You should care. You should care about it a lot. SEO is what’s going to determine the success of your website. Or at least how many people hear about it.
Okay, okay, let’s go back to the start and take it back to basics. As in…
What does SEO stand for?
SEO is short for Search Engine Optimization. More specifically, it’s “the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results”, as Moz.com notes.
Simply put, it refers to the process that needs to be done to improve your site’s visibility when people search for product, services or similar business as your in search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. As we mentioned before, these determine the success of your site; because the better visibility your pages have in search results, the more attention you will get and attract more business for yourself. Sounds good, right?
Yes, yes, it does sound good but have you ever thought about the fact that the list you get when you search for your favourite donut recipe isn’t random, but rather it’s carefully selected and brought to you by the search engine? Behind the magical list that you get is actually quite the process.
How does SEO work?
Basically, here’s the way it works: The search engine has a crawler, a program that systematically browses the web in order to create an index of data a.k.a. to know everything, anything, all of the time. These crawlers bring back the information and put them in an index, similarly to a librarian.
The last step is to match it to data that you looked for. Algorithms analyze the data brought forth by crawlers according to hundreds of ranking factors and signals. It basically estimates how well a website or web page can give the searcher what they’re searching for. After that process is done, boom, there they are, your results.
To make sure that nobody abuses the system, you can’t pay search engines to get higher organic search rankings. Paid search ads are the only workaround, but they don’t drive in an organic audience.
How can you make SEO work for you?
Well, it kind of already does. SEO already wants to do the best traffic for your website. To make sure that you’ll get the right kind, keep in mind that you will need to think about the Quality of it, the Quantity and if it’s Organic or not.
When we’re talking about the Quality of traffic. A lot of traffic is not always a good thing, especially if people are coming to you because they think you sell apples when, in reality, you sell clothes. Quite a bit of a reach, and with no use at all.
But don’t get me wrong, the quantity of traffic still matters. The more, the merrier. Just be sure that they are the right ones.
And if it’s Organic traffic, even better. Save some cash on Paid Ads and keep your business thriving!
Making these three things happen is actually quite easy, if you keep in mind that you need to offer those crawlers good content. Eventually, this good content needs to reach people, so you need to take both a technical and a human point of view. What I’m trying to say is:
- You need to make sure that search engines understand who you are, what you do and what you offer.
- You need to convince those search engines that you and only you can be the most credible option for the users.
- You need to create content that is actually deliverable and serviceable for the user.
So as you can see, SEO is quite a vast subject and it can’t possibly be summed up in a single article; even more, things are constantly changing, the industry standard changing, sometimes, even overnight. So keep on the lookout for new stuff around the corner.
Need help with your SEO? We can help, so let’s talk!
