What is SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO) refers to techniques that help your website rank higher in organic (or “natural”) search results, thus making your website more visible to people who are looking for your product or service via search engines.
SEO is part of the broader topic of Search Engine Marketing (SEM), a term used to describe all marketing strategies for search. SEM entails both organic and paid search. With paid search, you can pay to list your website on a search engine so that your website shows up when someone types in a specific keyword or phrase. Organic and paid listings both appear on the search engine, but they are displayed in different locations on the page.
So, why is it important for your business‟ website to be listed on search engines? On Google alone, there are over 694,000 searches conducted every second.i Think about that. Every second that your website is not indexed on Google, you are potentially missing out on hundreds, if not thousands of opportunities for someone to visit your website, read your content, and potentially buy your product or service. Practicing SEO basics, as well as more advanced techniques after those, can drastically improve your website‟s ability to rank in the search engines and get found by your potential customers.
What about paid search? Yes, you can pay to have your website listed on the search engines. However, running paid search campaigns can be quite costly if you don‟t know what you‟re doing. Not to mention, about 88% of search engine users never click on paid search ads anyway.ii
Because the sole purpose of a search engine is to provide you with relevant and useful information, it is in everyone‟s best interest (for the search engine, the searcher, and you) to ensure that your website is listed in the organic search listings. In fact, it is probably best to stay away from paid search all together until you feel you have a firm grasp on SEO and what it takes to rank organically.
How Search Engines Work
Search engines have one objective – to provide you with the most relevant results possible in relation to your search query. If the search engine is successful in providing you with information that meets your needs, then you are a happy searcher. And happy searchers are more likely to come back to the same search engine time and time again because they are getting the results they need.
In order for a search engine to be able to display results when a user types in a query, they need to have an archive of available information to choose from. Every search engine has proprietary methods for gathering and prioritizing website content. Regardless of the specific tactics or methods used, this process is called indexing. Search engines actually attempt to scan the entire online universe and index all the information so they can show it to you when you enter a search query.
How do they do it? Every search engine has what are referred to as bots, or crawlers, that constantly scan the web, indexing websites for content and following links on each webpage to other webpages. If your website has not been indexed, it is impossible for your website to appear in the search results. Unless you are running a shady online business or trying to cheat your way to the top of the search engine results page (SERP), chances are your website has already been indexed.
The search engines consider two main areas when determining what your website is about and how to prioritize it.
1. Content on your website: When indexing pages, the search engine bots scan each page of your website, looking for clues about what topics your website covers and scanning your website‟s back-end code for certain tags, descriptions, and instructions.
2. Who’s linking to you: As the search engine bots scan webpages for indexing, they also look for links from other websites. The more inbound links a website has, the more influence or authority it has. Essentially, every inbound link counts as a vote for that website‟s content.
A few factors that a search engine algorithm may consider when deciding what information to show in the SERP include:
- Geographic location of the searcher
- Historical performance of a listing (clicks, bounce rates, etc.)
- Link quality (reciprocal vs. one-way)
- Webpage content (keywords, tags, pictures)
- Back end code or HTML of webpage
- Link type (social media sharing, link from media outlet, blog, etc.)
What it Takes to Rank
It is not difficult to get your website to index and even rank on the search engines. However, getting your website to rank for specific keywords can be tricky. There are essentially 3 elements that a search engine considers when determining where to list a website on the SERP: rank, authority, and relevance.
Rank
Rank is the position that your website physically falls in on the SERP when a specific search query is entered. If you are the first website in the organic section of the SERP (don‟t be confused by the paid ads at the very top), then your rank is 1. If your website is in the second position, your rank is 2, and so on. As discussed previously in How Search Engines Work, your rank is an indicator of how relevant and authoritative your website is in the eyes of the search engine, as it relates to the search query entered.
Relevance
Relevance is a one of the most critical factors of SEO. The search engines are not only looking to see that you are using certain keywords, but they are also looking for clues to determine how relevant your content is to a specific search query. Besides actual text on your webpages, the search engines will review your website‟s structure, use of keywords in your URLs, page formatting (such as bolded text), and what keywords are in the headline of the webpage versus those in the body text.
While there is no way to track how relevant your website is, there are some SEO basics you can practice to cover your bases and make sure you are giving the search engines every possible opportunity to consider your website. We‟ll get to that in just a bit.
Glossary :
Algorithm - The calculation the search engines use to find the most relevant information in relation to a search query.
Alt Tags - Short snippets of code that allow you to tag each photo on your site with a short text blurb.
Anchor Text – Text in your webpage content that is linked to another website or webpage.
Black Hat SEO – A back-handed approach to SEO that involves shortcuts and manipulation of a website. It is prohibited by the search engines.
Keyword Density – How often a keyword is mentioned on a page.
Headline Tags – HTML code tags denoted by “<h1>Headline</h1>” that make the text bigger than other text on the page.
Head Terms – phrases more generic in nature (usually 1-2 keywords long) that garner significant amount of search engine traffic, but provide little return.
HTML – Stands for Hypertext Markup Language is a standardized code for tagging text files to formate font, color, graphic, and hyperlinks to create webpages.
Inbound Links – Links to your website from external websites that are not on your domain.
Indexing – The process used by the search engines to crawl the web, scanning webpages and storing information about them.
Link Building – The process of generating inbound links from other websites.
Link Juice – The boost given to a website‟s authority via inbound links from other authoritative websites.
Long-tail – The theory used to explain that while a majority of search traffic results from a small percentage of keywords (the head) there millions of unique keywords that make up a significant volume of search traffic in aggregate (the tail).
No-Follow – Tag placed in HTML code around links that are paid to tell the search engines not to give them any link juice.
Search Query – Term used to describe the actual keyword or phrase a search engine user typed into the search engine.
SEM (Search Engine Marketing) – Refers to all aspects of search, including organic and paid listings.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) – The process of optimizing your website‟s content so it‟s easy for the search engines to find your content, index it, and determine how relevant it is to a specific search query.
Tail Terms – Keywords phrases usually 3 or more keywords in length that garner a small volume of search traffic but are much more valuable because they provide a better qualified traffic than head terms.
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