What Is SEO?

SEO is the process of improving the ranking of your site in search engine results.

A good SEO strategy is essential for increasing traffic to your website. Organic search is the most popular way for people to find content, so focusing on optimizing your website for this type of search should improve your traffic levels.

How does SEO work?

Search engines like Google and Bing are able to collect information about all the content they can find using automated software programs known as crawlers or bots.

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.

Each page on the web has a content & links that help search engine crawlers understand what it's about and how it's semantically connected to other pages. All of this info is gathered in the crawler's memory--the site's index.

When a user types or speaks a query into the search box, the search engine uses complex algorithms and ranks and organizes the content accordingly.

These organic results often contain web pages full of text, news articles, images, videos, listings for nearby businesses and other niche types of content.

There's a lot of different factors that go into how search engines rank content. Search engines are always evolving to give the best results to users, and they use machine learning to do this.

Here's how experts rank their importance:

Google survey results indicate a trend in these ranking factors.

SEOs understand these ranking factors and use them to innovate search marketing strategies. These could include on-page, off-page, or technical best practices that balance different aspects of your business.

It's important that an organization that hopes to rank well and make lots of traffic does not use manipulative techniques to achieve these goals. They should also strive for a good user experience, as it will help them rank well. The strategies they use should not change much as Google adapts their algorithm

It's worth mentioning that while the other marketing strategies like convert rate optimization (CRO), pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, social media management, and email marketing often relate to SEO, no strategy is at it's core more related than search engine optimization. these tactics may be outside the scope of search marketing while still being called traditional

If you're looking for info on any of these subjects, there's a category dedicated to them on the blog.