Seo what is it

What Is SEO?

SEO stands for search engine optimization, which is a set of practices designed to improve the appearance and positioning of web pages in organic search results. Because organic search is the most prominent way for people to discover and access online content, a good SEO strategy is essential for improving the quality and quantity of traffic to your website.

Why is SEO important?

To understand the value of SEO, let’s break our definition into three parts:

If you are an agency or in-house SEO looking for resources to educate your clients or company stakeholders about search marketing, we suggest making a copy of, personalizing, and sharing this presentation on the basics and value of SEO.

How does SEO work?

Search engines like Google and Bing use crawlers, sometimes also called bots or spiders, to gather information about all the content they can find on the internet. The crawler starts from a known web page and follows internal links to pages within that site as well as external links to pages on other sites. The content on those pages, plus the context of the links it followed, help the crawler understand what each page is about and how it’s semantically connected to all of the other pages within the search engine’s massive database, called an index.

When a user types or speaks a query into the search box, the search engine uses complex algorithms to pull out what it believes to be the most accurate and useful list of results for that query. These organic results can include web pages full of text, news articles, images, videos, local business listings, and other more niche types of content.

There are a lot of factors that go into the search engines’ algorithms, and those factors are evolving all the time to keep up with changing user behavior and advances in machine learning. Here’s how a group of experts ranked their importance:

SEOs use their understanding of these ranking factors to develop and implement search marketing strategies that include a balance of on-page, off-page, and technical best practices. An organization that hopes to earn and maintain high SERP rankings and, as a result, lots of high-quality user traffic, should employ a strategy that prioritizes user experience, employs non-manipulative ranking tactics, and evolves alongside search engines’ and users’ changing behaviors.

It should be noted that while other digital marketing practices like conversion rate optimization (CRO), pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, social media management, email marketing, and community management are often closely related to SEO, these other tactics are generally outside the scope and definition of traditional search marketing. If you’re interested in learning more about any of these areas, the Moz Blog includes categories related to all of these topics and others, too.

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How can I learn SEO best practices?

Moz offers the best resources on the web for learning SEO. If you’re completely new to the world of search marketing, start at the very beginning and read the updated Beginner’s Guide to SEO. If you need advice on a specific topic or want to explore more content for all levels of expertise, check out all of our learning options below.

SEO Learning Center

You are here! Explore free articles like this one on a wide range of topics, from SEO basics to local search to strategies for mobile and international sites. The Learning Center is organized by topic for easy navigation, and each article includes links to other content you may find useful along the way.

Moz Academy

For those serious about investing in their SEO education, Moz Academy offers an extensive catalog of on-demand coursework, led by expert instructors and designed with hands-on learning in mind. In addition to a variety of courses for all skill levels, we offer the opportunity to earn valuable industry credentials with our world-class certifications in SEO Essentials and Technical SEO.

How-To Guides

Written and compiled by the top experts in the industry, our SEO guides on everything from auditing your site for technical success to hiring the best SEO managers are organized by skill level and available for free.

The Moz Blog

Long regarded as one of the most valuable places on the internet for SEO information, the Moz Blog is easy to explore by category and includes contributions from experts across the industry. The blog houses our popular Whiteboard Friday series as well as valuable updates several times per week on all areas of SEO.

On-Demand Webinars

Our webinar series includes talks on the latest innovations in search marketing, hosted by Moz’s team of subject matter experts. It’s the marketing conference experience on-demand.

SEO Q&A

Moz’s Q&A Forum, powered by our community of 500,000+ digital marketers, offers hundreds of thousands of SEO questions and answers from people just like you. Join the community and ask your own question, or browse discussions on everything from the Moz tools to other areas of marketing.

Your SEO success story starts here. Happy learning!

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What Is SEO / Search Engine Optimization?

SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” In simple terms, it means the process of improving your site to increase its visibility when people search for products or services related to your business in Google, Bing, and other search engines. The better visibility your pages have in search results, the more likely you are to garner attention and attract prospective and existing customers to your business.

How does SEO work?

Search engines such as Google and Bing use bots to crawl pages on the web, going from site to site, collecting information about those pages and putting them in an index. Think of the index like a giant library where a librarian can pull up a book (or a web page) to help you find exactly what you’re looking for at the time.

Next, algorithms analyze pages in the index, taking into account hundreds of ranking factors or signals, to determine the order pages should appear in the search results for a given query. In our library analogy, the librarian has read every single book in the library and can tell you exactly which one will have the answers to your questions.

Our SEO success factors can be considered proxies for aspects of the user experience. It’s how search bots estimate exactly how well a website or web page can give the searcher what they’re searching for.

Unlike paid search ads, you can’t pay search engines to get higher organic search rankings, which means SEO experts have to put in the work. That’s where we come in.

Our Periodic Table of SEO Factors organizes the factors into six main categories and weights each based on its overall importance to SEO. For example, content quality and keyword research are key factors of content optimization, and crawlability and speed are important site architecture factors.

The newly updated SEO Periodic Table also includes a list of Toxins that detract from SEO best practices. These are shortcuts or tricks that may have been sufficient to guarantee a high ranking back in the day when the engines’ methods were much less sophisticated. And, they might even work for a short time now — at least until you’re caught.

We’ve also got a brand new Niches section that deep-dives into the SEO success factors behind three key niches: Local SEO, News/Publishing, and Ecommerce SEO. While our overall SEO Periodic Table will help you with the best practices, knowing the nuances of SEO for each of these Niches can help you succeed in search results for your small business, recipe blog, and/or online store.

The search algorithms are designed to surface relevant, authoritative pages and provide users with an efficient search experience. Optimizing your site and content with these factors in mind can help your pages rank higher in the search results.

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The Definition of SEO in 100 Words or Less [FAQs]

Search engine optimization (SEO) seems pretty straightforward. You pick a few keywords, and voilà! Your page is optimized for SEO, right?

Many people understand the basic principles of SEO, but a lot has changed in the last decade.

The SEO that we know and love today is not the same SEO that we knew and loved (or hated) 10 years ago. And that’s why SEO is something marketers should continue to define, and redefine. Here’s a brief definition in under 100 words:

What Is SEO?

What hasn’t stayed the same are the techniques we use to improve our rankings. This has everything to do with the search algorithms that these companies constantly change.

Here are some other frequently asked questions about this critical practice today.

How Does SEO Work?

SEO works by optimizing a website’s pages, conducting keyword research, and earning inbound links. You can generally see results of SEO efforts once the webpage has been crawled and indexed by a search engine.

Looking deeper: There are a ton of ways to improve the SEO of your site pages, though. Search engines look for elements including title tags, keywords, image tags, internal link structure, and inbound links (also known as backlinks). And that’s just to name a few.

Search engines also look at site structure and design, visitor behavior, and other external, off-site factors to determine how highly ranked your site should be in their SERPs.

What Is an Organic Search?

Organic search refers to someone conducting a search through a search engine and clicking on a non-paid result. Organic search is a search marketing channel that can be used as part of inbound marketing to increase website traffic.

What Is SEO Strategy?

An SEO marketing strategy is a comprehensive plan to get more visitors to your website through search engines. Successful SEO includes on-page strategies, which use intent-based keywords; and off-page strategies, which earn inbound links from other websites.

To satisfy intent and rank well in the long term, build your SEO marketing strategy around topics, not keywords. If you do that, you’ll find you can naturally optimize for important keywords, anyway. Understanding your target audience (aka buyer personas) and what interests them is key to attracting relevant visitors to your website through search engines.

What Is Organic Traffic?

Organic traffic is unpaid traffic that comes from search engines such as Google or Bing. Paid search marketing does not increase your organic traffic numbers, but you can optimize your website using inbound marketing software to gain more visitors.

Looking deeper: One of the biggest changes in the last decade is the way other user behaviors shape the SERPs a user sees on search engines. And today, social media can have a big impact on your organic traffic trend line. Even just a few years ago, it didn’t make a difference who was finding your content through social search. But now SEO takes into account tweets, retweets, Google+ authorship, and other social signals.

Social search also prioritizes content and people that are connected to you. That could mean through a Facebook friend, Twitter follower, or connection through another social network. Sometimes social search will even prioritize content that has been shared by an influencer. Social search understands that you may be interested in content that your network feels is important to share, and therefore it’ll often get surfaced to you.

This all means when you’re thinking about your SEO strategy, you need to think about how your social media strategy fits into the puzzle, too.

What Is Direct Traffic?

Direct traffic consists of website visitors that come to your website by typing the URL into their browser, rather than coming from another website, a search engine, or social media.

SEO actually takes into account whether or not your visitors are staying on your website and engaging with other content. If you rank well for a keyword and attract a visitor who isn’t relevant, it won’t actually help your website.

Think about your visitors and the content they are looking for more than how many people you can attract to your website.

The Importance of SEO

SEO is important because it helps people find information and discover pages on the world wide web. SEO is especially important for businesses as it ensures they’re answering their audience’s biggest questions on search engines, while driving traffic to their products and services.

Looking deeper: In the past, SEO success was measured by whether or not you were ranked high on the first page of Google. But even if you ranked well for a term, does that actually mean you’re going to see results?

Not always. You might rank really well for terms that aren’t ideal for your business. So you appear high on search engines, get a ton of traffic, but then your website visitors realize your company isn’t what they were looking for. You don’t convert customers from this traffic, and ranking high for this particular keyword is essentially fruitless.

Also, you don’t necessarily need to be in the top three slots to be successful. In fact, if you rank well on subsequent pages, you may still have a high clickthrough rate, albeit less traffic. That’s great news for marketers who can’t seem to bring pages into those top slots or off the second page.

We said it before and we’ll say it again: The amount of traffic to your page is less important than how qualified that traffic is.

How Much Does SEO Cost?

Looking deeper: An SEO cost can mean one of two things: the investment in your organic search strategy, or how much you pay for paid search engine marketing (SEM) services like Google AdWords. If you’re paying for a tool, consultant, or marketing agency to help you optimize your web content, your bill can vary wildly with the depth of the services you’re receiving.

What Is Paid Search Engine Marketing?

Paid search engine marketing refers to pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. This enables you to pay a search engine for text ads shown at the top and bottom of search engine results pages after someone conducts a search. It is used to increase website traffic and gain more customers.

Looking deeper: You can actually pay for top rankings on Google SERPs by registering for a free account on Google AdWords. You’ll then select various keywords you’d like to rank under, and pay Google each time a user clicks on your result. This is called PPC search engine marketing, and your ads will be noticeably different in their appearance than the organic results below them.

How to Do SEO

Originally published Apr 1, 2021 7:00:00 AM, updated March 17 2022

What is SEO?

SEO (search engine optimization) means putting a web page in the search results in order to receive organic traffic from searchers. There hasn’t been a day that billions of people didn’t type certain queries in search engines to find useful information. To be precise, Google alone receives over 40,000 requests per second! The number of searches grows exponentially, which gives websites a large audience they can potentially convert into their regular visitors or paying customers. Learning the rules of getting to the top of the search results and complying with those rules are what SEO basically is.

How does searching work?

When you open any search engine and type the query you’re interested in, you’ll see the list of the first 10 results that can be organized in a different way. It’s called the SERP (search engine results page). There might be more than 10 results if the SERP includes paid ads displayed above, below, or on the right side to organic results.

The place where a page stands among the results is its search engine ranking and the higher the ranking, the more trust the page has and probably the more relevant it is to the query. To define the order of pages to appear, search engines evaluate hundreds of ranking factors, which we will cover later. The ranking process happens organically: in contrast to paid ads, you can’t pay Google or other engines to place a website higher or re-evaluate it more regularly.

If you’re an active searcher who knows and notices all the features of the search results page and the differences between different types of queries, you can skip this part and move to the section about crawling and indexing.

For now, let’s see how different types of searches work. The more unambiguous the query is, the bigger the chances of finding the right information quickly. For example, if you format your query as a question, you’ll probably get a lot of SERP features (which are distinctive blocks of information that help navigate through the search).

In the screenshot above, you can see the following:

As you can see, you get the short answer right from the search results and then you can click on different types of sources to find out more details. So, the system is designed to cater to searchers’ needs as quickly as possible and provide them with the most authoritative and helpful information.

Now, let’s see what happens if you type a very general query:

When you’re using just one word and it’s not a super-unique phenomenon, Google might get confused and give you very different results. As you can see from the screenshot, searching for “flamingo” will show the eponymous YouTube channel, hotel, and body care brand together with images of flamingo birds. If you’re looking for something different, you need to make the query more specific.

With that said, search engines work to understand searchers and give them the most relevant sources. The search features are improving to make it easier for users to jump to the best suitable result. What it means for website owners is that they have to research the queries that might interest their target audience and place them on the website. But more importantly, they have to make that content really helpful so that when people click on the website, they receive exactly what they were hoping to find.

Now, this was a very generic explanation of how search works as seen by users. Now, let’s dive into the inner mechanics of search as performed by search engines.

How do search engines organize web pages in the search?

For websites to get to the SERPs, they need to be easily discoverable by search engines. Even if you provide high-quality content that corresponds to what people search for, you won’t be able to rank high without getting discovered through the processes of crawling and indexing.

The mechanics behind rankings work in the same manner among search engines. Since Google is the most vocal about its tools and processes, we’ll illustrate crawling and indexing based on Google’s explanations.

What is crawling?

The process of establishing that a certain web page is out there on the web is called crawling. Simply put, crawling means being visited and scanned by a search engine.

Search engines act as directories of all existing websites but, as you might imagine, they need to update their databases all the time: there are over 1.7 billion sites with more than 500,000 being added each day. So, how does a search engine know that a web page is out there?

What is indexing?

After finding a new page, a search engine analyzes the content on the page, its structure and layout to rank it for relevant queries. The process of understanding what that page is about is called indexing. The better Google or another engine understands the page, the better it is for that page.

What elements a search engine scans to understand a page:

As the results of this process, a web page gets to the index, which is a database of all web content. To maintain its huge databases, Google, for instance, has millions of servers across 21 data center locations around the globe.

What is search engine ranking?

Each time a user types a query, a search engine pulls information from the index, trying to match the search intent with the highest quality answers. The order of results shown for each particular query is called ranking. Search engines evaluate a number of parameters to define the order—these parameters are called ranking factors or ranking signals and we’ll talk about them later. Rankings fluctuate all the time because search engines crawl and index a lot of new web pages and re-index already existing ones.

Why do you need SEO?

Let’s get back to the term SEO for a bit. It was spotted in usage already in the 1990s even though at that time, search engines functioned as directories and there wasn’t much websites could do to “optimize.” During the last decades, multiple attempts have been made to rebrand SEO or bury it but it doesn’t seem realistic that the practice of optimization will be long gone.

Search engines not only process tons of web sources to serve their rankings—they also put efforts into improving their algorithms and, ultimately, making search a better place. Innovative technologies are reshaping the search landscape, adding new opportunities for users and learning to better understand different searches. Despite the fact that the term SEO doesn’t say a thing about real users, the practice of SEO is actually about working to the user’s benefit.

SEO is a powerful tool to reach out to your target audience. Organic search is the most effective channel for promoting a website—research has shown that it offers a 20 times higher traffic opportunity than paid search. What benefits does search optimization offer?

To attract visitors and achieve the goals you pursue with a website (increase brand awareness, conversions, etc.), you’ll need to follow the best SEO practices and regularly monitor website’s performance against major SEO parameters.

To help you get the idea of how much you can achieve thanks to optimization, with our partners at ThinkEngine, we’ve prepared this interactive chatbot with some key facts and stats. If this data won’t persuade you of SEO’s fabulous possibilities, we don’t know what will 🙂

What is considered as a ranking factor?

Let’s see how exactly to get liked by search engines. The aspects of web pages whose evaluation impacts the position in the SERPs are called ranking factors. In the early days of search engines, they would rank websites based on domain parameters, basic structure, and keywords. If a page had a lot of target keywords, it would succeed in the search. From that time and till now, the situation has changed, a lot. Search engines have been evolving to address user needs more effectively, pushing back low-quality pages and eliminating manipulative SEO techniques. Let’s explore the major ranking signals in the context of search engine updates and improvements.

In an introductory article about how to get a website liked by a search engine, Google names 3 things:

Naturally, these factors are just a tip of the iceberg, but they alone tell a lot about how to succeed in the search: you should focus on providing the most helpful information, building credibility, and making your website easily crawlable. Let’s dig a little deeper into how these and other vital aspects would have worked earlier and are working now.

If you don’t want to read the details about different algorithms and search evolution, go to the rundown of ranking factors relevant for 2021.

How important is the content on a web page?

You may have heard the phrase “content is king”—it has been on the tongues of marketers starting from 1996, when Bill Gates expressed his belief that the power of content was to make impact and money on the internet. Content is still the number one ranking factor which you will find mentioned in any SEO checklists, but there’s a question of how exactly search engines learn that one page contains more useful information than another page.

In the early days of web search, it was hard to find results matching a too abstract query or a badly formulated one. But people come to search engines not necessarily knowing how to formulate what they’re looking for and they expect to see the most relevant results anyway. Addressing the problem of adapting the system to how people search, Google and its competitors have been improving their algorithms.

Several times, Google said that it was able to understand searches “better than ever before.” The first time it was about the 2013 Hummingbird update. This algorithm update marked the switch to semantic search, which meant that Google understood the intent behind a query and was able to distinguish subtopics related to a query. Spamming pages with keywords for better search visibility was over for good. Not the number of exact keyword matches but content’s relevancy to the search intent was taken into account.

In 2019, Google once again announced to revolutionize their understanding of how users search. Investing in language understanding research, Google developed a new natural language processing technique called BERT that analyzes the context around individual words. So, the engine is able to decipher misspelled queries and distill passages from web pages that answer particular queries—and shift rankings based on this analysis.

Still, search algorithms aren’t perfect. The system may understand what you’re asking and what topics and subtopics you can be interested in but provide you with outdated information. For example, when I typed “TLS certificate lifespan” to Google, the featured snippet included the correct result but when I typed “TLS certificate validity” meaning to find the exact same answer, the SERP highlighted information that is no longer relevant.

With all that said about search engines evolving to match user intents with the best possible answers, the primary task for web content is to be helpful. But it’s not the only thing to consider. Apart from being relevant to user intents, web content has to be:

Another thing about content is its readability. This issue has been debated for years. At some point, Google even launched the reading level filter for users to stick to those formats they are likely to understand. However, the feature wasn’t very helpful and eventually, Google ceased it. Many SEO and marketing specialists believe that the easier it is to digest content, the better it is for both search engines and website visitors. The content has to be comprehensible for sure, but it’s not considered the best practice to make it as easy to read as possible. Google’s John Muller states that it’s best to use “the language of your audience,” which makes a lot of sense: if you’re targeting tech-savvy customers, for example, you can afford going all out with technical details.

How do backlinks take part in the ranking process?

In the late 1990s, analysts have been thinking about how to incorporate the value of hyperlinks into the ranking system. For the first time, off-page factors (external to the page itself) were taken into use. Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed the revolutionary PageRank algorithm that counted links pointing to a website from an external source (now known as backlinks) as “votes.” Google wasn’t the first search engine to consider the links but it was the pioneer in creating a working algorithm for assessing the links.

Websites started aggressively acquiring backlinks and participating in link exchanges, leaving Google no chance but ceasing excessive link schemes and prioritizing quality over quantity. Now, it’s important to build a safe backlink profile by getting links from the most trusted sources and removing the spammy ones. Websites are placed higher not because of having a lot of backlinks (like it was in the early 2000s) but because of having relevant links from authoritative pages.

How does loading speed matter?

In 2010, Google announced that site speed became a ranking factor. Websites with loading speed issues were getting increased bounce rates and therefore lower positions in the SERPs. For a decade, website owners have been trying to provide visitors with the quickest possible page loads. While speed is undoubtedly an important factor of the website’s performance, the focus has recently shifted to ensuring fast interaction with the first rendered content (instead of guaranteeing fast load of a full page).

Starting from June 2021, Google’s page experience signals that include Core Web Vitals directly influence the rankings. These signals are all aimed at improved user experience and engagement with web content. They include safe browsing, mobile-friendly design, and metrics of interactivity and stability of web pages. If the first visible part of a page is loaded fast, shortly becomes possible to click around, and doesn’t disturb with ads or popups shifting the layout, the page will have great Core Web Vitals measurements and be placed high in the search.

What role does user experience play in optimization?

Google has been using traffic data to serve rankings, and the more people visit a certain website, the more trustworthy it gets in the eyes of Google. Not only website visits but user engagement with content is taken into account.

Starting from the RankBrain update, Google has been observing user experience signals, evaluating how easy a page is to interact with. The search engine analyzes how many clicks a search result gets and how much time users spend exploring it. If Google learns that a web page gets lots of clicks and high engagement, this page will get a ranking boost. By contrast, websites that are difficult to navigate and push users back to the SERPs aren’t likely to get high rankings. Some aspects of page optimization—for example, meta description tags—don’t directly affect the rankings but they still have some influence because they impact the number or clicks a page gets from the SERPs.

Do websites have to be mobile-friendly?

Mobile search has been dominant since 2015 and from the same year, Google has been boosting those pages that have a mobile-friendly layout. In 2016, the search engine introduced mobile-first indexing, meaning that the index was going to be built primarily based on mobile versions of websites. To stay afloat, modern websites need to provide a robust mobile experience. It’s best to adopt responsive design that adjusts the layout to any device and screen size.

So, what are the major ranking factors?

Summing up all the aforementioned and adding some SEO parameters that haven’t significantly changed over the years, here are the 10 most important aspects that influence website’s rankings:

How dominant is Google and what about other search engines?

The history of web search didn’t start from Google. Proto-engines were born in the university environment starting from 1990, when Alan Emtage launched Archie, a public directory of FTP sites. In 1994, Stanford University students Jerry Wang and David Filo created Yahoo. It was a directory of websites that were manually submitting themselves. Some other search engines also saw the light of day that year, but they failed to make any real impact.

In 1996, Stanford University students Larry Page and Sergey Brin built a new search engine called Backrub, which eventually was renamed and registered as Google. Starting from 2000, Google powered Yahoo’s search results, which was the beginning of the end for Yahoo’s fame.

In 1998, the world saw a prototypical paid search: the Goto service developed by the Pasadena-based incubator allowed advertisers to place bids to be shown above organic results. In 2000, Google introduced AdWords, now known as Google Ads. Paid ads and organic rankings co-exist in the SERPs but are independent of each other. Using paid ads in different search engines, websites get featured according to how much they pay for each click, while in organic search, you can’t pay to get featured or improve your rankings.

It wasn’t until 2009 when today’s biggest rival of Google was introduced: Microsoft Live Search turned into Bing. At the time, this search engine had some innovative features—for example, dedicated sections to different types of search (shopping, travel, local business, related to health) or preview of results visible on a user’s hover. Despite these helpful features, it didn’t come close to Google in the number of searches.

Through the years and till now, all the other engines have been failing to outperform the search giant. 2018 statistics show that around 70% of all web traffic comes from search engines, Google being responsible for almost 60%. Search engine comparison by StatCounter demonstrates how far behind Google leaves its competitors: it accounts for 95.8% of mobile searches in North America (95.4% worldwide). On desktops, users Google their queries in 87% of cases, Bing receives the desktop share of over 10% in North America and over 6% in Europe, and Yahoo and DuckDuckGo are getting around 1-3% of searchers’ attention.

Nevertheless, many alternatives to Google exist and they attract the audience that isn’t satisfied with Google’s policies, especially regarding privacy. DuckDuckGo is the most popular privacy-minded search engine used by people concerned with how much of their data is being tracked on a daily basis and sold to advertisers. The engine incorporates data from 400+ sources (including crowd-sourced sites and Bing and excluding Google), while its own crawler, DuckDuckBot, does its job by prioritizing the most secure sites. In January 2021, DuckDuckGo hit 100 million searches per day. It’s still not as many as Google, Bing, and Yahoo receive, but the tendency is clear: there are a lot of people seeking a more private and safety-first searching experience.

DuckDuckGo is not the only privacy-centered search engine alternative:

User tracking might seem like the biggest issue with Google and other search giants, but it’s not the only problem that pushes other companies to create alternatives. For example, Ecosia wishes to minimize the carbon footprint by running servers on solar plants and donating 80% of its profits to planting trees. Or, Switzerland-based Swisscows focuses on safe, family-friendly content and automatically removes any violent or explicit results.

Even though the numbers tell it’s hard if not impossible to cut some of Google’s pie, companies still plan on conquering the search with their new search engines. Ahrefs’ founder believes that their system will be able to compete with Google. Ahrefs’ vision is centered around two things: privacy (which is already a big drive for Google alternatives) and profit share (distributing massive earnings across powerful platforms like Wikipedia that publish content that is widely popular in search but isn’t meant to be monetized). The idea sounds intriguing and a little too good to be true—what will come of it remains to be seen.

It’s your choice whether to target other search engines. Their crawling and indexing mechanics are pretty much the same so if you take care of basic SEO, your website will likely be shown in the results of different search engines. But if you know that some part of your target audience prefers some alternative to Google, you might want to do a little extra research on how to please that particular search engine.

To sum up

Here’s a short summary of what we’ve discussed in this article:

What Is SEO And How It Works: A Beginner’s Guide

SEO, or search engine optimization, is the process of organically improving your ranking on a search engine result’s page. It involves optimizing your website so that search engines display your web pages as top results for relevant search queries. Let’s take a look at the basics of SEO, its types, and why SEO matters.

Content

How do search engines work?

Search engines perform three primary functions:

Then it arranges these web pages in order of relevance, hoping that the first results provide everything you need to know about electric cars. There’s a running joke about Google’s ranking algorithm’s excellence. The best place to hide a dead body is page 2 of Google search results. This joke implies that most users find answers to their queries on Google’s first SERP.

The basics of search engine optimization

A good SEO strategy starts with proper keyword research. Then, you start creating valuable content that meets a user’s search intent by providing answers to their queries. But search engine optimization goes further and deeper.

Let’s start with the most important SEO Basic every beginner must know.

1. Keyword research

Keyword research involves finding search phrases that are relevant to your web content. By our definition, keywords are words and phrases that are commonly used in search queries. First, you must understand your target audience and how they search for products or services related to yours.

• Discover what people are searching for

What does your target audience ask Google? What search keywords do your competitors rank for? How many people are searching for it? How do they want answers—in pictures, videos, or text content? Answering these questions is the first step in keyword research.

• Use a keyword tool

If you’ve created a shortlist of search phrases your target audience is using, you can further your research using keyword tools. Keyword tools are websites and programs that help you discover both long-tail and short-tail keywords to target. These tools also help you see who is searching for your keywords and how often people search per month.

• Understand long-tail keywords

Long-tail keywords are search phrases that often contain up to four words. Using long-tail keywords helps you target searchers whose search intent matches your web page’s content. Long-tail keywords with low search volume frequently convert better because searchers are more specific and intentional in their queries.

• Discover search intent behind keywords

There are four major categories of search intent:

1. Informational intent: The user wants information such as a celebrity’s age or the number of countries in Asia.

2. Navigational intent: The user wants to go to a particular webpage, such as Adsterra’s homepage or an ESPN blog post.

3. Transactional queries: The user wants to buy something or use a service, such as tickets to a music concert or spare car tires.

4. Commercial intent: When there’s a likelihood that a user can become a business lead or a customer. You can evaluate commercial intent by looking at the number of people that advertise on a specific keyword in Google Adwords.

Use these categories to understand how to use keywords in your content. A person searching for how tall the Statue of Liberty is doesn’t want to go there themselves. So web pages offering tours to the Statue of Liberty are irrelevant.

2. On-site optimization

On-page SEO, or On-site SEO, is the practice of optimizing your web pages to satisfy search intent and rank higher in search results pages. On-page SEO involves:

3. Technical SEO

Technical SEO is the practice of ensuring that your website meets the technical standards of current search engines with the intent to improve organic rankings. Crawling, indexing, rendering, and website architecture are all important aspects of technical SEO.

Why Is Technical SEO Necessary?

You can have the best website in terms of content quality and design. But if your technical SEO is poor, you’ll not move up in Google’s SERPs.

At a bare minimum, search engines must be able to locate, crawl, render, and index all web pages on your website. Also, a fully technically optimized webpage must be safe, mobile-friendly, devoid of duplicate content, must load very fast, and more.

Your technical SEO doesn’t have to be perfect to rank. But, the easier you make it for Google to access your content, the greater your chances of ranking. Technical SEO involves optimizing your 301 redirects, Structured Data, Hreflang, URL structure, Canonical tags, Site architecture, e.t.c.

4. Link building

What is the purpose of link building? Link building is perhaps the most vital component of any successful SEO strategy. It entails obtaining backlinks from other websites to yours—a simple dofollow hyperlink from one website to another.

Most SEO experts agree that link building is the most challenging aspect of search engine optimization and the most beneficial. Consider backlinks from other websites as votes. The more backlinks from higher-quality domains pointing to your website (and therefore being part of your backlink profile), the higher you’ll rank on search engine results pages.

So, how can you receive free high-quality backlinks from highly authoritative websites?

The first step in surpassing the top-ranked sites is to study what is already ranking and improve it. For example, comprehensive guides rank quite high in search engines since they are lengthy and contain several resources.
If your website doesn’t contain a lot of texts — File Converters, URL Shorteners, File Hostings — You should ensure that it is very user-friendly.

External links in your website determine how search engines rate your content’s quality. Google wants to determine the trustworthiness of your website, so it analyzes the backlinks you provided to your readers to aid in its ranking process.

Another simple approach to getting backlinks is informing these websites about your backlinks to their domain. There’s a chance that they will link back to you.

Guest posting involves writing articles for other websites and placing a backlink to your website in the article’s content. Your guest post pitch must be detailed and very relevant to your niche and the other website’s niche.

Your guest article must be comprehensive, incredibly informative, and publishable. Suppose your content is thin (but publishable) and providing little value to the reader. In that case, it’ll not generate interest and traffic back to your website, harming your chances of guest posting in the future.

5. Measuring & tracking SEO success

Measuring your SEO’s impact is vital to your success and growth. It’ll go a long way in helping you rethink your approach when something isn’t working.
Monitoring everything from rankings and conversions to lost backlinks and core web vitals helps determine the power of your SEO. So what should you track and measure?

Conversion rate is the number of conversions (for a single intended action/goal) divided by the total number of unique visits. A conversion rate applies to any action: email signup, purchase, or account creation. Knowing your CTR (click-through-rate) and conversion rate helps you estimate the potential return on investment (ROI) from your website traffic.

How much time do users spend on your website? Session Duration refers to the time during which a user engages in regular active interactions with a website. When the user is inactive for a predefined time, the session is timed out (30 minutes by default). Session duration takes into account the total amount of time spent on a website by a user.

Bounce refers to a single-page session on your site. In Analytics, a bounce is defined as a session that generates just one request to the Analytics server. For example, when a user visits a single page on your site and then quits the session without causing any additional queries to the Analytics server.

Is it bad to have a high bounce rate? Yes, a high bounce rate is negative if your website’s success depends on users viewing more than one web page.

Scroll depth measures how far users scroll down a specific webpage. It helps you determine if users are reaching the most critical part of your content. You can track this metric by setting up a trigger on Google Analytics. If your page’s objective is a form fill, you can specify that as a goal. You’ll be able to observe when site visitors convert your reports.

While ranking is an important SEO statistic, evaluating your site’s organic performance cannot end there. The goal of ranking is to attract organic traffic by appearing top of the search results for a user’s query.

CTR refers to the percentage of users that clicked on your webpage from search results. This metric provides insight into how well your web page title and meta description are optimized.

White hat vs. Black hat

Black hat SEO focuses on optimizing your content for the search engines only, not considering humans who interact with your content. It involves bending and breaking several rules to make a website rank higher than it should. For example, Rich Snippet Markup Spam, Article Spinning, and Keyword Stuffing.

On the other hand, White hat SEO involves optimizing your website in compliance with search engines’ best practices and rules. It’s the best way to build your website’s rank organically. White hat SEO is human-centric, i.e., content is created and optimized to improve user experience and completely satisfy search intent.

Like life, SEO’s not always black or white. Gray hat SEO involves practicing both white and black hat SEO tactics. With this approach, you’re trying to get a distinct advantage by following loopholes in some SEO rules. For example, Google frowns at guest posting to build backlinks and domain authority. However, guest posting is an honest attempt to build brand awareness and create business leads by directing organic traffic to your website.

Gray hat SEO is not as pure as white hats and not as bad as black hat practices.

Conclusion: Why SEO matters and how long is the optimization process?

Here’s an interesting fact: In 1997, there were approximately 1 million websites. This figure doubled to 2.4 million in 1998. By 2010, there were 200 million websites online. Today there are over 1.5 billion websites on the internet.

Why should this matter to you?

When someone uses Google or Bing to search for information, they have access to a billion websites (and exponentially more web pages).

The internet is like our expanding universe, and SEO is critical because your website will be relegated to its fringes without it. Google and other search engines may index your website, but does it really exist if your target audience never sees it on the SERPs?

Search engine optimization (SEO) ensures that your target audience finds your website when conducting a relevant search. For example, if a user wants to read about SEO for beginners, we’d like the top results on any search engine to show them this article.

SEO is still the primary step to generating a significant traffic flow. The more users visit your website, the more ad impressions you can deliver and the higher your revenue becomes. It is never too late to start optimizing a website, just as it is never too late to start getting passive income from advertising.