SEO, standing for Search Engine Optimization, is a digital marketing strategy focused on the augmentation of a website’s visibility in organic (non-paid) search engine results. SEO involves aspects not only of the technological build of your website but also the content you input and its relevance to your audience.
According to Moz, a leading SEO tool resource, SEO involves “the practice of increasing both the quality and quantity of website traffic, as well as exposure to your brand, through non-paid (also known as ‘organic’) search engine results.”
To dive deeper, let’s break SEO into its main components:
1. Quality of traffic: It’s not about attracting all internet surfers worldwide; it’s about attracting people genuinely interested in products/services you offer. If Google misinterprets you as a resource for Apple computers when indeed you’re a farmer selling apples, that is not quality traffic.
1. Quantity of traffic: After attracting the right kind of web surfers – those attracted due to the correct representations in the search engine results pages (SERPs), more traffic is much better.
1. Organic results: Organic traffic is better as they don’t involve any form of payment. Many mediums of traffic are through ads, and they are indeed not free, while organic traffic is.
How does Google, among the most preferred search engines globally, decide its rankings? It happens through the process of ‘crawling and indexing’, then answers it via an algorithm. They scour the internet for relevant and authoritative pages and present them to the searcher. The goal of this process, according to Google, is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”.
The ‘O’ in SEO is about optimization. Here businesses are ready with quality effected websites and content for search engines to comb through and users to consume. This involves making titles that are descriptive, adding alt text to images and making the site mobile-friendly, to name a few.
To give an example, suppose you have a travel business and want to improve your website’s standing on the SERPs. SEO strategy could involve creating destination-specific content, optimizing image descriptions and tags for relevance, inserting relevant keywords strategically while being careful not to “stuff” them artificially, and working to generate inbound links from qualified sources.
Sources:
- Moz’s Beginner’s Guide to SEO
- Google Search Central official blog
- SEO Basics: A Noob-Friendly 5-Step Guide by Ahrefs.
