SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It’s a process that takes place on the web by which organic results appear higher on search engines’ results pages (SERPs).
The goal of SEO is to improve your company’s visibility on Google, Yahoo, and Bing in search results. This means getting more people to click on your website or app, so they can see it and find out more about it.
In this article, we’ll discuss the simple explanation of what is SEO, how it works, and what you can do to improve your website’s performance in search engines like Google.
Table of Contents
What is SEO?
SEO is a process of making your website visible and “search engine friendly” which leads to more traffic, more conversions, and more sales.
The essence of SEO is to make your website as easy as possible for search engines to index. This means that your site has to be structured in such a way that keywords can be easily found and linked up with other pages on the site.
The main thing you need to do to improve your SEO score is to make sure that all of your content is relevant and useful for the target audience. In other words, if you want people to find your site when they search for something, then make sure that it’s relevant to what they’re looking for!
Types of SEO
There are two main types of SEO: on-page SEO expert and off-page. On-page refers to how well you’re structuring your content; off-page refers to how well you’re linking between different pages on your site (i.e., internal linking).
SEO Helps to Improve the Visibility of Websites
SEO, or search engine optimization, is the process of increasing the visibility of your website to search engines. Search engines are the gatekeepers through which people find websites on their own and decide whether they want to visit that site or not.
Google is by far the most popular search engine in the world. Google takes over 90% of all searches on the Internet, and at any given moment it has over 2 billion unique users looking for information.
The first step in SEO is to build a solid foundation for your content by writing articles that are relevant to your niche and well-written. This will have a positive impact on how well your page ranks in search results pages (SERPs).
SEO is About Writing Good Content
SEO is a complex process that involves a lot of different factors. But it’s also not just about writing good content. It’s about creating content that is highly optimized for the search engines and getting it in front of the right people.
SEO is about writing for your audience and not just for yourself. You want to write content that is relevant to your audience, so you need to know who they are, what they do, and why they care about what you have to say.
If you don’t know who your customers are or why they care about what you have to say, then there isn’t much point in writing content for them. You can write great copy without knowing anything about your customers’ needs or desires, but at some point, you’ll need to start talking directly with them if you want to get results from your efforts.
- Quality of organic traffic: how relevant the user and their search query are to the content that exists on your website. You can attract all the visitors in the world, but if they’re coming to your site because Google tells them you’re a resource for Apple computers when really you’re a farmer selling apples, those visitors are likely to leave your site without completing any conversions. High-quality traffic includes only visitors who are genuinely interested in the products, information, or other resources your site offers. High-quality SEO capitalizes on the search engine’s effort to match a user’s search intent to the web pages listed in the SERP.
- Quantity of organic traffic: the number of users who reach your site via organic search results. Users are far more likely to click on search results that appear near the top of the SERP, which is why it’s important to use your SEO strategy to rank relevant pages as highly as you can. The more high-quality visitors you attract to your site, the more likely you are to see an increase in valuable conversions.
If you are an agency or in-house SEO looking for resources to educate your clients or company stakeholders about search marketing, we suggest making a copy of, personalizing, and sharing this presentation on the basics and value of SEO.
How does SEO work?
Search engines like Google and Bing use crawlers, sometimes also called bots or spiders, to gather information about all the content they can find on the internet. The crawler starts from a known web page and follows internal links to pages within that site as well as external links to pages on other sites. The content on those pages, plus the context of the links it followed, help the crawler understand what each page is about and how it’s semantically connected to all of the other pages within the search engine’s massive database, called an index.
When a user types or speaks a query into the search box, the search engine uses complex algorithms to pull out what it believes to be the most accurate and useful list of results for that query. These organic results can include web pages full of text, news articles, images, videos, local business listings, and other more niche types of content.
There are a lot of factors that go into the search engines’ algorithms, and those factors are evolving all the time to keep up with changing user behavior and advances in machine learning.
SEOs use their understanding of these ranking factors to develop and implement search marketing strategies that include a balance of on-page, off-page, and technical best practices. An organization that hopes to earn and maintain high SERP rankings and, as a result, lots of high-quality user traffic, should employ a strategy that prioritizes user experience, employs non-manipulative ranking tactics, and evolves alongside search engines’ and users’ changing behaviors.