What does SEO stand for?

SEO stands for search engine optimization. Let’s break that down in the context of your website.

  • Search: What people do when they want to find an answer to a question or a product or service that meets their needs.
  • Search engine: A site (like Google or Bing) where a person can perform said search.
  • Search engine optimization: What you do to get said search engine to connect said search with your site.

Search Engine Optimization – Learn to Optimize for SEO

For most of us today, when we need something—whether it’s an answer, idea, strategy, or service—we start by asking search engines. Google alone gets 3.5 billion searches per day. So just as search engines have become integral to our lives, so, too, has it become integral to many business marketing strategies. In fact, organic search is considered to be the highest ROI channel by 49% of marketers.

Organic search traffic is usually higher-quality traffic because users are actively searching for a specific topic, product or service for which a site might rank. If a user finds that site through the search engine, it can lead to better brand engagement.

How does SEO work?

Search engines such as Google and Bing use bots to crawl pages on the web, going from site to site, collecting information about those pages and putting them in an index. Think of the index like a giant library where a librarian can pull up a book (or a web page) to help you find exactly what you’re looking for at the time.

Next, algorithms analyze pages in the index, taking into account hundreds of ranking factors or signals, to determine the order pages should appear in the search results for a given query. In our library analogy, the librarian has read every single book in the library and can tell you exactly which one will have the answers to your questions

Search engines use bots to crawl all website pages, downloading and storing that information into a collection known as an index. This index is like a library and when someone searches for something in it, the search engine acts as the librarian. The search engine pulls and displays relevant information from the search query and shows users content related to what they were looking for. Search engine algorithms analyze webpages in the index to determine the order those pages should be displayed on the SERP.

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, as well as…
  • 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.

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.

The above three types of SEO are used for websites and blogs, but they also apply to three subtypes of SEO:

  • Local SEO:Getting your business to rank as high as possible in Google Maps and on the local results of the SERP. Reviews, listings, and Google Business profile optimization are most important here.
  • Image SEO: A mix of on-page and technical strategies to get images on your website pages to rank in Google image search.
  • Video SEO: A mix of on-page, technical, and off-page strategies to get your videos to rank in YouTube or Google video results.