SEO strategy.

Remember: there is no perfect way to approach SEO, and every site or business needs to tackle its SEO needs in its own way.

Focus on Local SEO

A local business can use local SEO to attract users based in their location rather than simply trying to target keywords.

For example, if your main business sells products locally, it makes no sense to try and rank for a national audience.

A local SEO strategy is all about optimizing your site and content for local users and ensuring that your website is available for those searches.

Local SEO helps users find services that are closer to their location and can give businesses an edge against the competition within their local area.

Obviously, this means that you only really show up in local search results.

However, if you primarily target a local audience anyway, local search rankings are just as important.

How to target local audiences

Creating entries on local business listings and doing other location-specific things can really help boost local SEO.

Things like having a physical address and adding relevant location-based keywords can help since this information will often appear in a Google search.

You always want to target relevant queries in SEO, so SEO ranking opportunities are a very relevant (and therefore valuable) resource.

Remember that you may have to research keyword ideas separately for a local site since the audience would be different from your international one.

Use The Proper Tools

The right SEO tools can be invaluable for understanding your SEO ranking potential.

If you want to improve SEO rankings, then having a good toolset can help you develop your SEO knowledge and keep track of more data with less effort.

Google Analytics and Google Search Console

Tools like Google Search Console and Google Analytics are vital for tracking your website and how it is performing.

These tools allow you to look at how the site is performing, what the most popular pages are, and even what users are searching for the most.

This makes it much easier to track organic traffic and the organic search results that brought them to your site, as well as your overall rankings in those search results.

Both Google Search Console and Google Analytics have counterparts on other search platforms, so these are naturally the ones you would choose for looking over Google search results.

Website owners should always be monitoring their websites since this can help prevent issues before they happen.

Content Management Systems

Content management systems allow you to quickly create, modify, and publish content.

They also usually offer built-in analytics tools, making it much easier to see how your content is performing.

Some CMSs will also integrate with other parts of your site or offer pre-installed plugins that can extend their functionality.

These are incredibly important for any kind of content-related marketing, from working with Google Ads to drawing in organic traffic via SEO.

Keyword Research Tool Options

A keyword research tool is used to identify relevant keywords and phrases and analyze their current positions and performance.

This helps you see which keywords your audience is using, letting you pick out any target keyword that you could potentially rank for.

Without keyword research, you are basically guessing at your Google rankings, making it almost impossible to create content that is optimized.

Improving A Web Page

A given web page could have just as many good points as it has flaws.

For example, meta description issues can alter how Google Search Console and Google Analytics see the page.

Another good example is the mobile site and desktop site not functioning in the same way, killing the experience for mobile users.

Even something like bloated image files or incorrect page titles can damage your SEO ranking.

The content on your page tells search engines a lot about that page and site, and individual web pages can drag down the site that they are attached to.

Sometimes, it is important to do general-purpose site improvements, like fixing meta description tags and creating optimized-for-Google images.

While tools like Google Search Console and Google Analytics can help with identifying flaws, there are a wealth of other tools out there that might do the job as well.

Overall, as you get better at SEO, you will start to pick up on these flaws naturally.

Managing External and Internal Links

As mentioned earlier, it is entirely possible to disavow links you do not want and focus on capturing backlinks that you do.

However, proper link management is important. Keeping track of your links and their current statuses matters, especially if a few are suddenly broken or removed.

This can cause sudden changes to your overall link profile and can lead to your site losing a lot of its natural relevance.

If the links were important or were the only sources of relevant backlinks, then this can massively affect your rankings

Using the right monitoring tools can make this much easier and can help you identify the issue if your backlink profile has suddenly weakened.

Testing Changes for Search Engines

Sometimes, you just need to do the basic steps all over again.

Whether it is optimizing a page for mobile devices or tweaking your meta description tags, there might simply be a part of your site or page that Google does not like.

Do not ever be afraid to tweak things, especially if you are using that first page to experiment and see what happens.

Meta description and title tag changes are a good example of this. Altering a meta description or title tag does not massively change a site, but it can show you what kind of a difference even a slight adjustment might make.

Experimentation is key in SEO. Whether you are building a test first page for mobile devices or trying to adjust the organic traffic audiences you target, testing things is not a bad idea.

Search engine algorithms can be confusing and hard to work with, but that is all the more reason to play around with the tools that you have.

Where to Go From Here

SEO is such a broad subject that this article could continue for twice the length and still not be a fully comprehensive breakdown.

For example, there are niche subjects like voice search results and how you can target voice search users based on common speaking patterns.

However, from this guide, you have hopefully gained an understanding of the main principles behind search engine optimization.

SEO can be a massive challenge, but it can be incredibly rewarding, especially if you are trying to promote a site or service online.

It is all about understanding what your goals are and the resources available to you and using them to boost the reach of your site.

If you find a new SEO opportunity or discover something that might work, press the advantage. In SEO, there are rarely wrong choices – just experiments that you can back away from if they do not work.