What is SEO and How it Works?
This guide will enable you to understand what SEO is and how it works. Those things might seem basic to some people, but there are still lots of people out there who aren’t sure about the inner workings of SEO and what it’s all about. That’s understandable, but it’s a situation that you should aim to change. And that’s what we’re going to help you and your business with today.
SEO has an impact on just about every website out there. There’s no way to escape its importance or to skirt around its impact. Whether you like it or not, your website will perform better and so will your online business if you run one, if you get your approach to SEO right.
What is SEO?
So, first of all, let’s start with the most important question: what is SEO? SEO stands for search engine optimization, and that’s the process of making your website optimized in a way that allows it to achieve the best possible traffic numbers coming from search engine results pages. In particular, this traffic will predominantly come from Google.
SEO might involve making changes to the design of your website or to the content of it. The best approach will cover both of those bases because they both have an impact on the outcomes your website experiences. The ultimate aim of the SEO game is to have your website or one of its page displays as a top result on search engine results pages for relevant keyword search terms.
There’s a lot that goes into making that happen and it can all get pretty complicated pretty quickly, but at its heart, SEO is not all that challenging to get your head around. You need to view things from the point of view of the search engine algorithm. People running search engines want their users to be satisfied with the results they present to them; that’s their priority. You need to make your website a high-quality option so the algorithm selects it as one that it’s happy to present to search engine users.
Search engines scan your website and make judgements based on what they find there. But when it comes to getting particular content or pages ranked high on search engine results pages, you need to think about on-page SEO, which we’ll talk about later. At its core, it’s about making sure that if you have a page about, for example, how to clean the interior of a car, people find that page when they search for “how to clean inside my car” or something similar.
SEO Benefits
There are lots of very important benefits associated with taking the right approach to SEO. As we mentioned above, it’s important than websites have visitors because that’s what they’re aiming for. With the best possible SEO strategy in place, you will not only get more traffic on your website, but it’ll be the right kind of traffic too.
It’ll be targeted traffic, meaning they’ll be more likely to stick around and explore your website. Traffic is only useful if it’s the right traffic. Otherwise, people will arrive on your website, take one look at it and then immediately disappear and that’s obviously not what you want. It’ll also be organic traffic.
How Does it Work?
So, now you know what SEO is, why it matters and how your website will benefit from it, it’s time to talk a bit about how it works and some of the most important SEO factors you should know about and understand. Each of these factors will have an impact on your SEO outcomes, so read on to learn more.
On-Page SEO
On-Page SEO factors refer to all the things that happen on your actual website that impact SEO. For example, title tags are important because they essentially tell search engines what’s on your website and what it’s about. It should be short and contain vital information and keywords.
You’ll also need to think about meta descriptions. These provide more details about what your web page is about and human visitors will be able to read it before clicking too. Search engines also understand your content better when you use subheadings. Alt tags, image names and internal links are all vital too.
Off-Page SEO
Off-page SEO refers to the factors that impact your SEO success that take place away from your website. Things like people linking to your content have an impact, as do the overall trustworthiness of your site in the eyes of Google and other search engines.
Social media matters a lot too. If people who are considered influencers provide high-quality links to your content or they share it on their platforms, this will help your SEO massively.
Great Content
Content matters because it helps to attract the search engines. Search engines want to present information that they feel is relevant to searchers. So, having good content out there for people to find will provide a great entry point to your website for first-time visitors.
Search engines will rank your website as a whole higher when it has relevant content on it as well. If you have engaging posts that other websites link to, it’ll give your site greater authority and it’ll be judged more favourably by the search engine algorithms.
Black Hat vs White Hat SEO
You should also know that there are two key approaches when it comes to SEO. The first is black hat SEO, which is about optimizing youend-users for search engines and often involves breaking rules and not really taking into account the end users. The other is white hat SEO, which is more about optimizing your website for the search engines in a more natural and organic way, which is better in the long-term.
Now that you understand more about what SEO is and how it works, you can start applying these principles to your website. Doing so will help you benefit from the things we’ve discussed above and, as a result, your website will be in a much healthier position going forward.
