What is SEO?
SEO stands for
Search Engine Optimization, which is in the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results.
What goes into SEO?
To understand the true meaning of SEO, let's break that definition down and look at the parts:
- Quality of traffic. You can attract all the visitors in the world, but if they're coming to your site because Google tells them you're a resource for Apple computers when really you're a farmer selling apples, that is not quality traffic. Instead you want to attract visitors who are genuinely interested in products that you offer.
- Quantity of traffic. Once you have the right people clicking through from those search engine results pages (SERPs), more traffic is better.
- Organic results. Ads make up a significant portion of many SERPs. Organic traffic is any traffic that you don't have to pay for.
All major search engines such as Google and Bing have primary search results, where web pages and other content such as videos, images or local listings are shown and ranked based on what the search engine considers most relevant to users. Payment isn’t involved, as it is with paid search ads.
SEO Success Factors
There are four major groups covered by Search Engine Land’s Periodic Table of SEO Factors:
1.On-page SEO: Content, Architecture, HTML
2.Off-page SEO: Trust, Links, User
3.Toxins
4.Emerging verticals
The elements within each group or subgroup are factors you need to consider if you want to increase your site’s organic visibility and rankings. In the top-right corner of each element, there’s a value to help you understand the weight or importance of that particular element — the higher the number, the more weight it carries.
The on-page and off-page SEO groups each have several subgroups, and each chapter of this
SEO guide is dedicated to helping you navigate that particular facet of SEO.