What is SEO and How Can It Help Your Website?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic to a website or web page from search engines. Learn how SEO can help your website rank higher on Google.

What is SEO and How Can It Help Your Website?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic to a website or web page from search engines. It focuses on unpaid traffic rather than direct or paid traffic, and is designed to increase visibility when people search for products or services related to your business. SEO stands for search engine optimization, and it involves taking steps to help a website or content rank higher on Google.

The better the visibility of your pages in search results, the more likely you are to attract attention and potential customers. SEO is an art and science that involves understanding how search engines work, what people search for, the actual search terms or keywords typed into search engines, and which search engines are preferred by your target audience.

SEO can be broken down into two main categories: on-page SEO and off-page SEO. On-page SEO involves optimizing individual web pages in order to rank higher and earn more relevant traffic in search engines. Off-page SEO focuses on increasing the authority of a website through building links, enhancing online presence, and improving social media visibility.

To get shares in the SEO game, you need to create amazing content that people like to read, on a site where people are reading. But you can also create linkable assets that bloggers in the SEO world will want to share with their audience. To get data on the actual keywords people are looking for, you can look at traffic at the page level (outside your site's homepage).

Technical SEO has expanded to include topics such as site loading speed, mobile optimization, and more. If you're a small business that would benefit from ranking for very specific geographic terms, strengthen your local SEO efforts. The periodic SEO table also includes a list of toxins that detract from SEO best practices. As you evaluate your SEO practices, you can analyze what Google uses to train human content evaluators.

SEO is a fundamental part of digital marketing because people perform trillions of searches every year, often with the commercial intention of finding information about products and services. Let's finish this beginner's SEO tutorial with a handful of emerging trends in the world of digital marketing.