What Is SEO? Search Engine Optimization Explained

The world of SEO can be a confusing place. Heck, even experienced marketers struggle to wrap their heads around some of the more complex elements. 

But whether you’re a grizzled veteran or a fresh-faced industry newcomer, I’m here to clear up what SEO is and how it works.  

If you want to understand the basics of SEO, this article is the best place to start. I’ll explain the different elements of SEO, how search engines work, and what impact algorithm updates can have. 

You don’t have to read this front to back, but it can help if it’s your first time learning about SEO. If it’s not, use the table of contents below to skip to a specific part.

Table of Contents

 Feel free to bookmark this page, too, and come back to it every time you have a question. 

Key Takeaways

  • SEO stands for search engine optimization. It’s the practice of making websites rank higher in the organic results of Google and other search engines.
  • SEO is important because it can be a massive source of free and highly targeted traffic to businesses of any size. 
  • The goal of SEO is to optimize your site for all of the factors that Google uses to rank websites. The better you meet their standard for high-quality, helpful content, the more keywords you’ll rank for. 
  • There are 8 main elements of SEO:
    • Content
    • Keyword research
    • HTML
    • Site architecture
    • E-E-A-T
    • Links
    • Social media
    • Local SEO
  • Google changes its search algorithm regularly. Don’t try to beat it; just focus on following best practices.
  • Above all, be patient. SEO is a long-term play, and you’ll usually need to wait at least six months to see results.

What Is SEO?

SEO stands for search engine optimization. It’s a digital marketing strategy that improves your website’s placement in the organic (non-paid) results of search engines like Google and Bing. The higher your website ranks, the more traffic your site receives. 

SEO is one of the more cost-effective marketing strategies. Unlike PPC, where companies can pay to sit at the top of Google, companies earn free traffic through their SEO efforts by having the best (or best optimized) content.

You can use SEO as a standalone digital marketing tactic. Plenty of websites and businesses have been built through organic rankings alone. 

But doing SEO doesn’t mean you can’t run PPC ads. In fact, digital marketing strategies are often built around SEO and supplemented by additional strategies like paid search and social media marketing. 

Main Categories of SEO

You don’t just need to do one thing to optimize your website for Google. There are three main categories of SEO you need to focus on: on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and technical SEO.

  • On-page SEO is the process of optimizing your website’s content. This includes creating high-quality content and incorporating target keywords.
  • Off-page SEO is the process of improving your website’s trust and authority through backlinks.
  • Technical SEO is the process of optimizing your website’s technical aspects, like its page load speed and structure.

How you optimize your site for each of these three categories matters, too. Enter white hat and black hat SEO. 

Black hat SEO uses spammy optimization techniques that try to trick Google into ranking your website. While a lot of these concepts have fallen out of use, some are still around. One example is spammy linking building. This could be something like purchasing a Fiverr package promising you 5,000 links in 24 hours.

Since Google penalizes sites that do these things, you’ll only hear me talk about white hat SEO—the use of SEO optimization techniques that comply with the guidelines and terms of service of search engines. I’ve always played the entrepreneurial long game, and I believe white hat SEO is the way to go.

Why Is SEO Important?

There’s a good reason so many businesses place SEO at the center of their digital marketing efforts: it can be a massive source of free, targeted traffic. 

Google.com was the most visited website in the world in 2023. It processes over 40,000 searches every second. That’s 3.5 billion searches a day and 1.2 trillion searches every year. That’s a staggering amount of potential traffic, even if a tiny fraction of them click on your site’s listing.

It shouldn’t be a surprise, then, that search engines are the biggest source of traffic for most websites.

Businesses don’t have to pay for that traffic, either. Unlike paid ads—like search or social media that stop generating traffic as soon as you stop paying for them—you can continue to see rewards from SEO long after you’ve built links or created great content.

How SEO Works

So, how does search engine optimization work?

Well, if you want to learn what it takes to rank higher in search engines, it helps to know how they work. Sites like Google are able to provide their users with a list of results by crawling the web using spiders or bots. These bots make a note of key signals (keywords, freshness, etc,) from every page they crawl (hundreds of billions of them) and add them to the Search Index. 

This index forms the basis of every search results page. Whenever someone makes a search, Google serves up what it deems to be the best results. It uses over a hundred criteria to determine which pages are best, including relevance to the search query, freshness, and authority.

As you can see in the image below, understanding what searchers want isn’t always straightforward, especially when words have different meanings.

(Image source)

Google doesn’t just rely on the signals it collects through crawling the web, though. It also measures user experience signals based on how searchers interact with the results. If users click on a particular result a lot, Google will give it a rankings boost. Similarly, if users click on a result and then leave the site immediately, Google may downgrade the page. 

In the recent Google SEO documentation leaks, we got a deeper insight into how this plays out. For one thing, Google has several click-related modules in the documentation, including “goodClicks,” “badClicks,” and “lastLongestClicks.” This means that Google is look and tracking how long users are on your site when they click on it. If a lot of users instantly leave, say, because your piece has bad search intent or UX, your site might be punished.

Finally, it’s important to note that search engines are constantly changing—and it’s your job as an SEO to stay up to date on everything. 

Take the recent release of AI Overviews. SEOs now have to contend with AI-generated summaries for informational keywords. This is a massive change to Google and could require a shift in your keyword strategy. 

But it doesn’t mean you should stop following best practices or aiming to provide the best user experience possible. Things in SEO are changing all the time, but the following elements tend to stay the same. 

Elements of SEO: The Complete Breakdown

Now it’s time to learn how SEO breaks down into its constituting parts. Below, I’ll cover all of the things that you need to optimize during a comprehensive SEO strategy.

Content

Great content is foundational to SEO. It’s difficult (although not impossible) to rank your site without outstanding content. That’s why it’s the first element on my list.


After all, Google’s goal is to “deliver the most relevant and reliable information available.” So, if you want to rank, you better make sure you create exceptional content.

There are three elements of your content you should focus on when optimizing: quality, intent, and freshness.

Creating quality content is essential. It’s not just enough to write more than existing articles on page one, though. You need to cover topics in more detail, too. This is particularly important in the wake of Google’s August 2022 helpful content update, which rewarded sites that gave visitors a satisfying experience, and the September 2023 update of the same name that targeted low-quality and AI content written solely for search engines. 

While you can use AI to help in the content creation process, excessive amounts of poor AI-generated content will hurt your site more than help it. Make sure any AI content creation is overseen by a human to ensure quality. 

You also need to make sure your content matches the intent behind each search. If all the results on page one are blog posts, you’d better write a blog post. Conversely, if product pages are ranking in the top positions a blog probably won’t cut it. 

Finally, you need to make sure your content is fresh. The more up-to-date your content is, the better. Going through and updating your content for accuracy, fixing any broken links, and refreshing old data with new statistics that are more relevant are all ways to show Google your piece of content still deserves a spot on page one. This has been reinforced by information from the recent Google document leaks showing freshness as a ranking metric.

Keyword Research and Selection

 Keyword research is the process of finding target search terms. Good keyword research will make it easier to rank in Google and help you create relevant content.

There’s a lot more to keyword selection than going through your keyword research tool and choosing every keyword on the list. 

Focus on keywords relevant to your business to attract the right audience. For example, you don’t want people looking for free resources if you sell consulting services for $10,000 per month.

Avoid picking keywords that are too competitive. Most keywords with tens of thousands of searches will be out of reach for small brands with lower domain authority.

Take content marketing, for example. It gets 18,100 searches a month, but the average page has 14,000 backlinks and a domain authority of 88 (out of 100).

Ubersuggest keyword overview for the term content marketing.

My advice is to choose long-tail keywords.

Long-tail keywords are search terms with three or more words. For example, while a head term may say something like “pet supplies” a long-tail keyword would have something like “pet supplies for exotic birds.” Long-tail keywords are often easier to rank for and generate targeted traffic. You can find them easily using a keyword research tool like Ubersuggest.

There’s no reason you can’t get on page one for competitive keywords eventually—especially if you are creating helpful, quality content. But it isn’t going to happen overnight.

HTM​​L

Your site’s HTML is an important piece of the SEO marketing puzzle. Without proper tags, headers, and descriptions, Google will have a hard time figuring out what your content is about and why it should rank higher than the competition.

There are several HTML elements you need to optimize on your website:

  • Title tag: Tells search engines what your page is about, is a ranking factor, and shows up in search results. 
  • Meta description: Describes your page to users and search engines and while it’s not a ranking factor and often gets overwritten by Google, it shows up in Google results under your title tag.
  • Schema: A form of markup that helps search engines understand more about your page 
  • Heading tags: H tags add hierarchy to your content, making it easy for search engines and users to read.
  • Alt text: Describes the images in your article to search engines and screen readers.
  • URL slug: The end of the URL. It tells Google what the content is about

While it’s tempting to add as many keywords as possible to these HTML elements, be careful of keyword stuffing. There’s nothing worse than a keyword-stuffed meta description that reads horribly. Google will see right through it and may even penalize you.

Site Architecture

Your website’s architecture—how it is laid out and built—can impact your site’s rankings. 

When designing, building, and optimizing your website’s architecture, there are five things you should pay attention to:

  • Crawlability: The more internal links you have between pages, the easier it is for Google to crawl and understand your website. You can also improve crawlability by creating a sitemap with plugins, if your site is on the WordPress CMS..
  • Duplicate content: It doesn’t matter if short paragraphs or phrases are repeated on your website, but avoid reposting entire blog articles anywhere else online or having two pages with identical or nearly identical content as this can cause competition and prevent optimal ranking.
  • Mobile responsiveness: Google indexes for mobile first, which means we need to create a site that performs well on mobile.
  • Speed: Thanks to Core Web Vitals, Google emphasizes page speed and usability. If your site or certain elements load too slowly, Google may penalize you. Use PageSpeed Insights to check the performance of your website.
  • Security: Purchase an SSL certificate to improve your site security and claim an important trust signal that can improve your SEO and increase consumer confidence. 

E-E-A-T

E-E-A-T , which stands for experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness, is a concept Google uses as part of its Search Quality Rater Guidelines to help human evaluators assess the quality and credibility of content. By focusing on websites that have good E-E-A-T, Google ensures it serves the best possible content to its users. 

Optimizing your experience, expertise, authority, and trust signals can improve your rankings and help you provide the best experience for your users. 

Here are several ways to improve your E-E-A-T:

  • Get first-hand experience: Forget faking it to make it. If you want to rank in Google, you need to prove that you know what you’re talking about. That means showcasing your industry expertise by listing credentials on your site, taking original photographs, or proving that you’ve bought and tested the affiliate products you recommend.
  • Be thorough: Now that you’re sure that your information is accurate, you’ll also want to make sure it’s comprehensive. Answering a question with a short or simplistic post can feel dismissive. To be seen as an expert, your content needs to leave the reader feeling satisfied and equipped. Make sure you showcase your expertise with an author bio that includes relevant experience and credentials, and links to social media accounts. 
  • Become a trusted authority: Earn backlinks from other authoritative and well-known brands. Press coverage is also helpful. Even branded coverage can equal more potential traffic.. 
  • Prove you can be trusted: Don’t give Quality Raters or real users the chance to think you’re a shady business. Get an SSL certificate that makes your site secure, provide contact details that make it easy for people to contact a real human, and add real reviews to your site.

A backlink is a link from one website to another. Gaining backlinks from high-authority websites is a strong way to improve your SEO.

While you want to get as many high-quality links as possible, pay particular attention to link quality. It’s better to have a small number of links from very high-authority websites (like news publications, respected industry publications, and thought leaders in the space) than thousands of low-quality spammy links. 

Use my tips below to make sure you build links the right way:

  1. Don’t take shortcuts: Earning links takes time. You need to build relationships, pitch yourself, and tell site owners how you can provide value to their site. 
  2. Look for broken link opportunities: This is one way to add value and gain a link by improving a website’s user experience 
  3. Don’t forget internal linking: Internal linking is an important piece of the puzzle, too. If in doubt, aim for a maximum of about one link per every 100 words of content, including both internal and any external links.

Social

We don’t know if social media presence is a ranking factor. But we do know that social channels can help users find and share your content—and increase your chances of getting backlinks. 

The best way to improve your presence on social media is through great content and consistency. People only want to interact with (and share) great content. But it’s not enough to do this every so often. You need to post regularly on social media to grow your following and increase your chances of appearing in the Discovery sections of platforms like Instagram and TikTok. 

In many ways, social media platforms have become search engines in their own right and compete with Google for traffic. Younger generations, in particular, get all of their information from TikTok, which means having a presence on these platforms can be just as important for your brand as a presence on Google. 

It’s also important to note that some user journeys start on platforms such as Instagram or TikTok and then transition over to Google search, so keeping an eye on what’s trending on social and ensuring you’re capitalizing on how that translates into search interest on Google is key.

Local SEO

Local SEO is different from the other components of SEO I’ve discussed so far. Instead of trying to rank your website in search engines, local SEO aims to rank your business in the map and local listing results on search engines.

Four main factors impact your local SEO: location, your Google Business profile, NAP citations, and online reviews.

The location of the searcher and your business is the most important local SEO ranking factor. The closer your business is, the better. 

Google rewards businesses that fill out their Google Business profile in detail. That includes listing your website, phone number, address, and opening hours, as well as including photos of your business.

A NAP citation is any mention of your business name, address, and phone number online. You can think of them as local SEO backlinks—and the more citations you have, the better.

Online reviews are the final important local SEO ranking factor. Google wants to send its users to great local businesses, so the more five-star reviews your business has, the better.

How Google Algorithm Updates Impact SEO

Google updates its algorithm hundreds of times per year. While most of these are small updates that the average site owner wouldn’t notice, some—called core updates—are much more significant. These can fundamentally change the way Google works and cause massive changes in rankings. 

You can read all the most important core updates in my Google algorithm cheat sheet. These include:

  • Google Panda (2011)
  • Google Penguin (2012)
  • Google Hummingbird (2013)
  • Helpful Content Update (2022)

The latest core update occurred in March 2024 and tackled “low quality, unoriginal content”. This hit web publishers hard, with major brands like The Economist and New York Times losing up to 8 percent of their traffic. Other online business models like e-commerce stores were positively impacted, however. 

While algorithm updates can impact your business, you shouldn’t worry about them too much. You can’t control Google, after all. 

Instead, your main concern should be to continue creating high-quality content, using relevant keywords, and building reputable backlink relationships. You shouldn’t try to “game the system” when it comes to Google’s algorithms, as a major reason for the continual updates is to weed people who do that out. You could hurt your rankings by focusing too much on the algorithm and not enough on your content.

AI Overviews and the Future of SEO

It’s not just algorithms that will impact the future of SEO. Search Generative Intelligence (SGE) is an experimental AI-based search experience that may do away with links to websites entirely. 

Google recently released the first version of this to the public called AI Overviews. These results, like the one in the image below, appear when Google thinks generative responses will be helpful to searchers. 

As you can see, almost all of the screen real estate is taken up by the AI Overviews box. Google provides a few additional resources to the right-hand side, as well as follow-up questions below. 

So what could this mean for SEO?

The jury’s still out, but it could mean websites get less traffic from purely informational keywords — the kind that can be easily summarized by AI. It may mean SEOs need to optimize their content for SGE, creating the kind of high-quality resources that get included in the few links that Google adds to the SGE box—but that’s the kind of content you should be creating regardless! See our AI Overviews report for even more insights on how this feature is training the game.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is SEO optimization?

Search engine optimization is the process of improving your website’s organic rankings in search engines like Google and Bing. There are three main categories of SEO optimization:

  • On-page SEO: Creating and optimizing high-quality content
  • Off-page SEO: Enhancing your website’s reputation through link building and social media 
  • Technical SEO: Improving your site’s technical aspects like page speed and site structure.

How long does it take for SEO to work?

SEO success doesn’t tend to happen quickly. Depending on your domain authority and stratgey, it can take between six months and a year to rank for most keywords. That’s why you need to have a long-term plan when it comes to SEO, especially if you are in a competitive market like finance or software.

What is the most important factor in SEO marketing?

Google analyzes over 200 factors when ranking websites. If a single factor made a massive difference everyone would be optimizing it. But, if I had to pick something you should focus on, it would be providing quality information. You can optimize every aspect of your site, but it’s all for nothing if your content is trash—searchers won’t be interested in you.

How do I rank faster on Google?

The quickest way to rank higher on Google is to fix your site’s biggest issues. Got no links? Then, building links could see your rankings soar. Have you focused more on content quantity over quality? Now is the time to slow down and evaluate which content needs to be updated, consolidated, or removed. 

Other than that, consistency is key. The more optimizations you make and the more resources you dedicate to your SEO efforts, the faster you will rank.

Can I rank a website without SEO?

Absolutely. There will be thousands of websites ranking in Google that have never targeted a keyword or built a link. That being said, they are probably inadvertently doing excellent SEO by providing great content and writing about topics people are interested in.

Just think how well you could rank if you created the best content in the industry while also improving your site’s technical setup and promoting your content online.

How much does SEO cost?

SEO can be as cheap or expensive as you make it. You can hire a professional to handle it for you, for example, or you can do everything yourself. Doing it yourself will take a lot longer, and you’ll have to account for the learning curve. However, for the most part, you could do it for almost free if you do everything on your own—it just costs you time.

Conclusion

Well done for finishing this introductory article on SEO. Hopefully, you have a solid understanding of the basics of SEO marketing and are eager to learn more. Don’t be afraid to return to this section as many times as you need to during your SEO marketing journey. There’s a lot to pick up, and it certainly doesn’t hurt to remind yourself of SEO basics, core principles and key terminology from time to time.

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Neil Patel

source: https://neilpatel.com/what-is-seo/