What Is SEO / Search Engine Optimization?

Get started learning all about SEO, Search Engine Land. Review basics of search engine optimization, ranking factors & more.

What Is SEO / Search Engine Optimization?

What Is SEO / Search Engine Optimization?

"Search engine optimization" is what SEO stands for. In basic terms, it refers to the process of enhancing your website's exposure when visitors use Google, Bing, or other search engines to look for items or services linked to your business. The higher your pages' exposure in search results, the more likely you are to draw attention and attract new and existing clients to your company.

How does SEO work?

Bots are used by search engines like Google and Bing to crawl the web, moving from site to site, collecting information about those sites, and indexing them. Consider the index to be a big library where a librarian may pull up a book (or a web page) to assist you in finding exactly what you're searching for.

Then, using hundreds of ranking criteria or signals, computers examine sites in the index to decide the order in which they should show in search results for a particular query. In our library analogy, the librarian has read every book in the collection and can tell you which one will contain the answers to your queries.

Our SEO success indicators may be used as proxies for user experience characteristics. It's how search bots determine how well a website or web page can provide the searcher with the information they want.

You can't buy search engines to gain higher organic search ranks, unlike paid search advertisements, therefore SEO specialists must put in the effort. This is where we can help.

Our Periodic Table of SEO Factors divides the variables into six categories and weights them according to their overall value to SEO. Content quality and keyword research, for example, are crucial site architectural criteria, but crawlability and speed are also important.

A list of Toxins that distract from SEO recommended practices are also included in the newly revised SEO Periodic Table. These are shortcuts or tactics that may have been sufficient to assure a high position back when search engines' algorithms were less sophisticated. And, for the time being, they could even work – at least until you're caught.

In addition, we've added a new Niche section that delves into the SEO success criteria for three main niches: local SEO, news/publishing, and e-commerce SEO. While our general SEO Periodic Table may help you with recommended practices, understanding the subtleties of SEO for each of these Niches will help your small company, recipe blog, and/or online store flourish in search results.

The search algorithms are intended to bring up relevant, authoritative pages and provide a quick search experience for visitors. Using these variables to optimize your site and content can help your pages rank better in search results.

Why is SEO important for marketing?

Because individuals make billions of searches every year, frequently for commercial purposes to obtain information about products and services, SEO is a critical component of digital marketing. Brands' major source of internet traffic is frequently searched, which is supplemented by other marketing channels. Better placement in search results than your competitors can have a significant influence on your bottom line.

However, over the last several years, search results have evolved to provide visitors with more direct answers and information, which are more likely to retain consumers on the results page rather than redirecting them to other websites.

Also, keep in mind that search results features like rich results and Knowledge Panels may enhance exposure and give users extra information about your organization right in the results.

To summarise, SEO is the cornerstone of a well-rounded marketing strategy. When you know what your website visitors desire, you can use that information for your paid and organic advertising, your website, and your social media assets, among other things.