51 SEO FAQs For Beginners With Easy Answers (2025 Edition)

If you’re just getting started, SEO looks like an ocean. In fact, it really it is. SEO can be scary at times, even experts can’t predict changes to get better search rankings.

If you’re new to SEO and looking for some essential answers to your SEO questions, this detailed SEO FAQ page is created just for you.

Bookmark this page because we’ll update this SEO FAQs questions answers page more often with latest SEO questions that our audience ask. You too can ask if you’ve any (using the comment section at the end of this post).

Top 51 SEO FAQs For 2025: Frequently Asked Questions Answers About SEO

1. What is SEO?

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the process of improving a website so that it appears higher in search engine results like Google. The goal is to attract more visitors to the site.

Here’s a simple breakdown:

1. Keywords: Using specific words or phrases that people are likely to search for.
2. Content: Creating high-quality, relevant content that answers users’ questions.
3. Technical Factors: Ensuring the website is easy to navigate and loads quickly.
4. Links: Getting other websites to link to yours, which boosts credibility.

By optimizing these elements, a website can rank better, helping more people find it.

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2. What are the types of SEO?

There are 3 main types of SEO which include:

• White hat SEO: White hat SEO focuses on users instead of search engines (that’s what Google loves too) and requires a lot of time and effort. It includes tactics like content marketing, mobile optimization, keyword research, competitor analysis, etc.
• Black hat SEO: It includes things like link cloaking, keyword stuffing, hidden text manipulation, etc.
• Grey hat SEO: This is usually a combination of both the above two techniques and usually contains tactics like buying links, having higher keyword density than text, spun content, etc.

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3. What is a sitemap?

Google basically uses a website’s sitemap to index pages within them. A sitemap usually contains a list of pages on your site that you have decided to tell Google what to index and what NOT to index.

You can create your own website’s sitemap using an XML maps generator or Google XML sitemaps plugin if you’re using a self-hosted WordPress platform. An XML sitemap looks like this:

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4. How can I index my new website in Google search really quickly?

1. Google Search Console: Sign up, add your website, and submit your URLs using the URL Inspection Tool.
2. Sitemap: Create a sitemap and submit it in Google Search Console under the Sitemaps section.
3. Robots.txt: Ensure your robots.txt file allows search engines to crawl your site.

We wrote a detailed post on how to index your new site on Google.

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5. What is the best blogging platform for better SEO?

For a better blogging platform, WordPress.org is the best choice, It gives you full control over your site.

WordPress is search engine friendly and gives you access to a ton of tools, plugins, and themes that you can use to make your site more user-friendly and appealing. Also, make sure to pick the RIGHT hosting for your WordPress site as your hosting can make or break your blogging success.

You’ve got some SEO tips, but for hosting tailored for beginners, dive into our best web hosting for beginners guide.

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6. How much does SEO cost?

On average, an SEO expert charges $100 per hour. It can go all the way up to several thousand dollars depending upon the SEO expert or agency you choose. That means SEO usually costs you $500 to $5000 or even more every month.

You can invest on SEO for things like link building, on-page optimization, competitor analysis, paid advertising etc depending on the type of your business or website.

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7. How long does it usually take to get results from SEO?

It usually takes 6 to 8 months (or at least 1 year if you’re entering into a competitive industry) to start getting results such as search visitors, leads and sales to your sites from search engines like Google.

You’ll considerably be getting better results as you continue doing SEO for long time when compared to short term results. That means whatever the search traffic that you get to your site in the first 6 months will be much lesser when compared to the next 6 months and so on.

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8. What is keyword research?

Keyword research is the process of finding search terms for your website to attract more visitors from search engines like Google.

There’s no short answer. In fact, we write an in-depth article on doing keyword research that you can refer to if you want to know more about it. You can tools like keywordtool.io for quick keyword research.

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9. What is on-page SEO?

On-page SEO is the process of optimizing your website’s individual pages to get higher rankings on Google. On-page SEO elements usually include things like;

• Title tag
• Meta description
• Image alt tags
• URL
• H2, H3 subheading tags and so on

If you’re wondering about how to do better on-page SEO to get higher rankings on Google, here’s an excellent on-page SEO tutorial for you.

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10. What is off-page SEO?

Off-page SEO is the process of improving your website’s SERP (Search Engine Results Page) results by using techniques like link building, brand mentions etc. Off-page SEO generally include things like:

• Building links
• Social media shares
• Brand mentions
• Email outreach etc

To put it simply, on-page SEO happens inside of your website whereas off-page SEO happens outside of your website.

If you’re looking for a simple tutorial on off-page SEO for beginners, check out this post.

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11. What is link building?

Link Building is the process of acquiring backlinks from other websites, forums, blogs, and online journals to your site. This practice aims to increase your site’s authority and improve its visibility in search engine results. A strong backlink profile can enhance your website’s credibility, driving more organic traffic.

Link building is essential if you want to get better search rankings for the keywords you are targeting. There are a ton of link-building strategies out there which include;

• Guest posting
• Blog commenting
• Video marketing
• Infographics
• Guestographics
• Skyscraper technique
• Editorial links
• Broken link building and the list goes on

Here’s a detailed link-building strategy that you can use to get a higher ranking for niche sites and new websites.

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12. What is technical SEO and how does it help?

Technical SEO mostly deals with how search engine crawlers look at your site. So it basically involves in finding and fixing all your website technical-related issues such as crawling issues, no sitemaps, images with missing alt tags, 404 error pages, etc.

If you find and fix your site issues using SEO techniques like site audit, you can easily get better search rankings and it helps you increase your technical SEO with ease.

Here’s an ultimate guide on technical SEO that you must check out to increase your overall rankings and visibility to your sites on Google search.

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13. What are the best SEO tools?

Here are some of the best SEO tools that we use (or already used) and highly recommend.

Semrush: Our primary SEO tool for keyword research, backlink analysis, and competitor insights, costing around $120/month and worth it.

WordPress SEO by Yoast: A highly recommended free plugin that helps optimize your content for better search rankings, essential for increasing traffic.

Moz tools: Created by SEO expert Rand Fishkin, these tools assist with keyword research, link building, and competitor analysis.

Google PageSpeed Tool: A free tool that analyzes website speed and offers recommendations for optimization.

Google Keyword Planner: A popular free tool for keyword research, providing metrics like monthly volume and CPC costs, though less accurate than premium tools.

Here’s a great compilation of free SEO tools you can use to skyrocket your website search traffic.

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14. What is Google TrustRank?

Google TrustRank tells you how trustworthy a website is. It basically determines the overall backlink profile of a site. There’s no accurate tool to find out the TrustRank of a site but MozTrust from Moz gives you a better understanding about how trustworthy a site is.

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15. What are backlinks?

Backlinks, also known as inbound links or external links, are links from one website to another. They play a crucial role in search engine optimization (SEO) for several reasons:

You’ll find a variety of technical words used for backlinks which are mainly;

• Internal links (which contain links of your own site)
• External links (which contain links from other sites)

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16. How to protect my site from being hacked?

To protect your site from being hacked, follow these tips:

• Keep Software Updated: Regularly update your CMS, plugins, and themes.
• Use Strong Passwords: Create complex passwords and change them often.
• Implement HTTPS: Use an SSL certificate to encrypt data.
• Limit User Access: Grant access only to necessary personnel.
• Backup Regularly: Schedule frequent backups of your site.
• Install Security Plugins: Use security plugins to monitor threats.
• Use a Web Application Firewall (WAF): Block malicious traffic.
• Monitor Your Site: Check for suspicious activity and set alerts.

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17. My website search traffic is going down. How can I recover from it?

There are a ton of reasons for website traffic drop, here are some of them.

• Your website is hit by Google penalization (such as Panda, and Penguin updates)
• You did something terribly wrong with your website’s SEO (technical SEO mostly)
• You changed your website design (it does affect, that’s why authority sites don’t change their web design even after years)
• You’re building toxic backlinks or linking to quickly
• Your website is full of thin content and so on

Start creating high-quality content more frequently and use effective link-building strategies such as guest posting, and blogger outreach to build quality links to improve your overall website’s SEO.

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18. How does Google search work?

Google has a ton of ranking factors (over 200 factors) that determine the quality of a web page. Based on your search queries, Google shows up only the best results which have informative content.

If you want to know more about how Google search really works, you may want to check this out.

Here’s a great illustration that helps you quickly understand how search engines like Google usually work.

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19. What are Google’s major algorithms?

Although there are a ton of algorithms used by Google, but here are a few of the major Google algorithms that you should be aware of.

• PageRank: Measures backlink quality and quantity.
• Panda: Targets low-quality content.
• Penguin: Fights spam and manipulative link-building.
• Hummingbird: Understands search query context.
• Pigeon: Enhances local search results.
• Mobile-Friendly Update: Prioritizes mobile-optimized sites.
• RankBrain: Uses machine learning for complex queries.
• BERT: Improves understanding of language nuances.
• Core Web Vitals: Evaluate user experience metrics.
• Spam Updates: Regularly combats spammy practices.

So if you want to stay safe from getting penalized by any of the above-mentioned Google major algorithms, make sure to avoid the mistakes mentioned above.

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20. How can I increase my search engine traffic?

Here are a few tips to increase your search engine traffic to your sites in 2025 and beyond.

• Optimize for SEO: Use relevant keywords in content, titles, and meta descriptions.
• Proper Keyword Research: Use SEO tools that offer comprehensive keyword research features.
• Create High-Quality Content: Publish valuable and engaging content regularly.
• Improve User Experience: Ensure your site is mobile-friendly and loads quickly.
• Build Backlinks: Acquire quality links from reputable websites.
• Utilize Social Media: Share content and engage with your audience.

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21. What is domain authority and how can I increase it?

Domain authority is a metric from Moz tools that is highly used by bloggers and SEOs all over the world to find the authority of a website. It is also known as DA (Domain Authority).

It basically analyses your backlinks along with the toxic links such as spam links, redirection links, irrelevant links etc to give your site is domain authority which ranges from zero to 100. 100 being the highest domain authority which only a few websites have such as Google, Facebook, etc.

If you are looking to increase your website’s domain authority, here are a few quick tips that work well for you.

• Start link building. Try to get as many quality backlinks as possible from various domain names instead of getting too many links from a single website source. Domain authority usually gets updated every single month so the higher quality links you get within a month the sooner you will get higher DA to your sites.
• Domain authority is also about increasing your website User Experience (UX), that means you need to work on improving your website design along with navigation such as menu, sidebar, footer section etc. The faster your website loads the better chances will have to increase your overall performance along with DA.

Here’s a great resource on increasing your website’s DA easily.

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22. Does website speed affect search engine rankings?

Yes, your website speed and loading times impact your overall search engine rankings of your website. In fact, website speed is one of the most important ranking factors in Google search.

So if you are looking to increase your overall search engine rankings of your website, make sure to increase your overall website speed.

• First things first: Go to Pingdom tools and check your website speed and performance. It’s free and easy to use, so go check out your speed. If you website is taking more than 3 seconds to load, you need to work on increasing your performance as early as possible.
• Get managed WordPress hosting for your website as most of dedicated hosting services use SSD storage along with CDN which ultimately increases your overall website speed and performance when compared to shared hosting plans.
• Use less plugins on your WordPress sites as plugins takes too much of bandwidth and storage of your website hosting storage. As a rule of thumb, limit your plugin usage to 15 or below.

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23. What are the major Google ranking factors?

There are over 200 ranking factors that Google uses to rank a web page on Google search.

Here are some of the major Google ranking factors considered by Google to determine the quality of a web page.

• Content quality
• Backlinks
• Website speed
• Mobile-first indexing (make sure to use responsive design)
• Social signals
• Domain authority
• https (secure connections over http)
• User experience (how easy your site is to navigate and get crawled by search crawlers)

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24. What is competitor research?

Competitor research involves in analyzing your competitor’s websites to increase your odds of getting more search traffic, backlinks and sales to your site. Competitor research is quite common in all industries and it basically involves in:

• Finding and analyzing top content
• Backlink analysis
• Estimating traffic of your competitor sites
• Knowing their target audience
• Finding how they are making money and sales
• And so on

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25. Does social media impact my Google search rankings?

The short answer is YES. While social media is not a ranking factor in Google but it plays a key role in calculating the user engagement of your site (social sharing, comments etc).

If you create highly informative content and if it goes really popular on social media, you can easily get higher rankings for that page in Google search. That’s why most authority sites with thousands of social shares usually get quick rankings in the first page of Google search results.

Social media not only helps you with SEO but also increases your brand awareness, helpful for promotion, getting more target audience to your sites etc. So don’t ignore social media if you want to get better results in the long run.

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26. What are the best SEO tips for YouTube?

Here are some of the best SEO tips for YouTube in 2025.

• Make sure to use proper keywords within your videos in title, meta description, tags, etc. Also, use LSI-relevant keywords to boost your organic visibility for your videos from search engines.
• Start commenting on other videos by using your YouTube channel. Although it doesn’t help you instantly with SEO but gives you enough traffic to your videos if you’re leaving witty and smart comments, which also helps you increase your subscribers and likes on your videos.
• Always make sure to do keyword research before you create and upload any video on YouTube. That way you can find less competitive keywords that you can use to rank better in YouTube or Google search.

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27. How to track my keyword positions on Google?

Keyword tracking is one of the most essential things you need to if you want to improve your SEO and search rankings. Tracking positions can be done in a lot of ways. You can do it manually by searching for your targeted keywords on Google or you can use keyword tracking tools such as Semrush, Ahrefs, SpyFu, etc to easily track all of your keywords in one place.

Always make sure to track your keyboard positions to find out how your best-performing keywords rank on Google search so you can work on improving them accordingly to bring more distance from search engines like Google.

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28. How to find and fix my website issues?

You can use tools like Semrush to easily find and fix all your website’s technical-related SEO issues. It basically gives you a website health score (0 to 100, 100 being the best without any errors or warnings) so you can easily work on fixing all your website errors to get better rankings on Google search.

Also make sure to conduct frequent site audits of your website in order to find and fix all the technical and SEO related issues that your site might have so you can eliminate all the issues that are preventing you from getting bored search engine traffic to your website.

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29. Is investing money in SEO worth it?

First things first: spending on SEO is not an expense, it’s an investment that gets you a 10-fold or 100-fold return if done right. That’s why so many agencies and entrepreneurs are spending millions of dollars every month on SEO experts and agencies to bring more value from search engines to their products, services, and websites.

Whether you’re writing a book and looking for better ways to promote it or running a small business to generate better leads, You need the help of search engines. Here’s where SEO comes into handy.

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30. What is an SEO strategy and how to create it?

An SEO strategy involves in finding and using the PROVEN tactics and techniques to bring more visitors from search engines like Google to your sites. An SEO strategy not only helps you increase your search traffic but also your website sales, which is why it’s so essential for every business and website to thrive online.

If you’re wondering about how to create an SEO strategy to increase your search traffic, rankings and sales, here are few tips.

• Firstly, define your target audience. Without knowing who you’re serving through your websites, products or services – it’s impossible to layout a strategy that works well for your business. So know your target audience along with their wants and needs.
• Do a thorough keyword research
• Define and analyse your competition
• Tweak your SEO strategy as you go

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31. What are long tail keywords?

Long tail keywords usually contain 4 or more keywords within them and help increase your search engine traffic even with minimal effort (especially useful for new websites).

For example, “top 51 SEO FAQs for beginners” is a 6-word long tail keyword whereas SEO FAQs is a 2-word short tail keyword and is really hard to rank for when you’ve a new site.

Here’s a great tutorial on how to find long-tail keywords. Long tail keywords contribute to 70% of overall search engine traffic.

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32. What are Google search metrics?

Here are some of the Google search metrics that are highly useful when you’re doing keyword research to increase your search traffic or sales.

• Search volume
• Number of results for the keyword
• AdWords competition
• Keyword difficulty aka organic search difficulty
• Average CPC

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33. What is SERP in SEO?

A search engine results page (SERP) is a page displayed by search engines like Google for user queries. First SERP shows you the first 10 results of the first page and the second SERP shows you the results between 11 to 20 (in 2nd page) and so on.

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34. What is local SEO?

Local SEO simply means that you’re optimizing your website, business or products to generate traffic from location-based searching.

For example, if you’re running a small business in New York, you can do local SEO for your business to only target local customers from New York. This is highly useful if you want to ONLY attract a specific demographic audience to buy or research about your products or services.

Recommended: Top 10 Local SEO Tools to Improve Your Local Search Rankings

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35. What is a Google knowledge graph?

It can be simplified as the box on the right-hand side of the results page which shows all the important information of a business, product, or person you search for. Here’s what it looks like;

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36. Will SEO die?

The simple answer is NO. Not anytime soon. The search demand and SEO growth are only going up rapidly. So there’s more to come and SEO is a billion-dollar industry where businesses like Walmart, Apple, and Amazon are spending billions of dollars on Google search, AdWords, etc. So you can be sure that you can pick a career in SEO.

Read: Check out Future of SEO to know more about SEO.

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37. What is mobile SEO?

Mobile SEO is all about turning your website pages into mobile responsive, which means, giving a better experience to your users no matter what device they are using to browse information from your website (whether a smartphone, tablet or PC).

Mobile SEO is only increasing and if your site is not yet optimized for mobile, you should act on as soon as possible. If you’re using WordPress, you can install WPTouch (a free plugin, which creates a mobile theme for mobile visitors to your WordPress website).

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38. What is voice search?

Voice search uses a speech recognition technology that allows anyone to search by saying terms aloud instead of typing them on Google search. It is becoming more popular with the rapid growth of smartphones.

Write like your target audience talk. In voice search, instead of focusing on keywords, focus on your audience and find out how they talk so you can use the exact same words within your content. That way, they will find your site through voice typing on Google search.

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39. What is meant by Google AdWords?

Google AdWords is run by Google itself which is simply an online advertising service where advertisers, business owners or marketers pay money to show their product listings, website ads, services etc.

It helps advertisers in the following ways;

• Increase in search traffic
• Increase in sales
• Increase in brand awareness etc

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40. What is Google AdSense?

AdSense is a publishing program which is run by Google which helps the publishers such as marketers, bloggers, website owners to earn money by showing AdSense ads from a wide range of topics.

AdSense ads include text, images, video ads and so on and they serve the publishers to earn more money from clicks.

Here’s a great guide on increasing your AdSense earnings.

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41. What is the bounce rate?

Bounce rate is the percentage of people who bounce from the same page without navigating other pages on your website. It simply means a website visitor is leaving your site without visiting any other page.

Make sure to show related pages or products under your content so you can quickly reduce your website bounce rates and it works like a charm.

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42. What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics can be considered as a website tracking platform where you can get all your website’s tracking information such as website traffic, top content, bounce rate, audience demographics, active users on your site and so on.

Make sure to sign up to Google Analytics if you’re running a website so you can easily find out your website traffic and audience behaviour which will be helpful for you to create better content and products for them in the long run.

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43. How to make money with SEO?

There are a ton of ways you can make money with SEO. Here are a few of them.

• You can offer SEO services such as running PPC campaigns, AdWords, conducting site audits, keyword research and so on
• You can become an SEO expert and help businesses to bring better results from search
• You can create an SEO agency to start offering SEO services
• You can create and sell SEO products such as tools, plugins etc
• You can become a freelancer and start creating search-engine-optimized content for your clients and agencies
• The list goes on

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44. What is Google Suggest?

Google suggest basically gives you all the relevant search results for your queries as you type on Google search box. Google suggest is also known as Google autocomplete or auto-suggestion tool which looks like this;

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45. What does it mean by AMP? 

AMP is also known as Accelerated Mobile Pages which is designed to have web pages load quickly on mobile devices to give the users a faster and better experience.

AMP pages load really quickly so Google gives top priority the website and pages which already tweaked for AMP.

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46. What is the difference between dofollow and nofollow links?

Dofollow links tell search engine crawlers to follow the links and nofollow links work the exact opposite which are not followed by Google search crawlers.

Dofollow links are what pass link juice from one website to another website and are considered as quality links which are also helpful for increasing your search engine traffic and rankings.

Nofollow links are widely used for social media links, affiliates and other product links. These links don’t contain any search value so there’s no point in spending most of your time or money on getting such links.

Read: Dofollow vs Nofollow Links: How they help with Rankings

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47. What is robots.txt?

It is a text file that can be used to tell search engines which pages of your website crawl and which pages to avoid. It basically gives you full control over how your website should be crawled by search engine bots. You don’t need to make changes to this file unless you know what you’re doing (so avoid making changes if you’re a beginner).

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48. What is 301 redirect?

301 redirects are used for permanent URL redirection. This is especially used when you delete some of unwanted pages from your website and to avoid broken link issues, you can use 301 redirects to redirect your visitors to some other working (or active) pages on your site.

You can use plugins such as Redirection (free WordPress plugin) to easily send redirecting requests to another page on your site or elsewhere on the web.

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49. What are Google SiteLinks?

These are the links that appears below the website main page in the SERP results which mainly contain some of the most popular pages of your website.

Here’s a great tutorial on getting Google SiteLinks for your site really quickly.

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50. What are LSI keywords?

LSI keywords (Latent Semantic Indexing) are those keywords that are similar to the primary keyword that you type or target.

For example, here are the LSI keywords for the keyword “good”

Fine, healthy, capable, superior etc (as you can see these are relevant to the primary keyword and also known as LSI keywords).

Here are some of the benefits of using LSI keywords.

• They increase your search traffic
• They help you better optimize your content without keyword stuffing
• They give a better reading experience to your website audience

If you’re looking to find better LSI keywords, make sure to check this out.

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51. What is a Google-rich snippet?

A Google rich snippet is an enhanced search result that provides additional information, such as ratings, prices, or event details, beyond the standard title, URL, and description. Rich snippets use structured data markup to improve visibility and click-through rates by displaying relevant content directly in search results.

In simple terms, a Google-rich snippet is the information that you get for your search queries which includes heading, meta description and/or Google SiteLinks. It looks something like this;

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Final Thoughts

As I said earlier, SEO involves in too many things from keyword research to backlink analysis to competitor research. So if you want to get ahead in SEO, make sure to learn and practice the right SEO tactics so you can bring more visitors from search engines to your sites to increase your website sales.

We hope that you find this top SEO FAQs post informative, if yes, please share it with others and leave a comment below sharing your thoughts.