Search Engine Optimization
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results. Organic traffic is any traffic that you don’t have to pay for, as opposed to paid traffic, which comes from advertisements. SEO involves making changes to your website design and content that make your site more attractive to a search engine. You do this in hopes that the search engine will display your website as a top result on the search engine results page. Though SEO can get quite complex due to the numerous factors that impact your ranking, the basic process is not as difficult to understand.
SEO consists of multiple strategies, actions, and best practices, all of which have the end goal of improving your website’s position in search engines—which is why it’s called “search engine optimization. SEO is divided into two main categories:
Off-page SEO and On-page SEO
On-page SEO refers to anything you can do on your website to improve rankings. This includes things like:
Keyword optimization: Using relevant and correctly placed keywords within your content.
Content creation: Publishing high-quality content that is directly relevant to your audience.
Optimizing tags: Writing effective title tags, meta descriptions, and heading tags. Improving site architecture: Ensuring your website is structured in a way that search engines understand.
Page performance: Improving loading times and interactive elements.
SEO Off-page
Off-page SEO relates to activities done outside of your website to impact your rankings within search engine results pages.
It largely revolves around Link building.
Getting high-quality backlinks from other sites to yours.
Social signals: Having your site content shared on social media.
Trustworthiness: Establishing your site as a reliable and authoritative source through other site endorsements.
SEO also involves ensuring that your website has a level of expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-A-T), which are factors Google uses to determine the quality of a site.
Additionally, there is:
Technical SEO: This area focuses on the backend aspects of your website to see how well search engines can crawl and index your website. It includes things like:
Secure sockets layer (SSL)
Sitemaps
Proper use of robots.txt
Fast loading speeds
Understanding your audience and what they want to find when they make a query is key to successful SEO. It’s not just about getting more traffic to your site, but about attracting the right kind of traffic — the kind of visitors who are likely to convert into customers or repeat visitors.
SEO practices keep changing as search engine algorithms evolve to give users the most relevant results. For instance, Google makes thousands of changes to its algorithms every year. This means SEO tactics must also evolve to keep pace with technological changes and new strategies.