If you’re new to digital marketing, search engine optimization (SEO) may seem a bit mysterious. While it’s true there are a lot of rules, many of which seem to change frequently and aren’t totally transparent, there are some simple SEO basics that anyone can learn and apply to their content to increase traffic from organic search.
What is SEO?
Search engine optimization is exactly how it sounds: optimizing your website’s content for search engines. That way Google (and other search engines) can easily
index your content, categorize each of your pages based on the information they contain, and then serve those pages up to people who are looking for that information on the Internet.
Why You Need to Optimize Your Website for SEO?
By making some simple tweaks to your website’s content, users who are searching online will be more likely to find you, which means increased traffic to your site. One case study by Backlinko shows an incredible 385% boost in organic traffic that resulted from SEO efforts.
According to Search Engine Journal, 70-80% of users ignore the paid ads, focusing instead on organic search results. SEO is one of the cheapest and easiest ways to drive more traffic to your website. Frankly, by not optimizing for search, you’re leaving visitors on the table.
To develop an SEO strategy, it helps to first understand the basics of how search engines work.
How Search Engines Work?
A search engine’s main process is threefold: crawling, indexing, and querying. Let’s define each.
Crawling: A search engine runs a software program called a “spider” to discover content on the web.
Indexing: The search engine analyzes the content it finds to determine what it’s about, then indexes it–or organizes the content–so that it’s quickly retrieved when the next step occurs.
Querying: When you conduct a search online, the search engine fetches a list of results for you to consider. These search results appear on a SERP, or a Search Engine Results Page. As Google puts it, “…our algorithms look up your search terms in the index to find the appropriate pages.”
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