What is SEO and how does it work?

Search engine optimization is important for the success of any online business. Every webmaster should understand what SEO is, how it works and the traffic potential it can generate for all website types.

What is SEO?

SEO stands for Search engine optimization. It is a set of rules for optimizing your website so that it can achieve higher rankings in search engines’ organic results. It’s the process to follow to increase the visibility of your website in search engines and get more traffic.

SEO has two main goals. The first is to help you understand what users are searching for online so that you can create high-quality content to satisfy their intent. The second is to help you create a website that search engines can find, index, and understand its content.

In addition, following good SEO practices is a great way to increase the quality of a website by making it user-friendly, faster, and easier to navigate.

The most important SEO tasks have to do with:

• Identifying what users are searching for that is related to your products and services
• Creating content that will make users happy
• Providing the right signals to search engine crawlers and algorithms through various SEO techniques

SEO can be considered as a complete framework since the whole process has a number of rules (or guidelines), a number of stages, and a set of controls.

Why is SEO important?

In today’s competitive market, SEO marketing is more important than ever.

Search engines serve millions of users per day looking for answers to their questions or for solutions to their problems.

If you have a website, blog, or online store, SEO can help you get free targeted traffic from search engines.

SEO is important because:

• The majority of search engine users (more than 70%  – see graph below) are more likely to click on one of the top 5 suggestions in the search engine results pages (SERPS). To take advantage of this and gain visitors to your website or customers to your online store, your website needs to appear in one of the top positions.
• SEO is not only about search engines but good SEO practices improve the user experience and usability of a website.
• Users trust search engines and having a presence in the top positions for the keywords the user is searching, increases the website’s trust.
• SEO is good for the social promotion of your web site. People who find your website by searching Google or Bing are more likely to promote it on Facebook, Twitter, or other social media channels.
• SEO is important for the smooth running of a big web site. Websites with more than one author can benefit from SEO in a direct and indirect way. Their direct benefit is an increase in organic traffic and their indirect benefit is having a common framework (checklists) to use before publishing content on the site.
• SEO can put you ahead of the competition. If two websites are selling the same thing, the search engine optimized website is more likely to have more customers and make more sales.

An introduction to SEO for beginners

For beginners to SEO the above definition may sound complicated.

In simpler terms, Search Engine Optimization is a way to improve your website so that it will appear closer to the top positions in the search results of Google, Yahoo, Bing, or other search engines.

When you perform a search on Google the order by which the returning results are displayed, is based on complex algorithms.

These algorithms (also known as search engine ranking factors) take into account a number of rules before they decide which web page will be shown in the first position, second position, etc.

Optimizing your website for search engines will give you an advantage over non-optimized sites and you increase your chances of ranking higher.

What are the main stages of the Search Engine Optimization process?

As I mentioned above, SEO is not a static process but rather a framework with rules and processes.

For simplicity though, SEO can be broken down into 3 main types:

SEO Overview

Technical SEO: With technical SEO you can ensure that search engines can crawl and index your website without any issues.

On-site SEO: Rules to apply on your site and content to make it search engine friendly.

Off-site SEO: Ways to promote your website or blog so that it can rank higher in search results.

Technical SEO

The first stage in the SEO process is called technical SEO. As the name implies, technical SEO has nothing to do with the actual content of a website or with website promotion methods.

It has to do with settings you need to configure to make the job of search engine crawlers easier. Usually, once you get your technical SEO correct, you may not have to deal with it again.

On the other hand, if you have problems with crawling and indexing, it can negatively impact your rankings.

On-site SEO

On-Page SEO Techniques

The second stage is On-Page SEO. On-Page SEO has to do primarily with the content and other elements found on a page.

Unlike technical and off-page SEO, the main focus of on-page SEO is to provide search engine crawlers enough signals so that they can understand the meaning and context of your content.

Remember that search engines don’t read a page like a human so they are looking for signals to figure out what a page is all about.

It is at this stage that you will deal with website structure, SEO keywords, title optimizations, headings, internal links, image SEO, structured data markup, and other techniques that can send the right signals to search engines.

If followed correctly, on-page SEO will also improve the usability and credibility of a website or blog.

Note that content optimization is part of on-page SEO but sometimes this is referred to as Content SEO.

Off-site SEO

The third stage is Off-Page SEO.

Besides the changes, you can do to your website (on-site SEO) so that it ranks higher in the SERPs, the other way to improve your website’s ranking position is by using off-site SEO techniques.

Offsite SEO is commonly known as link building, but I prefer to use the term website promotion because a good way to promote a website involves many more methods and techniques than link building.

Why is off-page SEO important?

In general, when a user types a search query, search engine algorithms look into their index and try to find the best pages that can satisfy the intent of the user.

Pages that are good candidates appear in the first positions of the search results.

One of the factors to determine the position of a webpage in the results is the number of incoming links (backlinks).

Backlinks are a signal of trust and depending on where the links are coming, they can greatly affect your ranking position.

If the links are coming from well-known and trusted sites, your ranking will be positively affected.

If they are paid links, links in article directories, link farms, or a result of an exchange, your ranking will be negatively affected.

Getting links this way is a violation of Google guidelines and most probably it will also result in a Google Penalty.

What can you do to get more links?

That’s a very good question and I am sure that if you search the Internet for that phrase you will get hundreds of different answers.

You can read this article on how to approach link building but your primary focus is not how to get links but how to create good quality content for your website.

Good content will get you natural links which in turn will give you high rankings and traffic.

If you try to buy links or get them the easy way, you may have temporary success and then see your website disappearing from the top pages after the next Google update.

What is the best way to learn how SEO Works?

The best way to learn how SEO works is to practice SEO.

Besides learning the different concepts and theories, the only way to find out if what you’ve learned works, is to apply the various SEO techniques on a website and monitor your rankings.

If your rankings and organic traffic are increasing, then this means that you are in the right direction. If not, you will have to revise your SEO strategy and action plan.

What is the difference between SEO and Digital marketing?

Some people often ask me “Is SEO the same as Digital Marketing?” The simplest answer I can give is that SEO is one of the tools available in your Digital Marketing arsenal.

SEO can be part of your overall Digital Marketing campaign which normally includes other things like social media promotion, PPC, content strategy, etc.

Good content is still the most important success factor with or without SEO

Before closing this introduction to search engine optimization you must be very clear in your mind that SEO cannot help you if you don’t have good content.

In other words, if you try to SEO a website with not very good content your chances of succeeding (in the long term) are minimal.

On the other hand, a website with good content can do well with or without SEO. SEO will just give the website an extra boost.

Setting SEO objectives

Setting SEO objectives is a vital part of any SEO strategy. It is important to set SEO objectives – and to align them with your overall business objectives – because:

• They encourage buy-in from key stakeholders.
• They help you to formulate your SEO strategy.
• They ensure goals are met.

What should you measure?

While it can feel like a laborious task to set objectives, measuring them can really help you make progress with your SEO in the long term. So what types of things should you measure?

Consider measuring:

• Keywords
• Traffic
• Market share
• Brand awareness
• Lead generation
• Reputation
• E-commerce

Examples of SEO objectives

Here are three examples of SEO objectives that can be used as a guide to setting relevant objectives for your own business or website:

“Move 50% of our top 20 keywords onto the first page of Google within nine months.” This objective focuses on keyword ranking.

“Improve our year-on-year organic traffic by 20% in quarter three and 25% in quarter four.” This objective focuses on increasing organic website traffic.

“Grow our SEO market share from 3% to 5% in the next financial year.” This objective focuses on growing market share.

Setting objectives for different types of businesses

The focus of your objectives will vary depending on whether your business is transactional or informational.

If your business is transactional and you have an e-commerce element, you’ll want to set your objectives around tracking sales and lead conversions. However, if you’re a non-ecommerce commercial site, you’ll want to focus on lead generation.

If your business is informational, you are more likely to set objectives focusing on brand awareness or website traffic.

Finally, remember, even when you have fully implemented your SEO strategy, SEO is never finished. With SEO, you may need to change tactics midway through, play a long game, and wait to see the end results. But with a solid SEO foundation in place – and a little patience – the benefits of your SEO strategy should become apparent, leading to a better user experience for customers and more conversions for your business.