SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the practice of optimizing a website or content to improve its visibility on search engines like Google, Bing, and others. The goal of SEO is to get the website to rank higher in the search engine results pages (SERPs), which leads to more organic (non-paid) traffic. When people search for topics related to your website, having good SEO helps ensure that your site appears prominently.
Search engines use algorithms to rank pages based on various factors. Here’s a breakdown of how SEO works:
- Crawling and Indexing Search engines use crawlers (also known as spiders or bots) to scan the web, discovering pages and following links. Once a page is found, it's indexed, meaning that the search engine saves the content for future searches.
- Ranking After indexing, search engines analyze the content and rank it based on several factors like relevance and quality. The results are then displayed when someone searches for a related query.
- On-Page SEO
This refers to optimizations you can make directly on your website to improve its ranking, such as:
- Off-Page SEO Refers to external signals that help improve a website’s authority and ranking. Key aspects include:
- Technical SEO This focuses on optimizing the infrastructure of your website for better crawling and indexing by search engines. It includes:
- User Experience (UX) SEO also considers how easy and enjoyable your website is to use:
- Organic Traffic: The number of visitors coming to your site from search engines.
- Keyword Rankings: Tracking where your site ranks for relevant keywords.
- Conversion Rates: The percentage of organic visitors that take a desired action (like making a purchase or filling out a form).
- Click-Through Rates (CTR): How many people click on your link when it appears in search results.
- Research keywords that people are searching for in your niche.
- Create high-quality, relevant content that satisfies searcher intent.
- Optimize your website’s speed and ensure it is mobile-friendly.
- Earn backlinks
from reputable websites.
- Monitor SEO performance with tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console.