SEO Glossary of Terms Beginner’s Guide to SEO

Backlinks from trusted websites signal authority and improve rankings. This increased visibility can drive more organic traffic to your site, as users are more likely to click on links that are accompanied by an AI Overview. Ranking higher in search results increases your website’s visibility, driving more clicks from users actively searching for your content, products, or services. Unlike paid advertising, this traffic is sustainable and grows when you maintain optimization efforts. As expected, an SEO-friendly website will get you more traffic from search engines as it will likely run higher in the SERPS (search engine results pages).

  • It involves refining the content and structure of your site and aligning with search engine algorithms to improve your rankings.
  • If a search term matches your description, Google highlights it in bold, giving your snippet extra visibility.
  • NLP enables search engines to identify and highlight specific answers within feature snippets.

You can see our beginner’s guide on how to optimize images for search engines. It is a series of techniques that will help your website to rank higher on search engine results pages. We then saw what kind of resources are considered best by search engines and therefore they get top positions BHS Links in SERPs.

If you consider that most people who use the search box tend to select one of the first 5 results, you can understand the importance of SEO. If your website has thin content pages, consider expanding them more in-depth or removing them altogether. Consolidating similar pages can also improve SEO by reducing duplicate content issues and strengthening the authority of a single, well-optimized page. Where applicable, you should also prove to users that the website is secure by showing logos or other relevant information. This makes a page easier to read for both search crawlers and users.

seo meaning

What is SEO and How It Works for Small Businesses in 2025

seo meaning

Pages that best match a search query appear higher in results, driving more clicks. The most important advantage of having an SEO-friendly website is getting more targeted organic traffic from search engines. 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.

You can actually do more harm than good by trying to use the keyword a certain number of times in your text. A content hub is a collection of pages that are all related to a certain topic. A great way to plan and organize your topics is to use the so-called content hubs. (If you do a quick SERP analysis you’ll notice that the search results are almost identical for all of them). First, Google really knows what kind of content they want to see for each query and if you check the top results, you will often see similar results. They rarely consider intent when in reality, it is even more important than search volume.

seo meaning

How to Research and Use Keywords for SEO

seo meaning

HTML heading tags (H1-H6) separate content into sections, based on importance, with H1 being the most important and H6 being the least important. Headline tags should be used naturally and should incorporate your target keywords where relevant, as doing so may provide a small SEO benefit. A theorized and debated (but never confirmed by Google) “waiting period” that prevents new websites from seeing the full benefit of their optimization efforts. Typically, this effect is witnessed most often with new sites targeting competitive keywords and can only be overcome when the site gains enough authority.

seo meaning

SEO plays a crucial part in progressing a website’s permeability, drawing in focus on activity and setting up validity. We examined the key components of SEO, counting watchwords, on-page and off-page optimisation, and technical considerations. Emailing relevant bloggers and journalists to tell them about your content. Non-traditional search results (not a ’blue link’) like videos, tweets boxes, or featured snippets. If you’ve read anything about SEO before, you’ll know there’s lots of industry jargon.

seo meaning

Write a slug that incorporates your keyword and identifies your website structure when possible. For example if you’re writing a page that will appear on a blog internal to your website, you could use a URL slug that reflects your site hierarchy. On this page, squarespace.com/blog/on-page-seo indicates that this page lives on the website’s blog and is focused on on-page SEO as a topic. It’s useful to start page by page when incorporating SEO into your site. Pick a webpage, then decide what you want to communicate, the target audience, and what you want someone to do after viewing the page.