What Is SEO?
If you have a website or blog, you have probably encountered the term “SEO” more than once. What does it stand for and why does it matter? Below, we’ll explain what SEO is and how to best approach SEO on your website.
What Is SEO?
You see the term everywhere. Did you ever wonder what it stands for? Simply put SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is a practice of optimizing each page of your web site to make them reach a high position in the search results of Google and similar search engines. The key focus of SEO is on improving rankings in the organic search results (aka non-paid search results). If you want to increase the quality and quantity of traffic to your site, SEO should be a part of your marketing efforts. To understand SEO, you first have to understand how search engines work.
How Do Search Engines Work?
Think of a search engine as a giant digital library. Rather than storing rows upon rows of books, a search engine stores copies of web pages. When you type a question or query into a search engine such as Google, it looks through all of the pages in its library index to return the most pertinent results.
To do this rapidly and efficiently, a search engine uses a computer program known as an algorithm. Google is quite mum about how its algorithm works. However, they have explained that they look at many factors, including, specific keywords in a query, relevance of pages, usability of pages, proficiency of sources, and your exact location. The value applied to each factor depends on the nature of your search.
How Does SEO Work?
SEO works by demonstrating to search engines that your site content is the best result for whatever topic is being searched. Every search engine has the same goal: to show the best and most relevant results to users. How you cater to SEO depends on the search engine you’re looking to optimize for.
For example, if you’re seeking organic traffic (non-paid) to your site, then you’ll want to cater your content to Google’s algorithm. If you crave more hits on a YouTube video, you’ll need to cater to the YouTubes algorithm.
For our purposes, we’re going to focus on ranking with the top dog of search engines: Google.
Using SEO For Google
Part of understanding SEO is knowing how to rank on Google. Right now, Google has more than 200 unique ranking factors. No one is certain what all of the ranking factors are, but we do know some of them. First, it is important to keep one thing in mind: Google ranks web pages, not web sites.
Let’s say your site centers around a business that makes customized dog collars. That doesn’t mean every page on your website should rank for the search, “customized dog collars.” Instead, you want to rank for different keywords and topics for different pages.
Crawlability
Before Google can rank your content, it needs to be able to find your content. The primary way in which Google finds content on the web is through crawling. Crawling is where Google follows links on pages they already know about to those they haven’t visited before. To do this, they use a program called a spider.
For example, let’s say that the landing pages on your site have a link from a website that has previously been recorded on Google. The next time they crawl that page, they’ll follow that backlink to unearth your site’s homepage and compute it into their index.
From there, they’ll crawl the additional links on your page to find other relevant pages on your site.
Keep in mind, there are a few things that can block the Google crawlers:
- Poor Internal Linking
- No followed internal links
- No-index pages
- Blocks in robots.txt
Each of these things can stop Google from indexing your pages, thus preventing you from getting search engine traffic.
Learning The Basics of SEO
Now that you know a bit about how both search engines and SEO work you’ll want to learn the basics of SEO. If you’re new to the topic, you’ll need to start at the beginning and build from there. Let’s break down the basics of learning SEO.
Creating an SEO-Friendly Web Page
Remember, Google ranks web pages not web sites. Once you’re ready to optimize your site, you’ll need to learn the SEO techniques necessary for creating an SEO friendly web page that can be found on Google search. We’ll provide all of the information you need to get started, including choosing an SEO-friendly domain name and best practices with internal links.
Making SEO-Friendly Content
A page doesn’t mean much without great content. SEO requires that your content has many specific variables. If you’re interested in learning about how to use keywords, writing SEO-friendly copy, or the kind of markup that can help search engines understand your content, there are resources available to help you understand the basics of creating SEO friendly content. Start by getting to know how SEO works and go from there.
Learn About Link-Related Topics
As mentioned above, poor internal linking can be a great hindrance to your site. Using SEO means learning about link-related topics. Dive into everything from anchor text to redirection. Know when to use nofollow and whether link building can actually help for your particular site. You don’t have to become an SEO expert, but it helps to know a bit about link-related topics.
Using SEO to Your Advantage
SEO can seem intimidating at first, but knowing how search engines work and the attributes they’re looking for can help you to create content that ranks. With that said, search engine algorithms do change often, stay up to date on where SEO stands and go from there.