Intro to SEO

What is SEO and How Does it Work?

First, what is SEO, and what does it stand for? Search Engine Optimization is an overarching term to describe the strategy of increasing organic (not paid) traffic to your website. If you have ever wondered how a webpage gets ranked #1 on a search engine result page (SERP) SEO is the answer. Search engines like Google have algorithms in place to determine which pages have the highest quality, and which are the most relevant to your search. So if you want to increase how many people see your website, you have to work on SEO, and therefore understand how search engines rank pages.

Understanding Search Engines

There are a few ways that search engines collect data and analyze which websites to include on their results page. This section should give you a brief idea of how search engines work

• Crawling: The process of how search engines find new content. Operation starts with robots known as crawlers or spiders that scour the web for new and updated content. These crawlers start with a few websites and then follow links within those pages to find more websites, and this cycle continues. After finding the websites, they are added to an index to be used later whenever someone like you searches for something on the internet.
• Indexing: After pages are added to an index, they are considered good enough to show up when searched for. Indexing mostly refers to the organization of this massive database known as an index.
• Ranking: This is how websites within the index are ranked when you make a search. In short, it is how a search engine like Google chooses and ranks the most relevant 10 results. Relevant results are determined by factors like the number of links from other websites to your page, or relevant keywords within your page that match a search.

So if Google ranks my page on keywords and links, then I should just will my website with as many keywords as possible and make other websites link back to my website right? While some of these shady practices may have been possible many years ago, search engines like Google, have circumvented these tactics with their complex, top-secret algorithms. Ok, so then how do I actually improve my SEO?

Improving SEO and E.A.T.

Search engines do a pretty good job of showing pages on their results page that is truly authentic, relevant, and valuable. To be fair that is their main purpose. So the best way to increase SEO is simply to have a well-rounded website. MOZ, a company that provides software to help increase SEO, suggests that there is an order or hierarchy of needs that must be met in order to optimize your search results

The next resource to point you to is Google's EAT acronym. The EAT acronym stands for:

• Expertise: Are you an expert on your topic?
• Authoritativeness: Are you recognized within your field/niche, and are your peers linking to your page?
• Trustworthiness: Is your website secure, safe, ethical, and providing accurate information?

Having a quality website is one of the main components of how it will rank, but it isn't the only factor.

Link Building

As I touched on earlier, search engines use links as a way to rank your website, but not all links are created equally. Here are a few types of links and how they work.

Links From Your Own Website

• Internal links: A link that redirects you to another page of the same overall website/domain. Results in visitors spending a longer time on your website lead to an increase in authority
• External links (Outbound links): A link that redirects a visitor to a new page to give more information, just like I have been doing throughout this article.

Links From Separate Websites: (AKA: Backlinks or Inbound Links)

• Natural link: A link from another website that you gained without asking for it. Results in higher authority since another website is basically giving you their vote of approval.
• Manually obtained link: A link from another website that you explicitly ask for. More common among smaller businesses
• Self-created link: A link that you have placed on other websites like comments on blogs or forums. Self-created links DO NOT actually increase SEO.