Search engine optimization or SEO for short, is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results. To better understand what SEO means, it is important look at all the aspects of it. First, we have quality of traffic which entails attracting people from all around the world that are genuinely intrigued by your products and or what your website has to offer. The next part is quantity of traffic, or the amount of targeted people are clicking through your pages; the more people the better. And lastly, organic results or the traffic that is not paid for, just people clicking and using your website “organically”.
When searching into the web a question or phrase on Google, Yahoo!, Bing, or really any search engine, a list of links will pop up that provides you answers or pages of your desired link. But if you have ever wondered what these links that pop up are, it is search engine optimization. How SEO plays a role in this, is from the “crawlers” that gather the information from the Internet. These “crawlers” come back with searches that are 1s and 0s to then build up your index from the search. After that, the index will go through an algorithm process that will match the data found to “answer” your inquiry.
With this knowledge about what SEO exactly is, it is now time to use it to its advantage for your website. Building an SEO-friendly site can be done by using keywords, social metrics, mentions of brands and news or media are all ways to make your website SEO-friendly. The usage of this type of content will create for more potential on the algorithm to pick up and add it into someone’s index. Other things to remember about SEO is on-site and off-site topics, as the names state on-site topics umbrellas anything that is on a website. Meanwhile off-site are links to things that aren’t on the Internet. It is crucial to use both, as this will only make for better overall SEO content. Linking related topics to your website, gives more opportunities for your website to have optimal SEO success.
Now with understanding what SEO is and some of the basic’s ins and outs of how one should use it, you could dive in further on some more advanced topics. Keep in mind that your traffic will have the most successful rate if using SEO to your advantage. Using local SEO and international SEO are more advanced routes that can make your SEO usage even more specific.