Search engine optimization (often referred to as SEO) is the practice of making changes to web content, code and structure in order to improve its visibility in search engines. The ultimate goal is to drive relevant traffic to a website, whether it be in the form of new clients, customers or an audience that keeps coming back for more.
There are a number of factors that influence the visibility of any web page or site in a search engine result page (SERP). The most obvious are keywords, which are words and phrases that people type into a search engine when looking for something online. The other big factor is content. Having high-quality, relevant content that answers the questions people are typing into Google will ensure that your pages show up in search results for those queries.
The process of optimizing content begins with keyword research. This involves discovering the keywords that are most likely to be typed into a search query and then using those words throughout your web content in a way that makes sense. It also includes researching related keywords that may be used in searches and adding them to your list of target keywords.
Another important aspect of optimizing content is ensuring that your page titles, meta tags and alt text for images are optimized. This means using the correct title and description tag for each page as well as making sure that each of these contain the keyword you are targeting. Finally, using keywords in the alt text for an image can help search engines understand what the picture is about, which can also boost a page’s relevancy.
In addition to optimizing a page’s on-site elements, it is also important to optimize off-site elements. This includes claiming and optimizing the information about your business on all relevant social media platforms, review sites and wikis. It also includes submitting your website to search engines and directories.
Off-site SEO can be complex and time consuming, but it is an essential part of the process of getting your site visible in search engine results pages.
Technically speaking, search engines crawl the entire web and then store the billions of web pages they discover in their databases. When someone searches for something, they then pull up a set of results from the database that match the keywords they entered.
The most prominent search engine is Google, which holds about 92% of the market share for searches performed on computers and mobile devices. However, there are a number of other “search engines” out there, such as Bing, Yahoo! and even Instagram. Each of these engines uses a slightly different algorithm to determine which pages are most relevant to a particular search query and then displays those results in their SERPs. The most important things to keep in mind when it comes to search engine optimization are that the algorithms are constantly changing and that there are a lot of moving parts.