Exactly what is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and when done consistently it will increase the quantity and quality of traffic to your website. A good SEO plan requires continuous improvement cycles.

Search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, Yandex, and DuckDuckGo compete with each other to provide people searching the web with the most relevant search results so they will use their platforms for searching.

These Search Engines constantly send out bots or spiders that crawl website pages looking for new information to store in a database where it can quickly retrieve information for a searcher’s query. The more relevant and authoritative the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) is for the searcher’s query, the more likely the searcher will return to use that specific search engine.

When a person types a search query into a search engine text box, this query consists of a word or a phrase that is technically known as a keyword or key phrase. The search engine’s job is to instantly present links to the most relevant and authoritative information associated with the keywords and phrases in the search query.

That is why you need Keywords and Key Phrases on your site. It’s important to use keywords and phrases in your page titles, headlines, sub-headings, copy, and image alt tags. It’s the difference between getting people to stay on your site or to bounce away. If a person comes to your site and sees the keywords or phrases they typed into the search engine text box then your site looks relevant and they will read your content or turn it into a sale or conversion.

Google web crawlers see the title of your site and human site visitors see your site’s headlines. Google’s search bots are smart just like your site’s human readers and both want to see natural-sounding copy that is informative, relevant, and authoritative.  In order to gain the trust of your site visitors, it’s important that the keywords and phrases sound natural, relevant, and authoritative.

Now Google’s web crawler algorithm looks for other things too like site structure, page load speed, backlinks, internal links, and user experience in general. So as you can see, SEO can be a full-time effort. The more you put into it the better off your site will be. You also are competing with the big brand sites in your industry. Google is always changing its algorithm and it just updated to help smaller websites rank. So if you are a small website, you can compete but you have to be even more vigilant.

SEO, when done effectively can bring more traffic to your site but you need to be vigilant and, refresh your website at regular intervals with relevant, authoritative, informative content and you need to follow a good SEO plan.