What is SEO?

Simply put, SEO stands for search engine optimisation, the practice of increasing both the quantity and quality of traffic coming to your website via organic search engine results.

To properly understand what we mean when we say search engine optimisation, we’ll need to break it down into a few different parts:

Quality of Traffic

This refers to the type of traffic that your website is going to receive via your SEO efforts. If you’re selling homegrown apples, but your content is bringing in people who are looking for Apple products/tech, then you’re not attracting quality traffic. You want to attract visitors who are genuinely interested in your products and/or services.

Quantity of Traffic

Once you’ve found that you’re able to bring in the right quality of traffic through search engine results pages (SERPs), more is always better.

Organic Results

Advertising makes up a large portion of SERPS. Paying to put your website in users’ search result pages is a common thing. Organic results refer to any traffic to your website that you didn’t pay for. Content Marketing is usually the best way of bringing in organic views.

How Does SEO Work?

When you type something into Google (or Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, whatever your search engine of choice is) and run a search for it, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the results you’re shown are magically made to appear before your eyes.

And, to an extent, that’s somewhat true!

But do you ever stop to think about how those results were selected for you? I guess you probably do if you’re reading this…

Anyway, in a nutshell, search engines are powered by something called Crawlers. These are little robots (they’re actually algorithmic scripts, but it’s more interesting to say robot) that crawl the internet in search of content. When they find something, they rush back to the search engine with it. This search engine then uses it to build what’s known as an Index. This index is then fed through another algorithm that tries to match related data with your search term.

There are a whole bunch of factors that go into search engine algorithms, but that’s a quick (albeit simplified) explanation of what’s going on behind the scenes.

That’s the SE (search engine) bit, now it’s time for the O (optimisation).

Search engine optimisation comes in many different forms, but the most common of these is publishing content to your website.

This is where people will create a range of content (blog posts, videos, infographics, you name it) with the aim of getting them to appear in search engine result pages, or SERPs for short.

The way this works is by including keywords, both short- and long-tail. It’s these keywords the crawlers are looking for.

By including plenty of keywords, there’s more chance that a search engine will show your website when somebody is searching for something relevant.

So if you’re looking to bring in traffic to your website that’s selling spa weekends, you’d write blog posts and create content around that. The 10 Best Benefits you Get From a Spa Experience, for example.

In Conclusion

SEO is the process of optimising a website to give it a higher chance of being shown in more search engine results pages. The goal of SEO is to improve both the quality and quantity of organic traffic coming to a website.

A great way of boosting your SEO is by stretching ideas to get multiple pieces of content from them. By repurposing blog content for Instagram, and linking back to your website, you can boost your SEO by creating backlinks!