The specter looming over most SEO-related conversations in 2025 is AI. When ChatGPT and other generative AI tools burst on the scene in late 2023, many predicted that the death of SEO was imminent. Search engines would wither away, with people turning to AI answer engines like Perplexity and Gemini to answer all their queries. Lucky for all the SEO pros out there, that prediction has not yet proved correct. Instead, nimble marketers have discovered how to employ AI to improve their SEO tactics.
The article doesn’t begin with a long thesis about the history of SEO, then eventually circling back to on-page SEO. We’re also answering additional adjacent questions and showing you how to optimize your pages for search engines. Looking to the future, search engines are exploring ways of using relationships between entities, not just keywords, to determine topical relevance. It further reads the depth of your web pages from the home page itself and even indicates the number of clicks a user does to reach a specific page. Along with this, the interface also distributes different metrics in detailed categories such as ‘Indexation’, ‘Technical’, ‘HTML’, ‘Content’, ‘Links’, and ‘Sitemap’.
How to Create a Successful SEO Strategy: Step-by-Step Breakdown
- According to the Moz search ranking factors survey, title tags, also known as heading tags, are listed as the second most important ranking factor.
- In the end, optimizing all of the on-page factors helps ensure your page is shown on more searches.
- Read my full Ahrefs review to learn more, or check out my Ahrefs vs Semrush comparison to see why I choose Ahrefs as my primary SEO tool.
- Using ALT tags on images improves site accessibility and is viewed positively by search engine crawlers.
- Keep reading for a beginner’s walkthrough with tips from our SEO checklist, plus resources for learning even more about these on-page optimizations so you can perform DIY SEO.
Meta descriptions hold valuable real estate in search results and can help drive clicks and traffic. If additional header tags are needed, continue to use the rest of the H4-H6 tags in the same hierarchical order. Fresh content is essential for staying relevant in search results. Search engines favor updated pages, especially for topics that change frequently. Finally, minify HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to reduce file sizes.
How to Get Into Digital Marketing: Tips From An Expert
Simply increasing internal links pointing to your 1-3 most important pages can boost their ranking. But if a searcher enters a different keyword and Google wants to display your page, it’ll pull text from your page that closely matches what the searcher’s looking for. A sitemap is a file containing a list of all pages on your site. Alt text (alternative text) within images is a principle of web accessibility, and is used to describe images to the visually impaired via screen readers.
That means adding your own unique experiences, strategies and SEO Anomaly knowledge. Only one of those pages containing the “duplicate content” will rank for it. That means more potential traffic to your site and more foot traffic to your local business.
Essential Steps In Building A Winning SEO Strategy
As mentioned earlier, incorporating links throughout your pages is a must, but it’s often something that’s easily overlooked. Aim to have at least 500 words per page, and format content to make it easier to read and digest with the use of headers and subheaders. It should not reflect the content verbatim as it appears on the page. Get as close as you can to the 150-character limit to maximize space and tell visitors as much as possible about your page.
After they look at your URL, search engines read your site’s titles and descriptions, also known as your meta tags. The title and description are shown in Google search results below each website link, so your site visitors may also read them to determine if your site offers what they want. They are not showing on your website itself – only on result pages. Remember to write unique and descriptive texts for every single page and be sure to incorporate your keywords as much as possible – but again, in a way that sounds natural. Examples of on-page SEO include headings and subheadings, internal linking, and images and alt-text. These are all elements on the page that, when optimized, can help your website content rank higher on search engines—and drive more traffic.