SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results.

What goes into SEO?

To understand the true meaning of SEO, let’s break that definition down and look at the parts:

• Quality of traffic. You can attract all the visitors in the world, but if they’re coming to your site because Google tells them you’re a resource for Apple computers when really you’re a farmer selling apples, that is not quality traffic. Instead you want to attract visitors who are genuinely interested in products that you offer.
• Quantity of traffic. Once you have the right people clicking through from those search engine results pages (SERPs), more traffic is better.
• Organic results. Ads make up a significant portion of many SERPs. Organic traffic is any traffic that you don’t have to pay for.Organic search traffic is specifically any unpaid traffic that comes from SERPs.

How SEO works

You might think of a search engine as a website that you are visiting to type (or speak) a query into a box and Google, Yahoo! , Bing, or whatever search engine you use automatically responds with a long list of links to web pages that could address your query.

It is real. But have you ever stopped wondering what lies behind those magical connection lists?

Here’s how it works:

Google (or any search engine you’re using) has a crawler that goes out and gathers information about all the content they can find on the Internet. The crawlers bring all those 1s and 0s back to the search engine to build an index. That index is then fed through an algorithm that tries to match all that data with your query. There are a lot of factors that go into a search engine’s algorithm.

That’s all the SE (search engine) of SEO.

The O part of SEO — optimization — is where the people who write all that content and put it on their pages gussin that content and those pages up so that search engines can understand what they’re seeing, and the users who arrive via search will like what they see.

Optimization can take many forms. It’s everything from making sure the title tags and meta descriptions are both informative and the right length to pointing to internal links at pages you’re proud of.

The Crucial Elements of SEO

Keywords

Long gone are the days when keywords were the only important SEO strategy, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t still crucial. The difference is that today keywords need to be well-researched, carefully chosen, and judiciously used in your content in order to be effective. But what exactly are keywords? Keywords are words and phrases used by prospects to locate online content, which can then be used by brands to communicate with prospects searching their goods and services.

When researching keywords, it’s important to look for ones that have high search rates and low competition and to choose short-tail keywords (such as dog), long-tail keywords (such as terrier puppies for sale), and local keywords (such as puppies for sale in Boston) to work into your content. You can also use keywords to optimize all your titles, URLs, and other on-page SEO elements (more on that later).

Content

Content is a vital part of SEO because it’s the vehicle you’re using to reach and engage audiences. For example, if you owned a nursery and wanted to increase your visibility, you might be able to publish a series of blogs about gardening, choosing the right plant species, growing tips, and more. If someone who wanted to know about gardening was looking for that information, your blog would come up, and you’d be able to build a relationship with that prospect by providing valuable information. When the time came for the prospect of buying a plant, for example, you would have been the first nursery to come to mind. Today’s content must be educational, but it must also be interesting, relevant, engaging and shared. Comes in a variety of forms, including:

• Web page content
• Videos
• Blogs
• Infographics
• Podcasts
• Whitepapers and e-books
• Social media posts
• Local Listings

Off-Page SEO

Off-page SEO involves external optimization practices that happen away from your site rather than on it. The main technique used for off-page SEO is backlink building since quality backlinks to your site from external sites tell search engines that your site is valuable and high-quality, and this builds authority.

There are many tactics to backlink building, and some of the current best practices include guest blogging, creating lots of infographics that will be highly shared, and mentioning influencers in your content.

Local SEO

Local SEO is becoming increasingly important as more and more people use mobile devices for search. These days, 57% of all searches are performed from tablets and smartphones, and half of those searches have local intent.

If you owned a restaurant, for example, then local SEO would make sure that when people in your area were looking for the best restaurants in the city, they would come across your site. In addition to using local keywords, other local SEO best practices include claiming directory listings, creating location-specific pages for your site, and creating pages for your business on Google My Business, Google+, and Google Maps.

Search Engine Marketing

Search engine marketing (SEM) refers to paid marketing efforts, and it includes things like native ads, Google AdWords, social media ads, pay-per-click, Google shopping ads, display ads, and more. Although SEM isn’t usually a major component of a comprehensive SEO strategy, it does have its place because it can help you reach new and highly targeted audiences.

Final thoughts

As you can see, SEO is a complex undertaking that involves a variety of techniques, tactics and best practices. Moreover, these best practices are constantly evolving as consumer and web-user behaviors change, as new technologies emerge, and as search engines change their algorithms. That being said, SEO is still of the utmost importance to any business that wants to be visible online, so your efforts are well worth it.