SEO Guide: Everything a Beginner Needs to Know in 2025
By changing the rules for how SERPs were ranked on November 16, 2003—just before the holiday shopping season—Google accidentally hurt many small retailers. Some of the affected companies were also “false positives,” penalized for but innocent of using the black hat tactics Google wanted to suppress. Getting first-hand experience will teach you a lot about how SEO works and how to improve your skills! You can also explore our SEO FAQs to get answers to some of the most common SEO questions.
- This includes staying up-to-date on SEO best practices and trends, regularly optimizing your website for SEO, researching keywords & competitors, analyzing your site’s SEO data, and more.
- Off-page SEO refers to actions taken outside your website to improve search engine rankings.
- It’s important to note that while keyword rankings and organic traffic are important, they can become vanity metrics.
- The specter looming over most SEO-related conversations in 2025 is AI.
- Backlinks are the cornerstones of website authority and credibility in the eyes of search engines.
Guides
In effect, this means that some links are stronger than others, as a higher PageRank page is more likely to be reached by the random web surfer. The tool lets you monitor your overall organic visibility, where 100% means a top ranking for all keywords and 0% means you rank outside the top 100 for all keywords. It most commonly involves link building, which is the process of getting other high-quality websites to link to your website. Search engines use complex processes and criteria to rank results, aiming to provide users with the best search experience. The term “SEO” can also refer to a person, such as a “search engine optimization expert” or similar. SEO involves making your site more appealing to both users and search engines.
Use Mailchimp to promote your brand, reach your target audience, and grow your business.
He has more than 18 years of practical experience with SEO and digital marketing. Alex holds an MSc Degree in eCommerce and has consulted with Fortune 500 companies in different industries. He blogs regularly about SEO and Digital SEO Anomaly marketing, and his work has been referenced by leading marketing websites.Connect with Alex on Twitter and LinkedIn. These are important questions to answer before you start creating content because Google evaluates content relevancy based on how well a page serves search intent. SEO works by creating high-quality, relevant content with good UX about things people search for, and then proving to Google it deserves to rank. Before you get to content creation, it’s important to get your technical SEO in order.
Not surprisingly, Google announced well in advance that user experience would become a ranking factor. It is important to note that there are actually two types of results that appear in SERPs. SEO techniques aim precisely to improve organic positioning and consequently increase traffic to the site. To understand what is SEO and how this set of practices can help you improve the visibility of your site, we need to start from the basics i.e. the term SEO and its meaning. There are numerous factors that contribute to your site’s load time. Reducing image file size and cleaning up code can vastly improve your load time.
Link building and backlink acquisition would deserve an article of their own. In the context of this guide to SEO and its meaning, it is good to understand that you should not only focus on the number of backlinks but especially on their quality. Off-page signals include link building, reviews, and Google My Business tab optimization. These are just a few of the most commonly used techniques to which you can also add strategies aimed at encouraging and increasing the sharing of your content on social.
