Get started with search engine optimization (SEO)
This article describes what SEO is and how to improve the SEO of your content on Experience League.
What is search engine optimization?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of improving the quality of your content’s performance through non-paid search results (primarily on Google).
In a nutshell, SEO is about ranking in the organic search results and having users click those results to engage with your site (organic traffic). Search engine traffic accounts for more than 60% of all traffic on Experience League. You can directly affect how well your content appears in search engines by optimizing your content for SEO.
Higher search-engine ranking positions for the right keywords generally translate into higher organic traffic as well as brand awareness.
Where to start with SEO?
SEO can be daunting for both new and experienced users. Not only do you need to understand how SEO works, but Google also constantly changes its algorithms, which can drastically affect search performance.
That means that SEO isn’t something you can set and forget. It takes active management and measurement throughout the life of a piece of content.
This getting started document is not meant to be an end-to-end explanation of SEO. It provides specific recommendations for content that lives on Experience League and focuses primarily on on-page SEO although you may see some reference to off-page SEO as well.
This article is divided into three sections:
- SEO No-frills guide - This is for anyone who wants to know some of the things they can easily do. It assumes you have some basic understanding of SEO. Here are some easy changes you can make to your page that can help affect SEO in a positive way, but if you need more in-depth information including info on how SEO works, read the SEO Fundamentals section.
- SEO Fundamentals - This section provides more complete information on SERPs, how to measure success, keyword research, and how to think about optimizing your SEO (including what you need to have on your page).
- How to use AI for SEO to help with SEO tasks that are repetitive or can be streamlined.
SEO No-frills guide for authors seo-no-frills-guide
This section covers some quick actions that you can take to improve your page’s SEO. For a better understanding of SEO, including information on how to measure success, see SEO Fundamentals.
Quick and relatively easy things you can do to help SEO:
Update your title and description metadata
Metadata needed for SEO is described in detail in the Title and Description metadata article. It’s one of the easiest parts of your page to affect. (Use title case for title metadata.)
Enter your title and description into a SERP optimization tool like this SERP snippet organizer to see how your metadata would look in a SERP. You can also use a Chrome plug-in like Detailed SEO to see if the title and description meet length requirements.
Fix broken links and redirects
Broken links (and redirects) affect bounce rate, time on site/dwell rate, what Google thinks of the content, and sends signals that your content is old and outdated.
Use Linkcheck to identify broken links
Check Linkcheck: https://docs.ci.corp.adobe.com/job/LinkCheckExl/ - Errors, Warnings, Redirects Needed. This check runs hourly.
- Errors: Active 404s
- Redirects: You moved a page and it has caused other repo links to break. Request a redirect from Bob.
- Warnings: This can refer to redirect chains or it can refer to a broken link in the TOC, which causes a huge ripple effect in broken links for crawlers. (For example, a guide with 1000 pages counts a broken link in the TOC 1000 times.) This issue causes an outsize effect on the content quality index (CQI) dashboard.
Use Acrolinx to fix redirects
Redirects do make it harder for Google to find pages, which is why it’s important to update them regularly.
- Go to the appropriate page in VSC and check your page.
- Click the redirected links to allow Acrolinx to fix it.
Acrolinx also lets you know when you have broken links on a given page. Update the link on page and re-run Acrolinx check to remove that error message.
Add image alt tags to all images add-image-alt-tags
Image alt text tells Google or Bing what your image is. It can appear in image results but only if Google knows what the image is. Ideally, you add image alt tags as you author. However, if you’re updating existing content that does not have image alt tags, you have a few options:
- Update manually - This method is good for a small number of images.
- Use search/global to find and update empty image alt text - This method is good for larger number of images but it assumes that your images have meaningful names.
- Search for your image alt text in VSC.
- Replace empty items with text (ideally meaningful)
Here’s an example global search and replace for image alt items. This replaces blank image alt tags with the name of the asset.
For video, include transcripts add-transcripts
Make sure that you include video transcripts on your pages. This is the only way search engines can tell what your video is about. See the instructions for turning video transcripts on.
Link to other pages
Linking to other pages - both internal and external - is essential for SEO. Creating a page and not linking to it anywhere is called an orphan page and deteriorates SEO. Find relevant links to link your content to and from.
Internal links help search engines crawl your site more effectively and guide users to related content, improving engagement. External links to reputable sources build trust and authority, which can boost your rankings. Together, they create a better experience for both users and search engines.
Optimize your content with relevant keywords
Google uses keywords in the h1 (first header), body text, and metadata to determine intent. You can help optimize your page by including those keywords on the page.
But do not overstuff your content or metadata with keywords! Keyword frequency is not as important as intent and you could get penalized for keyword stuffing. And don’t even bother with the metadata called “keywords.” Google ignores that entirely.
Leverage AI for some tasks
AI is great at helping you create compelling titles and descriptions, can help you figure out what to improve on a page to make it rank better, and it can help with keyword research.
See How to use AI to improve SEO
SEO Fundamentals seo-101
This section covers the following:
- How to understand a search engine results page
- What a page with effective SEO looks like/what your page needs to rank better
- The difference between on-page and off-page SEO
- How to understand what Google is thinking
- How to measure your SEO efforts
- A list of SEO tools
What is on a Search Engine Results Page (SERP)?
SEO is all about organic rankings. These organic rankings are free results on a search engine results page (SERP) that you do not pay for. Ads (like Google Ads) on the other hand, are paid for and are managed completely separately from organic search results.
Ranking high on a SERP means that the search engine thinks your content is the most relevant for what the user is looking for (user intent). Rank is also important because the top spot gets the most clicks.
On a SERP, ads appear above organic search results.
Organic search results take the form of a link, but they can also take the form of any one of Google’s additional search types (called Universal Results) such as AI Overviews, Videos, Feature Snippets, or People Also Ask. These also appear above the “regular” link results.
Universal results are generally more valuable than the top “regular” link because users have various ways to get to your site as a result. But they can also have the effect of leading to zero-click results (especially AI Overviews), which are results that may mean a loss in organic traffic.
The first item on a SERP that’s not an ad or a universal result is considered page rank 1. Second item is rank 2 and so on. Most clicks occur in the first few ranked links. Only the first ten items are considered page 1.
What are search engines looking for in a page?
Google and other search engines look primarily for three direct ranking signals. Direct ranking signals are items that directly affect your Google/search engine rankings:
- Content Relevance - this includes how users interact with the page after clicking through, what keywords/entities are mentioned in the text, when the content was published or updated, and the prominence and prevalence of keywords on the page. According to Google: “The most basic signal that information is relevant is when the content contains the same keywords as your search query.”
- Content Quality - Google uses E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) as the framework to assess content quality. High E-E-A-T content is more likely to rank well in search results as Google tries to give users accurate and reliable information. E-E-A-T is not a direct ranking factor but some of the related elements like backlinks (links to your page), topical authority, readability, accuracy, credentials are ranking factors.
- Content Usability - Google looks at whether the content is safe and easy to access and interact with. This includes Core Web Vitals (think page speed), http vs https, pop-ups, and mobile friendliness. None of these are items that content creators can generally influence.
Google is always, always looking for content that matches the search intent. That means that if you search for “shoes,” it’s going to try to guess what kind of information you want. In this case, Google assumes that your search intent is to “buy shoes” even if you don’t say it because that’s what most searchers mean when they enter “shoes” as a keyword, so it returns results from shoe companies with information on buying shoes and local shoe stores.
Same thing for your Experience League content: If you have a piece of content that tells users how to, for example, create an email campaign, Google selects your content if it can determine whether your content matches the intent of the keywords the searcher uses. If it’s informing users how to create an email campaign, that’ll be the page it displays. In this case, Google selected the page for both the AI Overview and the first rank.
Technical/Off-page SEO versus Content/On-page SEO
SEO can include both technical and content SEO, which overlap in some areas.
- Content SEO is generally the SEO you as a content creator or curator can affect in terms of what you write; for example, what words you use in your content, what topics you cover, and how you write your metadata.
- Technical SEO falls into the realm of technical challenges that users face in getting to your pages - that can include everything from crawling issues or slow page speed to URL patterns that make sense to broken links. With technical SEO, some items like fixing broken links or adding image alt tags are something a content creator can fix but adding structured data so that videos show up in the Video section of a SERP is not (that’s an engineering task).
What does my page need to perform better in SEO?
While keeping Google’s principles in mind, when you create a page, make sure you have the following elements in place to perform well:
- Keywords in metadata, headings, and body - Your keywords may be obvious (for example, “segmentation”) or you may need to do research but each element on your page should be using the keywords you identified.
- Descriptive URLs - Google looks at URLs to get an idea of what a page is about and to display it in breadcrumbs. Make sure your URL uses descriptive text.
- Metadata - Your page needs to have a strong title and description in the metadata. These aren’t visible to users but are indicators to Google on what you’re page is about. These are often what Google displays in the SERP (but not always - Google decides what to display; Google is more likely to display something if it shows intent more clearly). See Title and Description authoring section for detailed guidelines on how to write SEO-friendly metadata.
- Heading 1 (and other headings) - Your page must have only one heading 1 (and there must be one h1 per page). This tag is what users see first and should be concise, descriptive, and tell users what the page is about. You can have multiple headings at other levels (they should not skip levels), but all the headings should include relevant keywords.
- An intro topic/paragraph - The section at the beginning of the document discusses what the article is about or what you’ll learn. It should not be a repeat of your description metadata - Your description is a call to action; the intro section tells users what the article is about.
- Body - The rest of your content should use numbered lists, subheadings, code blocks, as appropriate - Google looks for these especially for Universal Results like Feature Snippets or People Also Ask. Here’s an example of how a numbered list triggered a People Also Ask entry:
- Content includes a video - Rich content that includes a video ranks higher than content without a video. This is not confirmed by Google but is well known in the industry as video increases dwell time on a page. Also video content is more likely to acquire backlinks again signaling to Google that the content is valuable. If you have a video, be sure to include a transcript so Google can read the video content.
- Images and Image alt tags - Ensure that your images have image alt tags. This allows Google and screenreaders to understand what an image is about. Ideally, you’d also name your image file something meaningful.This is how Google knows what images are on your page and it can directly influence ranking.
- Linking - Link to relevant content as often as makes sense. Links add value by connecting users and Google to another resource that corroborates what you are writing about. Anchor text is descriptive, concise and relevant. Google provides the following examples of good and poor anchor text. We are lucky that our domain is considered highly authoritative so if you can link to your content internally (within Experience League) or from another internal site (business.adobe.com or experienceleaguecommunities.adobe.com) that also helps. You can do cross-linking by using Target or manually putting in links.
- Technical - Good technical SEO means your article can be easily read by Google (crawlable) and has no broken links, redirects, and includes image alt tags.
How do I know how my page is performing?
You can measure the effectiveness of your page with several metrics, including organic traffic growth, keyword rankings, and click-through rates (CTR).
Traffic
To monitor any increase in traffic to your pages, you can look at the organic traffic (Marketing Channel: Natural Search) in Adobe Analytics (company: Adobe Corp).
Pages that are increasing in organic traffic could be an indication that they are performing better. However, you will not know if your page is getting quality traffic until you look at what keywords are driving traffic and what your keyword rankings are.
Keywords and Rank
To find out what keywords a page is ranking for, you can run your URLs through an SEO tool. SEO tools (generally paid) give you additional information that you won’t get from looking at analytics such as broken links, metadata information, keywords, and so on. You can also look directly at the SERP to find out who is competing against your keyword.
Some SEO tools that you can use for free for keyword research:
- SERPs Keyword Rank Checker - tool to check your page’s keyword rankings on Google for specific keywords. (When using, be sure to select URL to only check a specific URL.)
- AnswerThePublic helps you find questions people are asking related to your keywords, which can be valuable for content creation and optimization.
- Google Trends can help with keyword research.
- Screaming Frog is free up to 500 URLs and provides information about on-page SEO issues.
- Moz Link Explorer (Free Version): Moz offers a limited free version of its backlink analysis tool. It provides insights into your site’s backlinks, domain authority, and spam score.
Click Through Rate
Click Through Rate is more challenging to see because we do not have the tooling in place. Google Search Console does provide information on Click through rates. Unfortunately, it is not accessible to authors but you can ask Alva for information about click through rates. Click through rates is only provided for the whole site and for the top 1000 URLs.
How do I fix a page’s SEO?
What happens if when users search for something, they get a page of your content and it’s not the right page? Either the content is outdated or it’s not where you want users to go? That’s when SEO strategy kicks in.
Generally, what you’ll need to do is
- Examine what pages are being served by the SERP and by which keywords.
- Determine which keywords you are targeting.
- Optimize the content that you want Google to find by updating everything under good example.
- De-optimize content that is currently appearing for those keywords. This step is just as important as optimizing as it will signal to Google which page to emphasize.
Some do’s and don’ts:
- Do not keyword stuff.
- Do not put in junk links.
- Do not try to get every page you are responsible to rank for the same keyword.
- Do wait for your changes to impact SERPs - about 1-2 months typically. Google re-crawls on a periodic basis. If you need a manual recrawl for a specific page, contact Alva.
- Do add redirects if you’re moving pages so Google can find the page.
Example SEO project
Let’s say you’re wondering how a page is doing that you launched a year ago and whether you should you make any updates. You notice that for the keyword “workfront training” your content is in position 10 for the regular web listing. You want your page to rank higher for that keyword.
You first find out how many people are searching for “workfront training” using an SEO tool. This helps you decide whether it’s worth pursuing page optimizing. Let’s say, you decide it is. Then you optimize the page - first you look at the metadata, then the headings, and text and ensure those are all optimized. Then you look for linking and see if you can link to/from this page. You also make sure there are no broken links and that all images have alt text.
After evaluating, you make your changes and watch how Google rankings and organic traffic change over time (1-2 months).
SEO tools
At Adobe, we use the following tools to measure SEO. Although these tools are not directly available to authors, you can reach out to Alva for help with your research.
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Chrome plugins - There are a number of free Chrome plugins available at the [Chrome store]
(https://chromewebstore.google.com/) that can help with your SEO:- Broken Link Checker - Checks for broken links and shows you were they are (hint: If you cannot find the link, it is either the TOC or a template issue)
- SEO Meta - Shows SEO metadata on any page
- Docs tool - Our internal tool shows all metadata but only works for SCCM pages.
- Detailed SEO
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Google Search Console - GSC provides info on how often content appears in search, which keywords we rank for, and how many pages are indexed including any issues. You can ask Alva for data from this tool.
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Lumar - Lumar is the tooling we use for in-depth technical SEO. If you have any technical questions about your pages, contact Alva. You’ll see Lumar mentioned in the CQI dashboard as several of the metrics for that dashboard come directly from Lumar. You can access monthly Lumar scores in the CQI dashboard.
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Acrolinx - Although not really an SEO tool, you can access Acrolinx to identify broken links and redirects that should be updated to a current URL. Acrolinx is actually able to tell you where your redirects should go and you can change them with a click of a button to the correct link. You can access monthly scores in the CQI dashboard
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Ahrefs and Screaming Frog - These are the tools we use to do keyword research and more technical deep dives. You can download and use Screaming Frog for free without a license for up to 500 URLs. Ahrefs requires a license although you can do preliminary research for free on their site. Reach out to Alva with any questions.
There are additional free tools you can use to access info on search trends or searching:
- Google Trends - Google Trends data reflects searches people make on Google every day. It’s useful in identifying trends.
- SERP snippet visualizer - one of several tools that shows you what your SERP entry looks like with specific title and description metadata.
How to get more help with SEO optimizations
If you want additional help with strategy around any SEO optimizations, please reach out to Alva. You can also file a jira ticket directly in project EXLSEO.
How to use AI to improve SEO
You can use AI for various writing tasks including for help with some SEO tasks. This section describes how to use AI for generating effective titles and description metadata. It also describes how to use AI for other SEO tasks like keyword research, image alt text, linking, and general items.
AI for titles and descriptions
You can use AI tools to help you generate effective title and description metadata. AI is still evolving and although it can help, you have to perform due diligence. It can still get it wrong and almost always you have to drill down with follow-up questions.
At Adobe, everyone has access to Copilot. Copilot works for this, but you can use your AI tool of choice (Acrobat, Word (if you have copilot licensed through m365, etc.))
If you use the Microsoft Edge browser and the page is already online, you can navigate to the page and open the Copilot pane and work directly in there.
Steps to follow to use AI for titles and descriptions:
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Do one of the following:
- Copy the AI prompt that is provided in Title and description prompt.
- Type your adhoc prompt into the AI tool of choice.
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Refine the answer by adding follow-up instructions or limitations.
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Check that the answers are correct and meet the requirements. Refine as necessary.
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Copy the information into your title or description.
Common mistakes made by AI tool:
- Ignoring length requirements
- Not adding the product name when it can’t identify it to the title
- Tone issues
Title and description prompt
This prompt gives the AI tool guidelines for creating effective SEO titles and descriptions for Experience League. You can use this prompt with existing content or new content.
Copy and paste the following text to your AI tool:
**Prompt:**
You are an advanced AI SEO optimization assistant. Your task is to generate an SEO-friendly title and description for web pages on experienceleague.adobe.com.
1. If provided a URL, analyze the content of the page and extract key themes, topics, and relevant keywords.
2. If provided a summary, identify the main ideas, concepts, and target audience from the summary.
3. Create a concise, engaging, and keyword-rich title (60 characters max) that accurately reflects the content of the page or summary. The title will always have | Adobe and the name of the product appended.
4. Generate a compelling meta description (160 characters max) that provides a clear overview of the page's content, encourages click-throughs, and includes relevant keywords.
5. Ensure that both the title and description adhere to SEO best practices and are tailored to attract the target audience.
**Input Format:**
- If using a URL: "URL: [insert URL here]"
- If using a summary: "Summary: [insert summary here]"
**Output Format:**
- Title: [insert generated title here]
- Description: [insert generated description here]
You may still need to make adjustments to the answers. For example, the prompt doesn’t take account of keywords needed so those may need to be added.
Adhoc prompts for titles and descriptions
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Start with a prompt like this: “Please draft a title and description for the following article - https://experienceleague.adobe.com/en/docs/integrations-learn/experience-cloud/tutorials/genstudio-for-performance-marketing-experience-manager/overview The title needs to be between 50-60 characters and the description needs to be between 150-160 characters. The description should be a call to action. The description needs to include the keyword “keyword”.”
note note NOTE Even after specifying the character requirement, you should ask AI to perform a character count of the title and description. AI frequently ignores that part of the request and returns text that is too long. -
Add follow-up instructions like:
- “Please add | Adobe Experience Manager to the title and rewrite to fit within 60 characters”
- “Include the keyword [keyword].”
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Refine as needed.
AI prompts for general authoring in Experience League
You can use AI prompts for all types of authoring tasks especially those that are repetitive. You can either add text directly into the prompt or rewrite the prompt slightly to ask it to visit a link.
As with all AI, double-check the work and ask relevant follow-up questions.
Keyword research
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“What are the top-ranking keywords for [your topic]?”
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“Suggest long-tail keywords related to [your main keyword].”
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“Provide a list of semantic keywords for [your topic].”
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“What are the most searched questions related to [your topic]?”
Meta, alt text, and linking
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“Write an engaging and SEO-optimized meta title for an article about [your topic].”
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“Create a compelling meta description under 160 characters for [your article].”
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“Suggest effective alt text for images related to [your topic].”
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“Suggest relevant internal links for an article about [your topic].”
General and Google
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“How can I improve readability and engagement for my article on [your topic]?”
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“How can I optimize my article for Google’s featured snippets on [your topic]?”
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“What are common user pain points related to [your topic]?”
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“How can I improve my article’s click-through rate (CTR) in search results?”