The Basics of SEO - Definitions, General Overview and FAQs
Eliminate the confusion around SEO. Learn the basics to help you to start the process.
This guide assumes you already have a website, that it has a goal of benefiting visitors and you want to make the visitor experience even better. If that’s the case, consider a search engine as a visitor to your site and know that SEO practices help search engines better understand and share your content.
With that in mind, let us share a high-level overview of SEO and then answer some SEO FAQs. Once you understand these basics, you will be able to follow five steps to start your SEO journey.
What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the long-term practice of growing the quality and quantity of traffic to your website and increasing your brand awareness through organic search results. It’s about understanding what people are searching for, the answers they need, what keywords they are using, the type of content they want (i.e., video, FAQs, shopping, contact information, etc.), then delivering it all in a way search engine crawlers can find and understand.
The history of SEO begins in the 1990s when the Internet and search engines where first used. Methods behind SEO have changed drastically over the years—from typing white, mass amounts of keywords into the background on websites (aka keyword stuffing) to now strategically incorporating keywords into copy and image coding.
Search engines are a complex tool that Internet users utilize when they have a simple goal to accomplish—searching for information. And, as a solutions provider or manufacturer, you want to provide that information to the people who matter most to you—potential customers.
Simply put, SEO is a generalized term that includes the actions you should take to make search engines, like Google, consider your website a valuable source of information for people.
Although SEO is intended to be used across all search tools, we will focus on how to apply SEO techniques to Google because of its dominance among search engine tools.
Why Does SEO Matter?
While social media posts, networking, traditional sales methods and paid advertising will help send people to your website, most website traffic is driven by search engines.
Organic search results cover more digital sources of information, appear more credible to Internet searchers and receive more attention than paid advertisements. In fact, of all U.S. searches, only roughly 2.8% of searchers click on paid advertisements. And, SEO offers approximately 20 times more traffic opportunity.
If that isn’t convincing enough, SEO is also one of the only online marketing techniques, when set up properly, that you will continue to reap rewards from for years. If you continue to write valuable content following the rules in this guide, your traffic will see compounding growth over time.
Useful SEO Terminology
Before we dive into the deep end, let’s go over some common SEO terms that will help you better understand some techniques in this process.
Organic Search Results: These are the results, not paid for by a company (e.g., ads), that appear when an Internet user searches for information through a search engine like Google
On-Page SEO: This groups all the activities you do on YOUR website, from the optimization of content to technical aspects that users don’t see. On-page SEO includes keyword research, content optimization, title tag optimization, page performance optimization (i.e., load speed) and internal linking. The goal of on-page SEO is to create perfect content and user experience (UX), while also helping search engines understand what the web page is about.
Off-Page SEO: Categorizes efforts that develop quality backlinks (links on other websites that direct back to yours) that show search engines your website has authority and value among audiences. Off-page SEO is also known as link building and may include activities such as guest blogging, email outreach and social media marketing.
Black Hat SEO: A group of SEO activities that intentionally doesn’t follow the rules set by Google in an effort to manipulate website crawlers. Some examples of black hat SEO are keyword stuffing, irrelevant backlinks, hidden text and comment spam.
White Hat SEO: The opposite group of SEO activities that seek to follow Google’s rules by naturally building links on relevant websites, creating a content strategy, conducting on-page optimization, researching keywords and focusing on quality.
Web Crawler: Sometimes referred to as a spider or search engine bot, it is a piece of technology that browses all the content on the Internet and indexes it to create a catalog of information. The goal of the crawler is to learn what every web page is about and determine its importance to web searchers like you.
SEO FAQs
Can I conduct my own SEO? Yes, SEO is not rocket science. But it certainly isn’t easy and can be time consuming. There are a lot of small tasks you can quickly complete, while others take a lot of time and research. If you are willing to invest the time to do it yourself, learn the techniques and follow through – you CAN do it! If not, make sure you find a partner that is well-versed is SEO and will provide value to your activities.
How do I learn to do SEO on my own? Find resources that are knowledgeable, reliable and stay on top of the latest technological developments. And then, test and experiment. See what works and what doesn’t by relying closely on analytics from SEO tools.
How long does it take to learn and do SEO? Most experts will tell you it takes months, if not years to master the art of SEO. It takes a lot of practice. And website-related technologies are constantly evolving. So, continuing to educate yourself will be critical to ensure your efforts never get old.
How do I know what people are searching for online? By using SEO tools, you can conduct keyword research to know just how many people are looking for a term, related search terms, how easily you can rank for terms, and what the cost per click for terms is (in case you plan to run paid campaigns for down the road).
How long does it take to rank on Google? The answer to this is dependent on a lot of factors, specifically your keyword choices and their popularity as well as the competitiveness of your industry. If all the factors play a positive role for you, it could take three to six months, sometimes even as long as one year, to begin ranking on Google for a keyword.
What are Google’s most important ranking factors? Search engines consider several factors in determining the value of your website and where it should appear in search ranks. The main factor is high-quality content, but others include mobile-friendliness, a page’s user experience and speed, on-page optimization and structure, internal and external links, and the quality of the websites linking to your site.
How can I find technical SEO errors? Your first step is to conduct a website audit. This will help outline technical errors for your site and give you an idea of where to start with changes. Another starting point is to embrace the Google Search Console tool. This will report on the pages Google has indexed and which ones are not indexed and the reasons why.
How do I create SEO-friendly content? The core of SEO is writing content that is better than your competition. Understanding the elements that search engines consider in ranking content is most important, then you can begin to brainstorm content ideas based on keywords and phrases your audiences are looking for. Be sure that you use the right keywords in the headlines and body copy, consider the search intent of the audience and write content for Google Featured Snippets.
How do I get other sites to link to mine? Another way to ask this, that you may have heard before is: “How do I get more in-bound links?” Doing this strategically will improve your domain authority and help your rankings, but you need to consider the quality of the content that is linking to your site. You might consider finding a website where your content might be valuable, and ask (through a contact form submission), if they could link to your site and why it would be valuable for them to do so. Writing content that other websites will want to link to will also be helpful. Consider using statistic topics that aren’t too popular from sites similar to yours. It will help you stand out. Our number one warning--don’t go on directory websites and create accounts with links to your website. Crawlers will see this as “spammy” behavior and it will work against you.
Search Engine FAQs
What Are Search Engines and How Do They Work?
Search engines are programs that scour its database of the Internet to discover information that it believes interests the user or corresponds to keywords the user searched for. Search engines use web crawlers, or bots, to use the searched keywords as a basis for looking through their index of information.
Think of this as the newest edition of the phone book. Do you recall looking through the Yellow Pages by category to find the perfect business you could call regarding a plumbing or landscaping problem? A search engine functions the same way. A search engine, such as Google, has an index of websites in its “catalog.” When a user types a keyword or phrase into the search bar, the crawlers look through the index to find relevant information.
With some of the latest technological developments in search engine algorithms, these programs can now understand your web browsing behaviors and predict what type of information you need or what information will be most valuable to you.
What is a Search Engine Algorithm?
A search engine algorithm is a specific process of rules used to determine whether a web page answers the question or aligns with the search term a user is inquiring about. It decides what information needs to be retrieved from the database and presented to the user, and in what priority of order.
Each search engine provider has a unique algorithm to determine the results of every search query. Because search engine algorithms are so complicated, here is an article we found that can delve into different algorithm platforms and how they all impact your website.
Related Articles
