What is SEO?

SEO stands for search engine optimization, which involves increasing the quantity and quality of traffic on your website through organic search engine results.

What goes into SEO?

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

Quality of traffic. You can attract all visitors to the world, but if they visit your site because Google tells them that you are a resource for Apple computers, then you are a farmer selling apples, it is not a question of quality traffic. You want to attract visitors who are really interested in the products you offer.

Quantity of traffic. Once you have the right people clicking on these search engine results pages (SERP), more traffic is better.

Organic results. Ads are an important part of many SERPs. Organic traffic is any traffic for which you do not have to pay.

How SEO works

You can think of a search engine as a website visited to type (or speak) a question in a box and Google, Yahoo !, Bing, or the search engine you use, magically responds with a long list links to web pages that: could potentially answer your question.

That is true. But have you ever thought about what's behind these magic link lists?

Here's how it works: Google (or any search engine you use) has a crawler that collects information about all content available on the Internet. The robots bring all these 1 and 0 back to the search engine to create an index. This index is then fed through an algorithm that tries to match all this data to your query.

The algorithm of a search engine depends on many factors. Here's how a group of experts ranked their importance:

It's all SE (search engine) SEO.

The O part of SEO, optimization, is where people who write all this content and put it on their sites consume that content and these sites so that search engines can understand what they see and the users who are coming. via the search will love what they see.

Optimization can take many forms. All you have to do is make sure that the title tags and meta-descriptions are both informative and of the right length, as well as point internal links to pages you are proud of.

Learning SEO

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

Here is a general overview:

Building an SEO-friendly site

Once you're ready to start this SEO step, it's time to apply these SEO techniques to a site, whether it's a new or old site that you are improving.

These pages will help you get started with everything from selecting a SEO-compatible domain name to best practices for internal links.

Content and related markup

A site is not really a site until you have content. But SEO for the content has enough specific variables that we gave it its own section. Start here if you're interested in keyword research, writing a friendly text for SEO and the type of tag that allows search engines to understand what your content really is.

On-site topics

You have already learned a lot about the topics covered on the site by analyzing the content and associated tags. It is now time to get technical information about the robots.txt file.

Link-related topics

Dig in everything you always need to know about links from anchor text to redirection. Read this series of pages to understand how and when to use nofollow and if the guest blogging is actually dead. If you're more interested in building links (to improve your site ranking by earning links), go directly to the Beginner's Guide to Linking.

Other optimization

Congratulations! You master the ins and outs of daily SEO and are now ready for some advanced topics. Make sure all traffic has the simplest possible time with conversion with conversion rate optimization (CRO), then go micro level with local SEO or take this site globally with international SEO.

The evolution of SEO

Search engine algorithms change frequently and SEO tactics change with these changes. So, if someone offers SEO tips that do not seem quite right, check out the specific topic page.

For a more technical look at SEO, watch this short video of Rand Fishkin.