What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization.
What is meant by SEO?
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To understand the true meaning of SEO, let’s break down that definition and take a look at its parts:
What is SEO?
- Traffic Quality. You can attract all the visitors in the world, but if they come to your site because Google tells them you’re a resource for Apple computers when you’re actually a farmer selling apples, that’s not quality traffic. Instead, what you want is to attract visitors who are genuinely interested in the products you offer.
- Quantity traffic. Once you have the right people clicking through from the search engine results pages (SERPs), more traffic is better.
- Organic results. Ads are an important part of many SERPs. Organic traffic is any traffic that you don’t have to pay for.
- Translation done with the free version of the translator
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How SEO works
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You can think of a search engine as a website you visit to type (or say) a question in a box and Google, Yahoo!, Bing or whatever other search engine you’re using magically responds with a long list of links to web pages that might answer your question.
You can think of a search engine as a website you visit to type (or say) a question in a box and Google, Yahoo!
That’s true. But have you ever stopped to think about what’s behind those magical lists of links?
But what’s behind those magical lists of links?
Here’s how it works: Google (or whatever search engine you use) has a crawler that goes out and collects information about all the content it 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 fed through an algorithm that tries to match all that data to your query.
Many factors are involved in a search engine algorithm, the importance of which has been ranked by a group of experts:
Level of the domain and keywords in it: 5.21%.
The level of the domain and keywords in it: 5.21%.
Use of keywords in the domain: 6.98%
Social metrics: 7.28%
Usability, usability and traffic: 8.06%
Brand image: 8.59%
Page level and keyword count: 9.8%
Page level and number of keywords: 9.8%
Keyword level and content: 14.94%
Link characteristics: 19.15%
Link characteristics: 19.15%
Domain authority and links it owns: 20.94%
That’s all the SE (search engine) part of SEO.
The O part of SEO – the optimization – is when the people who write all that content and put it on their sites, guess that content and those sites so that the search engines are able to understand what they’re seeing, and the users who come in through search like what they see.
Optimization can take many forms. It’s everything from making sure your title tags and meta descriptions are informative and the right length, to pointing internal links to pages you’re proud of.
Optimization can take many forms.
Learn SEO
This section of our site is here to help you learn all you want about SEO. If you are completely new to the subject, start at the beginning and read the Beginner’s Guide to SEO. If you need advice on a specific topic, drill down where it suits you.
Building an SEO-friendly website
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Once you’re ready to start walking the SEO walk, it’s time to apply those SEO techniques to a site, whether it’s new or an old one that’s improving.
These pages will help you get started with everything from selecting an SEO-friendly domain to best practices for internal linking.
Related content and branding
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A site isn’t really a site until it has content. But SEO for content has enough specific variables that we’ve given it its own section. Start here if you’re curious about keyword research, how to write SEO-friendly copy, and the kind of markup that helps search engines understand what your content is really about.
Web site topics
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You’ve already learned a lot about the topics on the site by digging into the content and related markup. Now it’s time to get technical with the information about robots.txt.
Topics related to links
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Dive deeper into everything you need to know about links, from anchor text to redirection. Read this series of pages to understand how and when to use nofollow and whether guest blogging is really dead. If you’re more interested in the link building side (working to improve your site’s rankings by earning links), go straight to the Beginner’s Guide to Link Building.
Other optimization
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Congratulations! You’ve mastered the ins and outs of everyday SEO and now you’re ready for some advanced topics. Make sure all that traffic has the easiest conversion possible with conversion rate optimization (CRO), then move to the micro level with local SEO or take that site to the global level with international SEO.
The evolution of SEO
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Search engine algorithms change frequently and SEO tactics evolve in response to those changes. So, if someone offers you SEO advice that doesn’t seem quite right, check out the specific topic page.