A Beginner's Guide to SEO

Search Engine Optimization, SEO, is a technique of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to a website by increasing your ranking on search engine results pages.

Search Engines

Every time you enter words into a search engine, you see a results page with links to websites that address those words.  This is called the Search Engine Results Page (SERP), and those websites have arrived on this page through a process called crawling, in which search engines explore the internet and find websites that are relevant to the search.  Search engines then use an algorithm to display and rank these websites in a certain order- the higher the link, the greater the ranking score, and the more relevant to your search query.

What is SEO?

Search Engines rank by relevance and importance so the more relevant and authoritative your site is, the more likely it will show up in someone’s search results.  This is the optimization part of Search Engine Optimization: using techniques to write and display your website content in a way that helps search engines find and display it to an interested audience.  Think of a search engine as a librarian and the internet as a library.  A person comes to the library asking about a specific topic and the search engine librarian find the books relevant to what they’re interested in.  It is our job to inform the librarian search engine what our website is about and how it will be helpful to a searching person.

How does SEO work?

There are many ways to increase search ranking, but here are the basics:  Make sure your site is targeted for a specific audience and addresses questions this audience might have.  You do this through your content.  Optimize your website for search engines by making it well-organized, accessible to search engine crawlers, and mobile friendly.  Utilizing linking within your website and from other websites to strengthen your content and establish your authority with search engines.

Search engines were created to sift through massive amount of internet data to deliver specific content to users in need.  It is our job to make sure that search engines can easily find and understand our website and deliver it to our potential audience.  Read our tips on SEO best practices to learn how to best optimize your site for search engines.