What is SEO?

SEO stands for "search engine optimization." In simple terms, it's a set of practices designed to increase the visibility of your web pages when people search for products or services related to your business in any search engine. The better the result of your web pages in organic search, the more likely you are to garner attention and attract customers to your products.

Why Is SEO Important?

Since most businesses rely on the internet for their business growth, knowing what SEO is, has become more important due to the competition in the market space.

Today, millions of people use internet searches to find answers to their questions, solutions to their problems, and products and services for their needs.

SEO can help put your website higher on the search engine result page (SERP). If your page appears on the top 5 suggestions to a user query or search, the majority of users are more likely to click on your link which will, in turn, bring traffic to your website.

How Does SEO Works?

Search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc use crawlers sometimes called robots or spiders, to scan the internet collecting information about every site moving from page to page and putting them in an index.

This crawler scans the entirety of the webpage including every link both the ones which link to other pages within the site and the ones that link to external pages. The content of this web page and the linked pages help the crawler understand what the page is about.

When a user sends a query, the search uses a complex algorithm to determine what it believes to be the best result for the query and the order the pages should be in the list. These organic results could be anything from videos, images, text, just any niche pertaining to the query.

There are a lot of factors that go into the search engines’ algorithms, and these factors keep evolving all the time to be up to date with constantly changing user behavior and advances in machine learning. The 3 major factors that affect SEO are:

1. Technical SEO

Technical SEO refers to the aspects of a website that can be optimized to help search engines to find, crawl, and index all the web pages of your website without issues. The most important tasks of Technical SEO are:

• XML Sitemap Optimization

• URL Canonicalization

• Improving your web page loading speed for both mobile and desktop

• Finding and fixing crawl errors

2. On-Page SEO

Onpage SEO is the aspect of the website that can be optimized to help search engines understand the context of your web pages.  The most important tasks of On-page SEO are:

• Web page title optimization

• Sub-heading optimization

• Image Name and ALT Tags optimization>

3. Off-Page SEO

Unlike the 2 aforementioned SEOs, Off-Page SEO has to do with activities outside your website. This has to do with backlink building or website promotion on the internet. The most important tasks of Off-Page SEO are:

• Trust

• Social signals

• Referrals

Below is a diagram of how google algorithms rank web pages:

SEO expert uses their understanding of these ranking factors to develop and implement search engine marketing strategies that include a balance of Technical SEO, On-page SEO, and Off-page SEO best practices. Any business that hopes to maintain high SERP rankings will have to employ a strategy that prioritizes creating good content, great user experience, must not use manipulative ranking tactics, and evolves alongside search engines’ and users’ changing behaviors.

If you want to learn more, my article on How To Become An SEO Expert will help you greatly.

I hope this guide helped you understand what SEO is:

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