What Is SEO / Search Engine Optimization?

in seo •  7 years ago 


SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” It is the process of getting traffic from the “free,” “organic,” “editorial” or “natural” search results on search engines.

More SEO Advice For Beginners
For more basic but also in-depth advice, our Periodic Table Of SEO Success Factors, shown below, introduces you to all the key concepts you need to know:

More SEO Guides & Books
Another excellent guide is Google’s “Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide.” This is a free PDF download that covers basic tips that Google provides to its own employees on how to get listed. You’ll find it here. Also well worth checking out is Moz’s “Beginner’s Guide To SEO,” which you’ll find here, and the SEO Success Pyramid from Small Business Search Marketing.

Daily SEO News & Expert SEO Advice
In addition to daily news stories from our editorial staff, Search Engine Land publishes daily articles from expert contributors that cover SEO issues mainly from an in-the-trenches perspective. Browse the SEO Channel for the most recent SEO news stories and expert columns, or sign up to receive all of our SEO related content via email.

Search Engine Land’s SEO Library
The SEO Library is an area within Search Engine Land that provides a collection of all stories we’ve written on the topic of SEO. We also have sub-categories, including:

SEO: Blogs & Feeds
SEO: Cloaking & Doorway Pages
SEO: Content and Writing
SEO: Crawling and Robots
SEO: Domains & URLs
SEO: Duplicate Content
SEO: Flash
SEO: General
SEO: Image Search
SEO: Local
SEO: Mobile Search
SEO: Redirects & Moving Sites
SEO: Spamming
SEO: Submitting & Sitemaps
SEO: Tagging
SEO: Titles & Descriptions
SEO: Video Search
Also see our related Link Building category and these sub-categories:

Link Building: Link Bombs
Link Building: Linkbait
Link Building: Paid Links
In addition to covering SEO generally, Search Engine Land also has search engine optimization areas specifically for each of the major search engines:

Google SEO
Bing SEO
Yahoo SEO
Also within our library is the How To: SEO section, which is devoted to practical tips and tactics about search engine optimization.

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Hi! I am a robot. I just upvoted you! I found similar content that readers might be interested in:
https://searchengineland.com/guide/what-is-seo

Search engine optimization is the process of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic to a website or a web page from search engines. SEO targets unpaid traffic rather than direct traffic or paid traffic

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.

How SEO works
You might think of a search engine as a website you visit to type (or speak) a question into a box and Google, Yahoo!, Bing, or whatever search engine you're using magically replies with a long list of links to webpages that could potentially answer your question.

That's true. But have you ever stopped to consider what's behind those magical lists of links?

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.

The O part of SEO—optimization—is where the people who write all that content and put it on their sites are gussying that content and those sites up so search engines will be able to 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 internal links at pages you're proud of.

very helpful post

good post...

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