Introduction to SEO

By jack123 | SEO | 0 Comments

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and it refers to the art of utilizing organic search results in your advantage to grow your traffic and its quality while increasing the exposure of your brand on the internet.

Even if it might sound complicated at first, SEO is about people as much as it is about search engines. It’s about understanding what people are searching, and the keywords they are using, in order to optimize, and promote your brand the best, directly to the users.

Understanding how SEO works and leveraging its features in your advantage is crucial for your site’s success, and because of that, we prepared this introduction into the world of SEO.

Traffic

Search engines are the heart of the internet, each time somebody requests for content based on a keyword these engines have to scroll through the whole internet to find sites relevant to the requirements mentioned in the search. The higher your site is ranked in the search engine results page (SERP), the more traffic you are going to get.  You can read our SEO Abbreviations Explained article to learn about all of the SEO related abbreviations.

Traffic is crucial for a website because without people to see your content, and buy your products, your website is useless. There are two types of traffic, the organic one, and the paid one. You can get paid traffic by utilizing SEM but you can read more about it in our What Is SEM and How to Use It article.

However, all you have to do for organic traffic is to improve your website, and your posts as much as possible so you get ranked higher in SERP. Currently, the SERPs are not only filled with organic content but, also with advertising, and SERP features meant to keep you on the pages for longer.

People can both pay to get into the SERP features but, also to get there organically through SEO, and appear in elements such as the featured snippets, and related questions.

Why SEO Matters

As said above, traffic is everything when it comes to a website, and even if through paid advertising users can generate a lot of short-term traffic, SEO is often the best option for the long term.

For advertising to keep on bringing you new users, you have to keep on feeding it with money. But, SEO is the type of investment that, if done correctly, can keep on paying you back over time, being crucial to your long-term relevance in the search results.

Even if SEO is important, not all SEO is created equal. There are two major types of SEO, white hat and black hat, and a third smaller one, a combination of the two called gray hat. White Hat SEO refers to the techniques and strategies that are approved by Google, and have the main focus of providing value to the people.

Black Hat SEO is the opposite of white hat and summarizes all of the techniques meant to falsely boost the reputation of a website, and its ranking in the search results, something completely prohibited by Google, and it can result in de-indexing from the search results, making a website useless.

Conclusion

SEO might not be the simplest concept on the planet but, at the same time it is not rocket science and it can be learned by anybody willing to improve their site and the search results rankings. Traffic is probably the most important thing to an online business, and the most effective long-term way of ensuring your success in the search results is by using White Hat SEO techniques.