What is SEO? Search Engine Optimization in Plain English

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has become a buzzword in digital businesses. What is SEO, though? In plain English, SEO is a set of tools you can use to increase the visibility of your content when your target audience searches for services or products that you provide.

This is the first article in our Introduction to SEO series of articles, where we will explore what SEO is, how to implement it in our WordPress websites on our own and also how to research keywords we want to rank for. All of the basics for a healthy and ranking website.

What Is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization helps to not just make sure that there are more people finding your content, but also that the right people are finding your content. We don’t just want to increase the quantity, we also want to ensure that the visitors to our site are of the right quality. After all, what is better? Having 100,000 views and only 5 of those people are actually potential customers or having 10,000 views and 1,000 of those are potential customers?

For the most part, in SEO, we are increasing this traffic to our content by utilizing organic traffic from major search engines like Google and Bing. Organic traffic is traffic that you don’t have to pay for through ads. This is the key difference between SEO-generated traffic and SEM (search engine marketing) paid traffic. Paid traffic through ads is only sustainable as long as you are whipping out your credit card. By creating generous amounts of organic traffic, though, you can continue to reap the rewards on a long-term basis.

It is not SEO Vs. SEM: both are important and you can and should do one or both, depending on your needs and business. A comprehensive SEO Strategy by an SEO Expert includes both in the planning.

Why Should You Care About Search Engines?

The reason you should care about search engines is because major search engines drive most of the online activity. If you aren’t ranking well with these search engines then you will be missing out on an incredible amount of organic traffic. 

Think about it: when you need something, what is the first thing you do? You search for it in google or any other search engine you use.

According to NetMarketShare, Google has the 69.80% among all search engines, with Bing (Microsoft’s Search Engine) coming in second at 13.31%.

How Do Search Engines Work?

There are two main processes that make search engines work: crawling and indexing. Crawling refers to the process where search engine crawlers go around websites looking at different pages and determining which ones are relevant to certain keywords. Once they find them, they add them into their database so that other users searching for similar terms can see them too.

Indexing is next and it’s how search engines determine relevance. It involves taking the data stored within the databases and organizing it based on topics, to allow for super-fast responses (we usually wait just fractions of a second after pressing the search button). For example, if I am trying to learn more about SEO, my search would return articles related to SEO rather than just one article

When you are looking for information on a specific topic, you head over to your favorite search engine and type in the question, topic, or phrase you are looking for. The minute you click “search” or hit the “enter” button, the search engine goes to work using the search algorithms it is programmed with to find the best results for your search query. 

When we specifically look at Google, during the time it takes to search, the bots scan through hundreds of billions of web pages to find the result that most closely matches your inquiry on the following factors: 

• Relevance 
• Authority
• Usefulness 

Search engines also take other factors into account, but these are the three that are most important. This scanning produces a familiar page filled with results that should closely match the information you are looking for. 

What are Keywords and Why do they Matter?

Keywords in SEO are the search terms that users enter into search boxes to find something specific. We can suggest search engines which keyword our website answers to, so that when a user finds something that matches our page, the search engine knows exactly where to send them.

Search engines are able to understand what our page is about, so if the search engine thinks our page does not provide relevant content, it will not list us in the search results, even if we added that keyword.

Search Engine’s purpose and aim is to provide the most relevant answers to user’s queries, so that they’re happy and satisfied.

The goal of every site owner should then be to make sure their pages appear high in SERPs (Search Engine Result Page), because these are the first places visitors look before deciding whether to click through to another web page.

How do I know which keywords to use?

There are lots of keyword research tools out there that help you come up with keywords so you can optimize your current content and decide on new content for your website.

Some of those tools are free, others come at a premium.

A few of the free resources are Google Trends, Google Search Console (add your own website), Answer the Public, 

There are also tools for rank tracking, so that we can know how our efforts are paying off, whether we are improving or if there are areas we should work on.

We will explore SEO tools later on in the series.

How Does SEO Work?

SEO works by optimizing your site for relevance, authority, and usefulness, and other elements as well. While SEO is very much about understanding how the algorithms of search engines work, it is also about understanding how human beings interact with search engines. 

Specifically, it is about understanding how your target audience searches for information and what topics they might want to know about, so that you can optimize your content for those searches. 

Good SEO is about ensuring that your content is considered valuable enough to include in that all-important first page of results, and as close as possible to the top of the page. The first result in a Google search gets around 20% of the clicks, so you definitely want to be as close to the top of the page as you can be. 

One very important note here: While we know the guidelines and more or less how search engine ranking works, we DO NOT have direct knowledge of its search engine algorithms and formula. We know what works today, but it might change and not work tomorrow. On the other hand, something that was frowned upon before could be well-received and work in the future. As such, it’s a very fluid field, with ranking factors constantly changing and thus the need to consistently update techniques and methods. It is not a solved kinda thing you just plug and be done forever, quite the opposite.

Why Is SEO Important?

While paid adverts within Google Ads and on social media will certainly help to increase your traffic, ranking high in search results organically is far more valuable. Most people using search engines understand that paid ads will always push content to the top of a search results page, but these pages are not necessarily the most authoritative, relevant, or useful. 

Google remains the highest source of traffic referral to websites. Nearly 60% of all internet traffic is still generated by Google searches. Many social media platforms are moving away from anything that risks taking eyes away from their platform, so if your goal is to create traffic to your own website, your greatest focus needs to be organic search traffic via SEO. 

3 Main Types of SEO

SEO is not just about how you organize or write your content. There are, in fact, three main types of SEO. 

On-Page SEO

On-page SEO is mainly focused on your content. It is about the mechanisms you use to engage your audience and bring traffic to your website. This includes:

• Blogs and Blog Post
• Web page content
• Podcasts
• Videos
• Infographics 

Some of the most important elements in the way you create your content include:

• Headings
• Page URLs (or slugs, like what-is-seo is this page’s slug)
• Meta descriptions (this is the summary that appears under each Google search result)
• Keywords (primary keywords, long-tail keywords and keyword clusters)
• Images (images SEO is pretty big!)
• Internal links
• External links

On-page SEO continues to be one of the most vital aspects of traffic generation. Businesses that publish content on a regular basis get up to 350% more traffic than similar websites that don’t. We explore that further on our series with WordPress SEO.

It is very important to note that while we do add relevant keywords in our content, we have to first and foremost write great content for our users.

The most important objective is to provide a great user experience, the website’s speed should be up to Google’s Core Web Vitals, the content should be High-Quality Content, relevant to what the user is searching for; it also must be original content, as well.

Mobile search can give different results than Desktop search as well, so websites need to be responsive as well as fast. A well made website is the foundation for On-Page SEO.

Search Engines factor these things in as well, and gone are the days of just adding your keyword everywhere and providing copy-pasted content that gets you no real answer: while some of those websites still rank, Google and other Search Engines regularly and systematically penalize them with each of the frequent search engine updates.

Off-Page SEO

Off-page SEO is everything that occurs away from your website rather than on it. The most important aspect of off-page SEO is backlinks.

What is a backlink? 

A backlink is when an external website links to your site or a piece of your content. When other sites link to yours, it helps to tell the search engine that your content is trustworthy and useful. Backlink building can be done through guest posting, creating valuable infographics that will be shared regularly, and also by mentioning influencers in your content.

Backlinks have become increasingly important for SEO because they’re used as part of algorithms that determine where a particular web page ranks. In addition, many businesses rely heavily on backlinks to drive organic traffic to their website.

Local SEO

Local SEO relates more to geography than anything else. It is the way that you attract a target audience that is close to your location. This is becoming more important as people start to use mobile phones to search for everything, including supermarkets, gas stations, and restaurants.  

You can benefit from local SEO by using keywords that would be used in searches for your type of establishment in the area as well as tools like Google My Business, Google Maps.

Your device’s geolocation also automatically makes your searches local for what Google or other search engines detect to be relevant. Say you type restaurant, you don’t need to write your area if you have geolocation active. You will see the most relevant results for your location.

Needless to say, Local SEO is crucial to any brick and mortar store or service.

What is White Hat, Grey Hat and Black Hat SEO?

White Hat SEO is developed by using good techniques, consistently, and over an extended period of time. It is the type of SEO that search engines like Google reward.There are certain guidelines or rules to follow, and White Hat SEO is about following them, keeping up to date and not trying to cheat your way up to better rankings. What we’re covering here is strictly White Hat.

Black Hat SEO, on the other hand, is when frowned-upon techniques like keyword stuffing are used that reduce the usefulness and relevance of content. 

Black Hat SEO will get you ranking in a very short period of time, but you will not stay there, and once search engines flag you as a dodgy creator, you may never lose that online stigma and your domain could be “banned”, as in, even if you stop doing Black Hat SEO, it might never rank. It offers very short-term results with long term consequences.

There’s also Grey Hat SEO, which falls somewhere between Black Hat and White Hat. Grey Hat SEO involves some unethical practices, but does so at a much lower level than Black Hat SEO.

Grey Hat SEO has been around since the beginning of Search Engine Optimization, but it was only recently that Google started penalizing websites who were found to engage in this practice.

It is far less risky than Black Hat SEO, but it still is not without risk.

White Hat SEO may take longer and more effort, but it will ensure that you are able to build a sustainable online business.

It’s a Wrap 

If you are looking to build an online presence and increase traffic to your website, SEO is crucial. Although it can sound intimidating, the most simple of techniques are not that difficult to implement, even if you are building your own website.

In our series we will explore some basics anyone can implement to start ranking in Google and other search engines. Next up is WordPress SEO.