What Does SEO Stand For?

What Exactly Does SEO Stand For?


SEO Stands for Search Engine Optimization, which means increasing your website’s traffic by showing on the first page of organic search engine results.

 

How To Do SEO?


So how do you actually do SEO successfully? To better understand what goes into doing SEO well, we need to understand what the goal of SEO really is.

Good SEO comes down to gaining two types of organic traffic; high quality and high quantity traffic.

 

        1. Quality organic traffic is important because if you attract a lot of visitors but for the wrong reasons, then visitors will just leave very soon after landing on your web page. Instead it is much better to target traffic and visitors that are genuinely interested in your products or services.
        2. Now that quality traffic is coming through from the search engine results pages (SERPs) to your website, you’ll want to increase the quantity of the quality organic traffic as much as possible.

 

Paid ads can take up a significant portion of the SERPs, SEO is concerned with gaining organic traffic, that is traffic you don’t have to pay for. Organic traffic is any unpaid traffic that has come from SERPs.

 

 

How Does SEO Work?


Google, Yahoo!, Bing, DuckDuck Go all may look like basic websites that you type search terms into (or ask with your voice) and magically generate any results that you need, but there’s more going on than you think.


Let’s take a look at what’s actually going on behind the list of links that Google serves to us.


How it works is that Google (and all search engines) have a crawler, which crawls the internet for information from all of the content that it can find. This information is then brought back to the search engine and indexed. This created and index of information which is then put through an algorithm which tried to serve the most relevant content and data for your query.


The search engine’s algorithm is where things get interesting in regards to SEO. There are many ranking factors that go into the algorithm. Not all of the rankings factors are openly shared by Google or any other search engine. But there is a vast SEO community to engage with and who are dedicated to sharing their SEO wins, loses, advice and experiments.


For a quick list of the most important ranking factors for Google in 2020, Optinmonster has a
great article.


Let’s talk about the ‘O’ in ‘SEO’, optimization. Having the technical knowledge in how to implement SEO work is important. Successfully implementing optimized SEO changes on a website is what will help the search engine to understand what the users want to see as a result for their search query,


There are lots of different ways to optimize a website for SEO, from making sure metadata targets relevant and valuable keywords, to having a great internal linking strategy that utilizes link equity effectively.

 

How To Build An SEO Friendly Website

 

        1. Fast Web Host Provider
          Fast web hosts don’t have to be expensive in 2020, there are some great deals out there from fast web hosts.
        2. User Friendly CMS
          Choosing an easy to use platform such as WordPress will allow you to implement SEO optimizations without having to know how to code.
        3. Keyword Research
          Reverse engineer your SEO process by finding out which relevant search terms (keywords) your website should target first. You can then use these keywords to do technical and on-page optimizations, such as writing targeted metadata and content.
        4. Internal Linking
          Make sure that all of your pages that you wish to rank on Google (or any other search engine) have internal links pointing to it from other pages. Once you begin to gain backlinks to your website you can use internal links to pass on link equity and subsequently help to improve it’s page authority, and therefore rankings on search engines.
        5. Create Content
          Create engaging content around your subject or industry that your audience will enjoy and will peak their interest. Whether it’s creating videos or content on social media, or writing content for your website’s blog, this will all help to build your organic presence on search engines. Great content over time will help to build backlinks and create brand awareness for your website.


As you may know by now, SEO is a deep topic that has a lot of moving parts, but also is always evolving, updating and changing. There’s a lot more to dive into in regards to technical SEO, which we strongly recommend you look into before creating your SEO friendly website.


There are many great voices for SEO out there, we would recommend these websites and articles to get you started in technical SEO and SEO in general.


As always, feel free to contact us if you’d like to ask us any SEO questions, whether it;’s how to build a new website, optimize an existing site or more technical issues.