What is search engine optimization and how it works?

What is search engine optimization? By definition, SEO is a comprehensive set of techniques aimed at improving the amount and quality of your page traffic, which comes from organic search results.

What are the key points of SEO? To understand what is search engine optimization, I suggest having the previous definition split into its three main components.

Amount of traffic

Apparently, the more traffic you get, the better runs your online business. The amount of traffic is betting on the right people coming to your web pages through clicks on the search engine result pages (the SERPs).

Quality of traffic

By definition, quality traffic means engaging only those visitors who are actually interested in the products or services you are dealing with. No point attracting visitors from all over the world. For example, there is not quality traffic, when people looking for software are coming to your website dealing with fruits & vegetables, just because Google offered them doing so.

Organic results

Most commonly, organic traffic is probably any natural traffic, i.e., those you aren’t supposed to pay for. So, many search results can be mainly shaped with different paid advertisements, just consider that fact.

Understanding what is search engine optimization, let’s see how it works. To be more precise, I suggest having a brief check often used as the very basics for the beginners. Having a general overview below, feel free to dig in any specific topic you may need to have advice on.

Create a website with SEO-friendly structure

Before delving deeper into the matter, you will need to make sure your web pages are built in a friendly manner to be well-indexed by the search robots. No matter if you have just launched a new website, or just want to brush up your current one, SEO-friendly structure starts with selecting the right domain name, to the best content organization and link building techniques.

Work on your writings and remember: content is the king

Just take it for granted - content always comes first. And there are a lot of specific variables about this topic. But there are only several things you need here most - just feeling curious about the keyword research, standard practices for creating SEO-friendly content, and the necessary set of special markups helping the search engines (like Google itself) “understand” your content.

On-site basics and some topics related to link building

Once you feel confident on the quality and SEO-friendly content, as well as related technical markups, you are ready to have a deep dive into all about robots.txt, just browse for it. As for the backbone topics of link building, I recommend starting from learning all about anchor text, to getting a better understanding of the redirection process. Once it is done, suggest browsing for some bullet points, such as guest blogging, earning links, and when to use nofollow. Once you got them all, you will be ready to go for some advanced topics like conversion rate optimization, local and international SEO, and so on.