SEO Guide: Everything a Beginner Needs to Know in 2025

Many people think that content length is one of the ranking factors. There’s a well-known study by Backlinko that shows that posts with about 2,000 words ranked better in Google. If your focus keyword is “best content marketing strategy for small businesses”, it would be crazy to use it in all the on-page elements mentioned above just to tick them all off the list. By focusing on various search intent types (including the informational one) you’ll be able to target various SEO Anomaly stages of the buyer’s journey. In my experience, pages with lots of external links on them (like a resource page or list of “best posts”) work best. In fact, I usually don’t even bother with traditional blog posts.

• You can determine which questions to answer first, second, third, and so on based on the search intent.
• Therefore, having duplicate content can hinder your SEO efforts by diluting the visibility of your content in search results or, in worse cases, causing search engines to penalize your site.
• It bridges the gap between what your audience seeks and what your website offers.

SEO, however, has a lot of aspects from on-page to off-page and backlinking to interlinking. On-page optimization is the process of improving the technical and content aspects of your webpages. To make them more user-friendly and relevant to your target keywords. SEO is all about making sure search engines can crawl and index your pages. And showing search engines that your content is the best (in terms of quality, relevance, and user experience). Thin and duplicated content is another area of emphasis with Google’s recent Panda updates.

In this guide, learn about SEO fundamentals and how to apply them to achieve maximum results on your website. Tedious, involving technical and business decisions, and not guaranteeing results—it nonetheless provides lasting benefits. The search engine optimization process involves optimizing each of these core components of search engine algorithms in order to rank higher in the search results. SEM stands for Search Engine Marketing, which is just another way of saying search marketing. 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.

SEO Basics: How to Rank #1 on Google

For example, the SERP for “chocolate cake” is dominated by recipes on popular sites that search engines see as reputable. This means that other types of content and lesser-known sites might struggle to rank here. And now that Google sees those keywords in my content, they’re probably going to boost my rankings for those search terms.

In fact, some bad actors use robots.txt files to find where you’ve located your private content. It’s better to NoIndex these pages and gate them behind a login form rather than place them in your robots.txt file. Search engines process and store information they find in an index, a huge database of all the content they’ve discovered and deem good enough to serve up to searchers. We also offer a variety of SEO courses in our Yoast SEO academy, where you can find 5 free courses to get started.

High-quality content is at the core of a successful SEO campaign. Here are some of the key terminologies necessary to understand the world of SEO. While SEO brings many benefits in any form, you will experience these benefits more when you have a well-developed strategy. A strategy gives you a path to follow to make educated decisions with specific goals in mind.

Guest posting

When lots of people click on your result in Google, you can find yourself with higher rankings for that term. Google introduced a new search algorithm called page experience. It refers to a set of signals that measures user experience when interacting with a web page.

If your site is particularly video-focused, then continue reading about more things you can do to optimize your videos for search engines. Many people search visually, and images can be how people find your website for the first time. For example, if you have a recipe blog, people might find your content by searching for “fruit tart recipes” and browsing photos of various types of fruit tarts. The snippet is sourced from the actual content of the page the search result is linking to, thus you have complete control over the words that can be used to generate the snippet. Occasionally the snippet may be sourced from the contents of the meta description tag, which is typically a succinct, one- or two-sentence summary of the page.