If Google detects that you’ve used black hat techniques to manipulate the algorithm, they may enforce a BHS Links manual penalty that will cause your rankings to drop dramatically. This shift in ranking has resulted in a decrease of 1.2K in traffic. Overall, the Organic Keywords Trend graph is useful for obtaining an overview of your ranking positions.
Design for the Reader, Not the Algorithm
- Keywords with high volume and low to medium competition are the sweet spot — they have high traffic potential and are easier to rank for.
- Image alt tag optimization ensures that all images on your site are correctly labeled with descriptive text, helping to improve your website’s accessibility and search engine ranking.
- Google is striving to always surface the best results, so machine learning systems have been developed as part of the move towards parsing natural language queries.
- This means users are likely looking for information about the paleo diet such as what is the paleo diet, how it works, etc.
- In addition to monitoring the KPIs, you need to focus so that you never lose touch with where your SEO efforts are leading.
- A well-organized XML sitemap makes your site easier to read and improves your chances of ranking high in local search results.
Google’s algorithm has become adept at spotting “keyword stuffing” and penalizes pages that use keywords excessively, in ways that interfere with the reading experience. A good way to avoid being penalized for “keyword stuffing” is to read your copy aloud — if your keyword use sounds unnatural, you may get flagged for stuffing. To correct this, you can replace your focus keyword with secondary keywords you want the blog to rank for. Quality is far more valuable than quantity when it comes to your website. If you have a large number of pages that aren’t delivering value to your audience, they could be harming your rankings. Having too many pages on your site can lower your site speed — a key ranking factor for Google.
The Importance of a Mobile Site in 2022
For search engines, a clear internal linking system allows them to index your content more efficiently, ensuring that every page is crawled and properly ranked. Social platforms are another essential off-page SEO tool, especially for newer sites looking to establish authority. Sharing your content on platforms like Facebook, X.com, LinkedIn, and Instagram increases its reach and likelihood of engagement.
Internal linking is the process of adding links to web pages that lead to other pages on the same website. It’s easy and profitable to build a web of internal links, but some content marketers treat this like an afterthought. Including a table of contents with jump links is an absolute necessity for long-form content. It helps to elevate the user experience by making it easier to find what they’re looking for and jump there with a click. “E-E-A-T” is short for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. Although it’s not included among ranking factors, It’s a component of Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines.
In this example, having a description that includes both “books” and “coffee” in the description will be very important for capturing both audiences. This example further illustrates why descriptions and keywords are so important for ranking in Google Maps. The Google algorithm uses hundreds of signals to rank content on search engine results pages (SERPs).
