What is SEO?
SEO is an acronym that stands for Search Engine Optimisation and it is the practice used by digital marketers to increase the quantity and quality of traffic that a website receives through organic search results.
What Goes Into SEO?
SEO is easier to understand if you break it down into the three main things that it is focused on:
– The quality of website traffic. Of course, you can attract all the website visitors you want in the world but if they haven’t arrived at your website with the correct intent, they are practically worthless. You want to attract visitors to your website that are genuinely interested in the products that you are offering them.
– The quantity of website traffic. Once you get the correct kind of people coming to your website, you need to find a way to increase the amount of traffic that is flowing to your website.
– Organic results. In search results you will notice that ads make up a significant amount of space on your screen, however, organic traffic is that which isn’t paid for (i.e. the results below the ads).
How SEO Works
It’s easy to think that search engines operate on magic, returning a long list of websites of the question you type in the box – whether that be Google, Yahoo, Bing or any other search engine of your choice. This is kind of true, but have you ever stopped to think about what goes on behind the magic of these search engines.
So, let’s take a look at how it works…
Google (for example, but any other search is the same) has “spiders” that crawl through the internet and find information about all the content that is available on the internet. This information is returned to the search engines and it builds an index out of it. This index is fed through the algorithm it uses to sort the information and is then received by you when you search for something you need to find out more about.
There are a couple of hundred ranking factors but they can be organised into several distinct groups that are ranked by their importance below:
Credit: Moz
That’s about all that makes up the SE (search engine) of SEO.
Of course, the O in SEO stands for optimisation which is the reason for people writing lots of content for their website or improving their existing content so that search engines can better understand what is about and the users who arrive on your site through their search results.
The process of optimisation can take on many forms and it includes everything from titles tags to meta descriptions that are both informative and create perfect links to the pages that have been created.
