SEO stands for search engine optimization, which is the art of ranking high on search engines in the unpaid section, also known as the organic listings — quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results.
Unpaid traffic may originate from different searches, including image, video, academic, news, and industry-specific vertical search engines.
How it works:
Google, or Bing, has a crawler that goes out and gathers information about all the content they can find on the Internet. The crawlers bring all those back to the search engine to build an index fed through an algorithm. The algorithm then tries to match all that data with your search query.
When you understand how SEO works, you can use different tactics to increase your visibility (or how high you rank) in search results.
You can categorize SEO tactics in two ways:
On-page SEO: All on-page SEO strategies happen on your website.
Off-page SEO: All off-page strategies happen off your website.
On-page and off-page SEO’s goal is to make your site more friendly and reliable to users and search engines.
When search engine crawlers see how friendly your website is to them and users, it increases the chances that your site will rank well for different searches.
Today, search engines use more than 200 different factors to generate search results, which means a lot of other elements influence your placement in search results.
Examples of ranking factors:
- A Secure and Accessible Website
- Age Speed (Including Mobile Page Speed)
- Mobile Friendliness
- Domain Age, URL, and Authority