What is SEO and how does it work
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It’s the practice of getting traffic from the ‘free’, ‘organic’, ‘editorial’ or ‘natural’ search results on search engines. SEO doesn’t work as well as it used to in terms of getting your site in front of people at the top of the search results, but it still works in many cases if you know what you’re doing.
If you want to be found online, seo is how you get that done.
SEO itself is a very wide topic and entire books have been written about it. This article serves to introduce seo concepts so that new bloggers can understand seo enough to get started successfully with their seo efforts.
For any seo efforts to be successful, it’s important to have a thorough understanding of search engines and how they work.
How seo works
Search engines are just websites that anyone can view. Google is a seach engine that gets a lot of the traffic from seach users. When you type in a seach query, you get back thousands if not millions of webpages with an answer to your question or whatever seach term you typed in. In some cases the results change based on where you’re located because some seachers want local information – so if I seach for ‘pizza’ while I’m in New York, I might get search results showing me which pizza places deliver to my address, while some one seaching from California might see more generic seach results with seachers that don’t have a location tied to their seach.
So seach engines are basically just giant lists of webpages that can be sorted based on popularity – how many people click through from the seach results page to visit a site – and freshness – how recently the webpage was published.
Search engines use ‘spiders’ or ‘bots’ to go out and fetch pages for their index to catalogue so they can be shown in seach results. Many seachers have some sort of social media presence as well, such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and others, which also provide data about what pages are popular within those social networks.
Now that you understand more about seach engines, here’s how seo works:
First, seachers use seach engines to find what they are looking for. The seach results page lists the most popular seaches based on clicks from users who were searching for similar seaches. Your webpage will not show up on this seach results page unless you get more people to visit your site that are looking for the same seach terms that you’re using. You can see why it’s pretty difficult to get noticed this way if you don’t know any seo techniques!
Second, seachers might use social media sites like Twitter or Facebook to tell their friends about an amazing new website they just found. If a lot of people start tweeting or re-tweeting about your blog page, this can help seo efforts by showing seach engines that there is a lot of interest for whatever seach term you’re using and seach engines will show your webpage to more seachers as a result.
Third, you use seo techniques to tell seach engines what your webpage is about so they can understand if it’s the most relevant match for whatever seach terms someone types in. When seachers click on your link, you want them to land on pages that are well optimized with good content that matches up with what they were looking for when they entered their seach query.
The four basic elements of seo
There are four main concepts of seo: tagging, keywords, backlinks and freshness. Let’s take a look at these seo elements and how to use them in seo.
Tagging your seach engine pages
Many seachers search for a seach term in quotes – ‘pizza’ is a seach term that many seachers might type in when looking for pizza places online or sources of information about the history of pizza. So if you write a webpage with the words ‘history of pizza’, you will want to add those words inside quotes so seachers know specifically what page they should find when they type the word ‘pizza’ into their seaches. If someone types in, I love sausage pizzas! I am not sure this article will help me, but maybe it’s worth reading anyway’, you don’t want your seach result to show up when seachers are seaching for ‘pizza’.
Which seach engines should you list your seach terms in? Well, if someone types in the seach query you’re targeting into one seaching engine, but then clicks on Google instead of Bing or Yahoo! for their seatch results, then it doesn’t do much good to include that seach term in Bing or Yahoo! because no one will click on your site from those seach results. So it’s best to stick with a single seach engine and use all the available tools that each search engine offers – this way a searcher might see a link to your blog through any one of these companies rather than just one.
The next part of seo is keywords. You seachers probably know that seachers use seach terms like ‘pizza’ or ‘pizza place’ when looking for pizza places online. It’s important to make sure you get these seachment of seaching correctly by putting the words people are seaching for in the right spots on your webpage.
If you’re writing a blog about pizza, your title may be “I Like Pizza.” If you put this as your webpage title tag it will show up in seach engines with just those two words – not very helpful! We want seachers to see that this page is about their topic of interest when they click on I Like Pizza from the seach engine results page. So adding ‘History of Pizza” to your seach engine seaching terms is a good seo technique.
I hope you seachers have found this tutorial helpful! I’d love to hear about how seo works for you in the comments section below so be sure to let me know if you have any helpful tips or seaching experiences with seo. Thanks for reading and happy seaching!
The history of pizza is an interesting topic that leads into the origins of pizza, how many types of pizzas there are, regional variations of pizza, different styles of pizza – it’s endless! I guess you can see why people would want to learn more about the history of pizza. It’s definitely something fun to talk about during parties at dinner with friends. People tend to seach for common seaching terms like ‘pizza’ or ‘History of Pizza”. The seach engines will show up at the top seach results page for any seaching term, near the tag lines because seachers tend to be interested in those topics.
The seo takes advantage of seachers that type a seaching term into seach engines and then click on the first link that shows up – it’s not very smart but many people do it. Of course you want to appear as one of those first links because your webpage offers a great opportunity for someone who wants to find out more about a topic that interests them. So using seo techniques helps get your webpage ranked higher in seache engine results by making sure it includes seaching terms that seachers use to find out more about topics they are interested in.
With seo, seachers often get better seach results because seachers can type seaching queries like ‘pizza’ or ‘History of Pizza’ and the secher sees you’re post (and other posts like it) near the top of their results page without having to click through several pages. This is good for seachers because they get what they want quickly and it’s good for you because your webpage will be clicked on by many people who might otherwise not see it at all!
Welcome to my blog about pizza! The topic of pizza has generated much interest over the years so I wanted to start a blog that could offer tips, tricks, seaching tips and seach experiences related to seo. I hope you seachers enjoy this post about seo and be sure to tell me in the comments section below what seaching terms have brought you here!
SEO is a topic that seachers have talked about for years but it’s just started getting more attention from seachers during the past few years as technology has advanced and people have become busier – they don’t have time to go through many pages of seach engine results anymore so being listed near the top makes a big difference. So let’s discuss what seo is and how it works.
There are two parts of seo: keywords and backlinks. These two aspects work together because if your webpage doesn’t seach well for seaching terms, it won’t get seached much and if no one seaches for your seaching terms, you won’t get any seachers. The keywords work because seachers type in seaching queries when looking for specific information – think about how many times you’ve typed keywords into a seach engine to find what you were looking for (it’s probably hundreds!).