If you’ve ever wondered ‘What is SEO and how it works?’, then this short series of articles will help you get the answers you’re looking for.
SEO stands for search engine optimisation (or search engine optimization if you’re from the US).
It’s simply the practice of optimising content to be discovered through a search engine’s organic search results.
Think of a search engine as a huge filing system in a library, which has billions of books with hundreds of trillions of pages, and let’s say you wanted to find information on ‘how to train your puppy’.
The search engine will then look through all of it’s pages in its index and send you the ones it thinks has the most relevant results.
The biggest and most used search engine is Google, but there are lots of other search engines you can optimise your content for as well.
YouTube, for example, is also a search engine, and YouTube SEO is the process of optimising your content for the YouTube’s organic search results to get more people to watch your videos.
Amazon SEO is the same thing, but you’re optimising your product pages to get free organic traffic to them.
And Google SEO is the process of optimising your website to rank on Google to drive more traffic to your web pages.
So they give priority in their top stories widget from reputable news sources like the BBC. They also understand that if you’re looking for something like “best microphones,” then you likely want fresh information since new models and manufacturers are always bringing out new models.
And you can identify this right in Google’s search results seeing as all top ranking pages have the current year in the title.
Most, if not all of the things we’ve covered here can be summed up as the SEO definition often referred to as “search intent,” which basically means the reason behind a searcher’s query.
This is arguably one of the most important things to master as an SEO. If you’re unable to match the searcher’s intent, in terms of content type and format, your chances of ranking are slim.
But there are additional layers to understand how Google works, which we’ll look at next.