What is SEO?

What is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results.

What goes into SEO?

To understand the true meaning of SEO, let's break that definition down and look at the parts:

• Quality of traffic. You can attract all the visitors in the world, but if they're coming to your site because Google tells them you're a resource for Apple computers when really you're a farmer selling apples, that is not quality traffic. Instead you want to attract visitors who are genuinely interested in products that you offer.
• Quantity of traffic. Once you have the right people clicking through from those search engine results pages (SERPs), more traffic is better.
• Organic results. Ads make up a significant portion of many SERPs. Organic traffic is any traffic that you don't have to pay for.

How SEO works

You might think of a search engine as a website you visit to type (or speak) a question into a box and Google, Yahoo!, Bing, or whatever search engine you're using magically replies with a long list of links to webpages that could potentially answer your question.

That's true. But have you ever stopped to consider what's behind those magical lists of links?

Here's how it works: Google (or any search engine you're using) has a crawler that goes out and gathers information about all the content they can find on the Internet. The crawlers bring all those 1s and 0s back to the search engine to build an index. That index is then fed through an algorithm that tries to match all that data with your query.

Learning SEO

This section of our site is here to help you learn anything you want about SEO. If you're completely new to the topic, start at the very beginning and read the Beginner's Guide to SEO. If you need advice on a specific topic, dig in wherever suits you.

The on-page and off-page SEO groups each have several subgroups, and each chapter of this SEO guide is dedicated to helping you navigate that particular facet of SEO.

SEO factors work in combination

SEO factors do not exist in a vacuum. Well-optimized HTML titles won’t compensate for thin content. Blazing fast site speed won’t help if search engines can’t easily crawl your pages. Simply put, having several positive factors can increase your odds of success, but negative factors can worsen those odds.

n-page search ranking factors are almost entirely within the publisher’s control. This is also where it’s critical to balance serving the needs of your audience with making your pages search engine friendly.

The title of the page or article, the depth of research, keywords used and so on should all be used with your specific audience’s needs in mind. HTML headings, anchor text and more should provide clues for both search engines and your audience about the relevancy of your content. Your site architecture should help search engine crawlers navigate your site and help users find what they’re looking for.

Off-page SEO factorsThe search engines don’t just evaluate what’s on the page and visible to users. Off-page ranking factors are typically out of the creator or publisher’s direct influence. Search engines evaluate reputation, the quality of a site’s backlinks, the user’s geographic location and many other factors to deliver the most relevant results.

Although these factors aren’t as easy to control on a per-page basis, they must be taken into account when optimizing your site for search.

Toxins

When done well, SEO benefits the search engines just as much as it benefits sites. SEO helps search engines provide users with better search results. However, using SEO techniques that aim to manipulate ranking signals to gain an unfair advantage over the competition can backfire.

We group spam and so-called "black hat" techniques into "toxins." Using them can result in your pages receiving a ranking penalty or even getting banned from the search results entirely.

Emerging verticals

Voice, local, image and video search have their own special chapter in this guide because they represent different ways for users to find your content. Each of these emerging verticals has its own distinguishing features, nuances and opportunities for brands and publishers. However, they also correspond to one or more of the base elements in our Periodic Table and do not require a completely new way of viewing SEO.

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