Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.
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What makes a good link?
What makes a good link? Nobody knows for sure how exactly Google measures the value of each link. But there are some general concepts of evaluating links that the SEO community believes to be true: 1. Authority As you already know, Google sees links as “votes” that a given page deserves to rank well. But a link…
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How to build links
Conceptually, most link building tactics and strategies fall into one of the following four buckets: 1. Adding links If you can go to a website that doesn’t belong to you and manually place your link there, that’s called “adding” a link. The most common tactics that fit into this category are: Building links via those…
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Link building basics
What is link building? Link building is the process of getting other websites to link to pages on your website. Its purpose is to boost the “authority” of your pages in the eyes of Google so that these pages rank higher and bring more search traffic. Why is link building important? According to Goo0gle’s Andrey…
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Optimize for featured snippets
A featured snippet answers the searcher’s question with a short answer. Goo0gle pulls them from web search listings, and they almost all come from one of the pages ranking in the top 10. This means you can shortcut your way to the top position by winning the snippet. The best featured snippet opportunities tend to be…
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Set SEO-friendly URLs
If you’ve set up your website for SEO success, your URL structure should be sound. But you still need a descriptive slug for each page. Google says to use words that are relevant to your content. Often the easiest way to do that is to use your target keyword. Optimize your images Images from your pages…
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Write a compelling title tag
Title tags are often the main piece of information used to decide which result to click on. This is why you need to make them compelling. Here are a few tips: You should set a title tag on every indexable page. If you like, you can use refs’ Site Audit to find pages with title tag issues like being…
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How to do on-page SEO
Although Google looks at keywords on your page, repeating keywords is not on-page SEO. Doing too much of this will actually harm your rankings. So let’s run through some sensible optimizations that will make a positive difference. Use an H1 tag for your page title Heading tags, including the H1, help Google understand the content on your…
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On-page SEO basics
What is on-page SEO? On-page SEO is anything you can do on the page itself to improve its rankings. It focuses on helping Google and searchers better understand and digest your content. Why is on-page SEO important? Google looks at things you can influence with on-page SEO to decide if your page is a relevant…
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7. Keep it evergreen
Content doesn’t stay fresh forever. That’s an issue if you’re targeting a fast-moving topic. It means you’ll have to work to keep your content updated to keep Google and searchers happy. For example, the estimated traffic trend for our list of top Google searches goes up and down. This happens because the topic demands fresh content.…
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6. Make it “sticky”
People aren’t going to stick around for something they find confusing or hard to read. That’s bad because Google uses interaction data to assess relevance. If searchers abandon your content like the Titanic, that’s unlikely to help SEO. Here are a few tips for making content more “sticky”: Tools like Hemmingway and Grammarly can help with simplification and spell checks.…
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