SEO in the wild

As the last blog post for this semester I decided to go a little all-out and look at as many SEO functions and features as I could. In order to do so I searched up a simple search term and tried to find as many SEO related content and techniques within the results.

the search term I chose was “Rat”, and here is a screenshot of the SERP for that search phrase in DuckDuckGo (no, I don’t use Google, sue me)

to start, there is a paid search result for Rodents – Find Rodent Control Pros – Top-Rated Service Pros which shows us an example of an SEO Title Tag, custom Meta Description and Sitelinks. However none of these contain the key search term

This is followed by a rich snippet from a Wikipedia page that contains text and an image. right after this is the Organic search result for the same page.

After this is a short rich card from the DuckDuckGo images search engine, which shows a couple of the top image results for the same search.

after a few more search results of an encyclopedia and a nature blog, we see more rich results showing recent news articles related to the search.

from here on all the SERP gives us is more normal pages. so lets move on to looking at some of the top results.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat is the first organic search result we get. On this page we see a very good example of organized structure and internal links. because the page is an encyclopedia, it contains mostly text content with a few images, all of which contain alt text

this page also contains nearly 100 links to external sites in its reference list.

so these were a couple of SEO techniques easily found in the wild. Its really easy to see this kind of thing hiding in plain sight, try it yourself sometime, you may be inspired by what you see for your own site, (or just go down a rabbit hole of cute rat pictures like I did)