What is SEO?
Shah Porag
Video Editor With Animation | Helping Brands & Creators to Grow Their Journey | SEO Specialist | Content Marketing
Do you want to learn everything about SEO? I wanted to create this guide to help you understand the basics of SEO and how it can help you grow your business. To convert your website, visitors, into customers, you’ll want the help of keywords to drive that traffic. Your paid ads don’t have to do all the hard work (or else you’re just wasting money). Before I teach you how it works and how to do it, let’s first go over the definition of SEO, and then we will dive into how SEO works.
What Is SEO?
SEO stands for search engine optimization. SEO is the process of taking steps to help a website or piece of content rank higher on Google.
The key difference between SEO and paid advertising is that SEO involves “organic” ranking, which means you don’t pay to be in that space. To make it a bit simpler, search engine optimization means taking a piece of online content and optimizing it so search engines like Google show it towards the top of the page when someone searches for something.
Look at it this way. When someone types “vegan lasagna” into Google, they’re likely looking for a recipe, ingredients, and instructions on how to make it. If you wrote an article about making vegan lasagna, you’d want people to find your recipe. For anyone to find it, you need to rank above all the other websites with recipes for vegan lasagna. It’s not easy, but that’s what SEO marketing is all about.
Let’s break it down even further: The majority of online searches begin with a search engine like Google. In fact, 75 percent of those searches start on Google.
To better understand how you can rank your content higher in the search engines, you need to first understand how search works.
The ultimate goal of this article is to help you understand the ins and outs of search so you can optimize your content to rank higher on Google and get more eyeballs on your posts.
Types of SEO
There are three types of SEO:
You maintain 100% control over content and technical optimizations. That’s not always true with off-site (you can’t control links from other sites or if platforms you rely on end up shutting down or making a major change), but those activities are still a key part of this SEO trinity of success.
Imagine SEO as a sports team. You need both a strong offense and defense to win – and you need fans (a.k.a., an audience). Think of technical optimization as your defense, content optimization as your offense, and off-site optimization as ways to attract, engage and retain a loyal fanbase.
Technical optimization
Optimizing the technical elements of a website is crucial and fundamental for SEO success.
It all starts with architecture – creating a website that can be crawled and indexed by search engines. As Gary Illyes, Google’s trends analyst, once put it in a Reddit AMA: “MAKE THAT DAMN SITE CRAWLABLE.”
You want to make it easy for search engines to discover and access all of the content on your pages (i.e., text, images, videos). What technical elements matter here: URL structure, navigation, internal linking, and more.
Experience is also a critical element of technical optimization. Search engines stress the importance of pages that load quickly and provide a good user experience. Elements such as Core Web Vitals, mobile-friendliness and usability, HTTPS, and avoiding intrusive interstitials all matter in technical SEO.
Another area of technical optimization is structured data (a.k.a., schema). Adding this code to your website can help search engines better understand your content and enhance your appearance in the search results.
Plus, web hosting services, CMS (content management system) and site security all play a role in SEO.
Content optimization
In SEO, your content needs to be optimized for two primary audiences: people and search engines. What this means is that you optimize the content your audience will see (what’s actually on the page) as well as what search engines will see (the code).
The goal, always, is to publish helpful, high-quality content. You can do this through a combination of understanding your audience’s wants and needs, data and guidance provided by Google.
When optimizing content for people, you should make sure it:
For search engines, some key content elements to optimize for are:
Off-site optimization
There are several activities that may not be “SEO” in the strictest sense, but nonetheless can align with and help contribute indirectly to SEO success.
Link building (the process of acquiring links to a website) is the activity most associated with off-site SEO. There can be great benefits (e.g., rankings, traffic) from getting a diverse number of links pointing at your website from relevant, authoritative, trusted websites. Link quality beats link quantity – and a large quantity of quality links is the goal.
And how do you get those links? There are a variety of website promotion methods that synergize with SEO efforts. These include:
Brand building and brand marketing: Techniques designed to boost recognition and reputation.
PR: Public relations techniques designed to earn editorially-given links.
Content marketing: Some popular forms include creating videos, ebooks, research studies, podcasts (or being a guest on other podcasts) and guest posting (or guest blogging).
Social media marketing and optimization: Claim your brand’s handle on any and all relevant platforms, optimize it fully and share relevant content.
Listing management: Claiming, verifying and optimizing the information on any platforms where information about your company or website may be listed and found by searchers (e.g., directories, review sites, wikis).
Ratings and reviews: Getting them, monitoring them and responding to them.
Generally, when talking about off-site, you’re talking about activities that are not going to directly impact your ability to rank from a purely technical standpoint.
However, again, everything your brand does matters. You want your brand to be found anywhere people may search for you. As such, some people have tried to rebrand “search engine optimization” to actually mean “search experience optimization” or “search everywhere optimization.”
SEO specialties
Search engine optimization also has a few subgenres. Each of these specialty areas is different from “regular SEO” in its own way, generally requiring additional tactics and presenting different challenges.
Five such SEO specialties include:
Ecommerce SEO: Additional SEO elements include optimizing category pages, product pages, faceted navigation, internal linking structures, product images, product reviews, schema and more.
Enterprise SEO: This is SEO on a massive scale. Typically this means dealing with a website (or multiple websites/brands) with 1 million+ pages – or it may be based on the size of the organization (typically those making millions or billions in revenue per year). Doing enterprise also typically means delays trying to get SEO changes implemented by the dev team, as well as the involvement of multiple stakeholders.
International SEO: This is global SEO for international businesses – doing SEO for multiregional or multilingual websites – and optimizing for international search engines such as Baidu or Naver.
Local SEO: Here, the goal is to optimize websites for visibility in local organic search engine results by managing and obtaining reviews and business listings, among others.
News SEO: With news, speed is of utmost importance – specifically making sure you get into Google’s index as quickly as possible and appear in places such as Google Discover, Google’s Top Stories and Google News. There’s a need to understand best practices for paywalls, section pages, news-specific structured data, and more.
How does SEO work?
If you found this page via Google search, you likely searched Google for [what is seo] or [seo].
This guide is published on Search Engine Land, an authoritative website with great expertise on and experience in the topic of SEO (we’ve been covering all SEO changes, big and small since 2006).
Put simply, these factors (and others) have helped this guide earn a good reputation with search engines, which has helped it rank in Position 1 for years. It has accumulated signals that demonstrate it is authoritative and trustworthy – and therefore deserves to rank when someone searches for SEO.
But let’s look at SEO more broadly. As a whole, SEO really works through a combination of:
People: The person or team responsible for doing or ensuring that the strategic, tactical and operational SEO work is completed.
Processes: The actions taken to make the work more efficient.
Technology: The platforms and tools used.
Activities: The end product, or output.
Many other things factor into how SEO works. What follows is a high-level look at the most important knowledge and process elements.
Six critical areas, in combination, make SEO work:
1. Understanding how search engines work
Simply, if you want people to find your business via search – on any platform – you need to understand the technical processes behind how the engine works – and then make sure you are providing all the right “signals” to influence that visibility.
When talking about traditional web search engines like Google, there are four separate stages of search:
Crawling: Search engines use crawlers to discover pages on the web by following links and using sitemaps.
Rendering: Search engines generate how the page will look using HTML, JavaScript and CSS information.
Indexing: Search engines analyze the content and metadata of the pages it has discovered and add them to a database (though there’s no guarantee every page on your website will be indexed).
Ranking: Complex algorithms look at a variety of signals to determine whether a page is relevant and of high-enough quality to show when searchers enter a query.
But optimizing for Google search is different from optimizing for search other platforms like YouTube or Amazon.
Let’s take Facebook, for example, where factors such as engagement (Likes, comments, shares, etc.) and who people are connected to matter. Then, on Twitter, signals like recency, interactions, or the author’s credibility are important.
And further complicating things: search engines have added machine learning elements in order to surface content – making it even harder to say “this” or “that” resulted in better or worse performance.
2. Researching
Research is a key part of SEO. Some forms of research that will improve SEO performance include:
Audience research: It’s important to understand your target audience or market. Who are they (i.e., their demographics and psychographics)? What are their pain points? What questions do they have that you can answer?
Keyword research: This process helps you identify and incorporate relevant and valuable search terms people use into your pages – and understand how much demand and competition there is to rank for these keywords.
Competitor research: What are your competitors doing? What are their strengths and weaknesses? What types of content are they publishing?
Brand/business/client research: What are their goals – and how can SEO help them achieve those goals?
Website research: A variety of SEO audits can uncover opportunities and issues on a website that are preventing success in organic search. Some audits to consider: technical SEO, content, link profile and E-E-A-T.
SERP analysis: This will help you understand the search intent for a given query (e.g., is it commercial, transactional, informational or navigational) and create content that is more likely to earn rankings or visibility.
3. Planning
An SEO strategy is your long-term action plan. You need to set goals – and a plan for how you will reach them.
Think of it your SEO strategy as a roadmap. The path you take likely will change and evolve over time – but the destination should remain clear and unchanged.
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Your SEO plan may include things such as:
Setting goals (e.g., OKRs, SMART) and expectations (i.e., timelines/milestones).
Defining and aligning meaningful KPIs and metrics.
Deciding how projects will be created and implemented (internal, external or a mix).
Coordinating and communicating with internal and external stakeholders.
Choosing and implementing tools/technology.
Hiring, training and structuring a team.
Setting a budget.
Measuring and reporting on results.
Documenting the strategy and process.
4. Creating and implementing
Once all the research is done, it’s time to turn ideas into action. That means:
Creating new content: Advising your content team on what content needs to be created.
Recommending or implementing changes or enhancements to existing pages: This could include updating and improving the content, adding internal links, incorporating keywords/topics/entities, or identifying other ways to optimize it further.
Removing old, outdated or low-quality content: The types of content that aren’t ranking well, driving converting traffic or helping you achieve your SEO goals.
5. Monitoring and maintaining
You need to know when something goes wrong or breaks on your website. Monitoring is critical.
You need to know if traffic drops to a critical page, pages become slow, unresponsive or fall out of the index, your entire website goes offline, links break, or any other number of potential catastrophic issues.
6. Analyzing, assessing and reporting on performance
If you don’t measure SEO, you can’t improve it. To make data-driven decisions about SEO, you’ll need to use:
Website analytics: Set up and use tools (at minimum, free tools such as Google Analytics, Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools) to collect performance data.
Tools and platforms: There are many “all-in-one” platforms (or suites) that offer multiple tools, but you can also choose to use only select SEO tools to track performance on specific tasks. Or, if you have the resources and none of the tools on the market do exactly what you want, you can make your own tools.
After you’ve collected the data, you’ll need to report on progress. You can create reports using software or manually.
Performance reporting should tell a story and be done at meaningful time intervals, typically comparing to previous report periods (e.g., year over year). This will depend on the type of website (typically, this will be monthly, quarterly, or some other interval),
SEO is ongoing
SEO never ends. Search engines, user behavior and your competitors are always changing. Websites change and move (and break) over time. Content gets stale. Your processes should improve and become more efficient.
Bottom line: There’s always something you can be monitoring, testing or improving. Or, as Bruce Clay put it: SEO will only be done when Google stops changing things and all your competition dies.
How to learn SEO
Now that you understand more about what SEO is and how it works – how can you learn more?
Reading (or, if you prefer, watching or listening to) the latest SEO news, research, best practices and other developments should become one of your regular habits, whether it’s daily, weekly or monthly. You should also invest in attending at least one or two events per year.
The expectations and behavior of searchers are constantly evolving, which means algorithms are constantly changing to keep up. That, in combination with new breakthroughs in technology (look no further than the explosive rise of ChatGPT in late 2022 and the sudden addition of generative AI to search results in 2023).
Here are some trusted resources and tips to help you grow as an SEO professional.
Search Engine Land’s SEO resources
Search Engine Land has been covering SEO since 2006. In addition to news stories written by our editorial staff, Search Engine Land publishes contributed articles from a diverse group of subject matter experts featuring helpful SEO tips, tactics, trends and analysis.
We’re biased, but we highly suggest you sign up to receive Search Engine Land’s free email newsletter featuring a roundup of the latest SEO news, and insights every weekday.
Search Engine Land also has multiple categories on topics dedicated to specific areas and platforms which you may find helpful:
All SEO
Bing SEO
Content SEO
Ecommerce SEO
Enterprise SEO
Google: E-E-A-T
Google algorithm updates
Google Search Console
Google search features
Link building
Local SEO
News SEO
Technical SEO
Search Engine Land’s Guide To SEO
(Editor’s Note: We are currently updating this guide, with the goal of having the chapters completely updated before the end of March 2023.)
Search Engine Land’s Guide To SEO walks you through the fundamentals of optimizing for search so you can develop a solid strategy to drive organic traffic to your website.
Our guide explains these factors in more depth, and highlights tactical tips from experts on search engine optimization that will help your website get more visitors from organic search.
Chapter 1: Types of Search Engine Success Factors: These are the on- and off-site factors that can affect your search rankings. We’ll also look at niche verticals in SEO and toxic SEO tactics to avoid.
Chapter 2: Content & Search Engine Success Factors: Keep these elements in mind to create high-quality content that search engines and your target audiences will love.
Chapter 3: Site Architecture & Search Engine Success Factors: Let’s go behind the scenes and look at the aspects of your site that make it easy for search engines to access and influence user experience.
Chapter 4: HTML Code & Search Engine Success Factors: HTML tags and structured data help organize information on your site and help search engines understand your content.
Chapter 5: Trust, Authority, Expertise & Search Rankings: How your users engage with your site, as well as its reputation and authority, helps search engines determine if it’s worthy of showing to users.
Chapter 6: Link Building & Ranking In Search Engines: Why backlinks are still important and what they tell search engines about your content.
Chapter 7: Personalization & Search Engine Rankings: These are the user-specific elements, such as location and intent, that can affect the results users see.
Chapter 8: Toxins & Search Engine Spam Penalties: Beware of SEO “shortcuts.” Getting caught using these tactics can potentially result in a manual action penalty or even get your site delisted from the search index.
Chapter 9: Emerging Verticals in Search: Voice, local, image and video search represent new ways for users to find what they’re looking for. While they each provide nuanced opportunities for brands, they’re still based on the fundamental principles of SEO.
Google’s SEO resources
Google Search Essentials: In this guide, Google discusses technical requirements, spam policies and key best practices.
SEO starter guide: An overview of SEO basics, according to Google’s best practices.
Search quality evaluator guidelines: This document explains how Google instructs human raters to evaluate the quality of its search results by examining the experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness of content and websites.
Developing your SEO skills
One of the best ways to learn SEO is to experiment. Hands-on experience is one of the absolute best ways to advance your skills and deepen your SEO knowledge.
Build your own websites – and make them about topics you are passionate about. Try out various tactics and techniques. See what works and what doesn’t.
SEO requires many other skills. Dig deeper into some of those in 13 essential SEO skills you need to succeed.
Another way to advance your career is by attending a search conference. The Search Engine Land team programs the Search Marketing Expo (SMX) conference series, which has a dedicated SEO track that dives into various aspects of SEO and features some excellent speakers and presentations. SMX Advanced takes place in June and SMX Next in November.
Bottom line: there are no “universal” truths or some big secret to SEO. The truth is, you have to put in the work in all the phases of SEO to grow your visibility, clicks, traffic, authority, conversions, sales and revenue.
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