What Is SEO – Search Engine Optimization

What is SEO and how exactly does it help you to achieve your goals?

Many people know that SEO is important for the success of their business but don’t know what it actually is. Search engine optimization, or SEO, is a process that improves the visibility of a website on search engines and social media platforms. For example, if you want more people to visit your blog, then your blog needs to be optimized for search engines so that it ranks higher in the search engine results pages (SERPS) and increases in traffic.

The goal of any website should always be to get more traffic. You can only get this by investing in your site’s SEO. This article will teach you how to start optimizing your site for success.

What Does “SEO” Stand For?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization.

SEO means the process of improving your website to increase its visibility in Google, Microsoft Bing, and other search engines whenever people search for:

• Products you sell.
• Services you provide.
• Information on topics in which you have deep expertise and/or experience.

The better visibility your pages have in search results, the more likely you are to be found and clicked on. Ultimately, the goal of search engine optimization is to help attract website visitors who will become customers, clients or an audience that keeps coming back.

Benefits & importance of SEO

People are searching for any manner of things both loosely and directly related to your business. These are all opportunities to connect with these people, answer their questions, solve their problems, and become a trusted resource for them.

• More website traffic: When your site is optimized for search engines, it gets more traffic which equates to increased brand awareness.
• More customers: To get your site optimized, it has to target keywords. The terms your ideal customers/visitors are searching—meaning you’ll get more relevant traffic.
• Better reputation: Ranking higher on Google builds instant credibility for your business. If Google trusts you, then people trust you.
• Higher ROI: You put money into your website, and into the marketing campaigns that lead back to your website pages. A top-performing site improves the fruits of those campaigns, making your investment worth it.
• Important for social promotion of a website: if a website appears in top results of a search engine such as Google, Bing, etc. then it gains instant popularity and to some extent trust of a user.
• It plays an important role in improving the business of a commercial site: if two websites are selling the same product, for example, both Myntra and Koovs focus on selling fashion clothing, then the site having a better position in the search result of a search engine has chances of getting more users as compared to the other.
• Improving user experience: SEO doesn’t focus only on improving search results but also on improving the user experience and usability of a website so that a website is more appealing to a user.

Types of SEO

Google and other search engines take several factors into account when ranking content, and as such SEO has many facets. The core three types of SEO are on-page, off-page, and technical SEO:

• On-page SEO: Optimizing the quality and structure of the content on a page. Content quality, keywords, and HTML tags are the key players for on-page SEO.
• Off-page SEO: Getting other sites, and other pages on your site to link to the page you are trying to optimize. Backlinks, internal linking, and reputation are your off-page MVPs.
• Technical SEO: Improving your site’s overall performance on search engines. Site security, UX, and structure are key here.

You maintain 100% control over on page SEO and technical SEO. That’s not always true with off-site (you can’t control links from other sites or if platforms you rely on end up shutting down or making a major change), but those activities are still a key part of this SEO trinity of success. 

Imagine SEO as a sports team. You need both a strong offense and defense to win – and you need fans (a.k.a., an audience). Think of technical optimization as your defense, content optimization as your offense, and off-site optimization as ways to attract, engage and retain a loyal fanbase.

On-page SEO

In SEO, your content needs to be optimized for two primary audiences: people and search engines. What this means is that you optimize the content your audience will see (what’s actually on the page) as well as what search engines will see (the code).

The goal, always, is to publish helpful, high-quality content. You can do this through a combination of understanding your audience’s wants and needs, data and guidance provided by Google.

When optimizing content for people, you should make sure it:

• Covers relevant topics with which you have experience or expertise.
• Includes keywords people would use to find the content.
• Is unique or original.
• Is well-written and free of grammatical and spelling errors.
• Is up to date, containing accurate information.
• Includes multimedia (e.g., images, videos).
• Is better than your SERP competitors.
• Is readable – structured to make it easy for people to understand the information you’re sharing (think: subheadings, paragraph length, use bolding/italics, ordered/unordered lists, reading level, etc.).

For search engines, some key content elements to optimize for are:

• Title tags
• Meta description
• Header tags (H1-H6)
• Image alt text
• Open graph and Twitter Cards metadata

Off-page SEO

There are several activities that may not be “SEO” in the strictest sense, but nonetheless can align with and help contribute indirectly to SEO success.

Link building (the process of acquiring links to a website) is the activity most associated with off-site SEO. There can be great benefits (e.g., rankings, traffic) from getting a diverse number of links pointing at your website from relevant, authoritative, trusted websites. Link quality beats link quantity – and a large quantity of quality links is the goal.

And how do you get those links? There are a variety of website promotion methods that synergize with SEO efforts. These include:

• Brand building and brand marketing: Techniques designed to boost recognition and reputation.
• PR: Public relations techniques designed to earn editorially-given links.
• Content marketing: Some popular forms include creating videos, ebooks, research studies, podcasts (or being a guest on other podcasts) and guest posting (or guest blogging).
• Social media marketing and optimization: Claim your brand’s handle on any and all relevant platforms, optimize it fully and share relevant content. 
• Listing management: Claiming, verifying and optimizing the information on any platforms where information about your company or website may be listed and found by searchers (e.g., directories, review sites, wikis).
• Ratings and reviews: Getting them, monitoring them and responding to them.

Generally, when talking about off-site, you’re talking about activities that are not going to directly impact your ability to rank from a purely technical standpoint. 

However, again, everything your brand does matters. You want your brand to be found anywhere people may search for you. As such, some people have tried to rebrand “search engine optimization” to actually mean “search experience optimization” or “search everywhere optimization.”

Technical SEO

Optimizing the technical elements of a website is crucial and fundamental for SEO success. 

It all starts with architecture – creating a website that can be crawled and indexed by search engines. Google’s trends analyst, once put it in a Reddit AMA: “MAKE THAT DAMN SITE CRAWLABLE.” 

You want to make it easy for search engines to discover and access all of the content on your pages (i.e., text, images, videos). What technical elements matter here: URL structure, navigation, internal linking, and more.

Experience is also a critical element of technical optimization. Search engines stress the importance of pages that load quickly and provide a good user experience. Elements such as Core Web Vitals, mobile-friendliness and usability, HTTPS, and avoiding intrusive interstitials all matter in technical SEO. 

Another area of technical optimization is structured data (a.k.a., schema). Adding this code to your website can help search engines better understand your content and enhance your appearance in the search results. 

Plus, web hosting services, CMS (content management system) and site security all play a role in SEO. 

How does SEO work?

So how does Google determine which pages to surface in the search engine results page (SERP) for any given query? How does this translate into traffic to your website? Let’s take a look at how SEO works.

• Google’s search crawlers constantly scan the web, gathering, categorizing, and storing the billions of web pages out there in its index. When you search for something and Google pulls up results, it’s pulling from its index, not the web itself.
• Google uses a complex formula (called an algorithm) to order results based on a number of criteria (ranking factors—which we’ll get into next) including the quality of the content, its relevance to the search query, the website (domain) it belongs to, and more.
• How people interact with results then further indicates to Google the needs that each page is (or isn’t) satisfying, which also gets factored into the algorithm.

In other words, SEO works like a complex feedback system—to surface the most accurate, trustworthy, and relevant results for any given search using input from you, Google, and searchers. Your role is to produce content that satisfies Google’s expertise, authority, and trust requirements that satisfy its searchers’ requirements.

SEO is ongoing

SEO never ends. Search engines, user behavior and your competitors are always changing. Websites change and move (and break) over time. Content gets stale. Your processes should improve and become more efficient.

Bottom line: There’s always something you can be monitoring, testing or improving. Or, as Bruce Clay put it: SEO will only be done when Google stops changing things and all your competition dies.

Conclusion

A good understanding of search engine optimization can help your business rank higher on search engine results pages and drive more traffic to your website. Read on to find out the basics of SEO and how you can use it to your advantage.