What The Hell Does SEO Actually Mean?

Yay, marketing jargon.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a term that is thrown around a lot in the world of digital marketing. It’s something that businesses are told they need to focus on if they want to be successful online.

But what the hell does SEO actually mean?

Simply put, SEO is the practice of optimizing your website and its content in a way that makes it more likely to show up in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). When someone types a query into a search engine like The Google, the goal of SEO is to have your website appear at the top of the results page.

Why is this important?

Well, when you think about how many people use search engines every day to find answers to their questions, it becomes clear that showing up at the top of the SERPs can be incredibly valuable for businesses.

If your website is one of the first results that a user sees when they search for something related to your industry, it increases the likelihood that they will click on your website and potentially become a customer.

How do you actually go about optimizing your website for search engines?

There are a lot of different factors that go into SEO, but some of the key components include:

Keyword Research

This involves identifying the words and phrases that people are searching for in relation to your industry and then incorporating those keywords into your website’s content in a strategic way.

For example, if you’re thinking of starting a human statue business—you know, artists who pose as statues or mannequins, usually clad in silver paint who aren't quite mimes—you’ll need to use keywords throughout your website pages like “human statue”, “human statue services”, “human statue services in Calabasas”, “non-toxic paint unlike the kind the Tin Man used”, etc.

On-Page Optimization:

More jargon.

On-page optimization makes your page titles, meta descriptions, and header tags more appealing to both search engines and users.

Page titles are the clickable headlines that appear in search results:

Meta descriptions are short, informative snippets of text that appear below the page title:

Header tags are used to structure the content on a webpage and make it easier for both users and search engines to understand. They range from H1 (the main heading) to H6 (subheadings). This is too boring for me to provide a representative picture—no disrespect to human statue services.

Technical SEO

This refers to the behind-the-scenes aspects of your website that can impact its search engine visibility, such as site speed, mobile-friendliness, and the use of structured data.

For more on this, read this blog post.

Link Building

Credibility is currency, and this is where link building—acquiring links from other websites back to your own website—comes in.

This is also known as backlinking, and search engines view backlinks as an indication of the authority and relevance of a website's content, so having high-quality backlinks can help improve a website's search engine rankings.

But beware: not all links are created equally, and search engines have become increasingly adept at detecting and penalizing low-quality or spammy links.
So, what’s the takeaway besides human statuing?

While SEO can be a complex and ongoing process, the benefits of ranking well in search engine results pages can be significant. By taking the time to understand what SEO is and how it works, businesses can take steps to improve their online visibility and attract more customers to their websites.

About the Author, David Telisman

I am a Writer and Content Creator, and I work with businesses to inspire their customers to buy from them. I believe that my clients deserve to feel proud of how their content marketing looks and what it says, and I deliver by providing expert copywriting and marketing solutions.

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