Search Engine Optimization, more commonly referred to as SEO, is one of the most crucial aspects of marketing. As such, if you’re working to market your blog or your business, you need to know what SEO means and what the rules and ways of SEO success are. While a successful SEO strategy isn’t an exact science, and its practice has been challenged on many fronts throughout the years, knowing the basics is still important to an effective marketing campaign. For more information about SEO and how to incorporate it into your marketing efforts, refer to the following SEO introduction for beginners:
What is SEO?
SEO refers to the process of making a website more visible on a search engine’s results page. To clarify, a great SEO strategy will put a company’s website at the top of the list on a Google search page, therefore increasing the likelihood that people will visit the site. Search engines strive to provide the most relevant results for a person conducting a search, so that when a person runs an internet search for “cupcakes,” the first thing to appear isn’t a cookie shop, but a bakery that specializes in cupcakes as well as a definition of the dessert. In other words, SEO helps to make a search relevant to the user and can be critical in driving traffic to your site.
Search engines work by searching the Internet to find text that meets certain criteria. This text is known as keywords and refers to the most important theme(s) of the website, company, or product. Scouring the online world to find keywords are why, as in the example above, a search for “cupcakes” yields a result of multiple pages about cupcakes, not cookies. Other important things that a search engine uses to rank a website include titles, headings, and links that make up the content of a website’s pages. Search engines also employ search engine indexing to find, digest, and store the content of a website. A search engine index refers to the set of data that’s used to base a final search result on.
