SEO stands for "search engine optimization." This means designing your website and pages in such a way as to appear at the top of Google queries. So if you sell smartphones, you want your website to come up whenever someone searches for "buy smartphones online" or whenever they search for "the best smartphones for 2023.”
This is very important for businesses that want to increase traffic since most of us now head to Google first when we are looking for a product, service, or informational website. What's more, SEO brings targeted visitors to your page because these are people who have searched for the thing that you are offering, meaning there is a higher-than-average chance that they are interested in buying from you.
So, how do you get started with SEO? What is the process? What terms do you need to understand? Read on for a quick and comprehensive guide to SEO basics that will benefit you no matter what your current level of experience.
SEO essentially boils down to "second-guessing Google." More specifically, the aim is to try and understand Google's "algorithms." An algorithm is, of course, a piece of code or math that is designed to produce a desired outcome by churning the information fed to it.
The algorithms that drive Google are designed to try and sift the way for information and then match that information to the user and the search term they used. Google is not interested in giving you free promotion. It has no agenda. The only goal for Google is to help people find the information they are looking for in a high-quality manner. Why? Because if someone finds great information when they use Google, then they are likely to come back to Google and use it again!
All this is handled automatically – no human is responsible for searching through every website and deciding where it should "rank" (how high up it should go in the results) for any given search term. That's where the algorithm comes in.
This means a few things:
While Google has updated and changed its algorithm countless times over the years, certain key points have remained fairly constant and still provide the backbone of SEO. These are the "activities" that anyone should engage in if they want to promote their website:
It’s important to know what people are searching for in relation to your products/information. Tools like Google’s Keyword Research Tool will allow you to get an idea of the “search volume” for specific phrases around particular topics. You can then choose which of those to target. Of course, you also need to consider competition: how many huge brands are also targeting those phrases? Likewise, it’s important to remember to target traffic and to consider intent. All that is to say, the most searched-for term is not necessarily the most valuable to you, as it might bring the wrong kind of person to your site.
In order to “index the web,” Google uses programs (called either bots or spiders) that will trawl websites and “read” their content. This is what Google will use to understand the topic of your site and to make some assumptions regarding the quality. You need to make sure you add lots of new content to your site, as this will create more opportunities for your site to be discovered. It also gives people a reason to come to your site, which we’ll talk about more in the content marketing section!
Keyword stuffing means inserting your chosen keywords into the content of your articles AND some of the code of your website. Your aim is to repeat the search terms you’re targeting so that Google is more likely to match your content to that search term. BUT you mustn’t overdo this. Google doesn’t want you to try and “play” the system, as that would mean low-quality websites could get to the top without delivering anything useful (as long as they used the keyword X number of times). This has been a genuine issue in the past, and it is something Google is keen to avoid. Instead, then, you should aim to: