SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is the process of getting traffic from the “free,” “organic,” “editorial” or “natural” search results on search engines. SEO is crucial if you want to be found by your target audience. That is why it’s important that more and more people are starting to use this marketing method.
In this post , The Perez Notes will cover the following: What is SEO, What are Search Engines and What do they Do? Understanding how your target audience searches; What to optimize for; Choosing good keywords.
What are Search Engines and What do they Do?
To answer the question, “What is SEO?”, we need to understand what a search engine actually does. This can be best explained by breaking it down into two parts: how a website gets discovered in the first place. And then once found, how relevant content is ranked. In fact this makes up all of what you know about Google today from its humble beginnings as just another directory site built on top of existing online catalogs called Yahoo!
What Is A Directory ?
A simple list of websites that was organized via human-powered submissions known as “portals’ ‘ were created during the early days of internet web directories . Today’s search engines evolved from these very portals. Where they would crawl the web indexing sites with metadata to create things called “web pages”.
What Is A Web Page?
A single unique page on a website is known as a ‘Web Page’. It can be identified by its URL address for example google.com or yahoo.ca are examples of web page addresses you’re familiar with today . It’s important to note that each site has multiple pages (sometimes hundreds, thousands and even millions!). But it all comes down to how Google identifies them using specific HTML tags embedded throughout the code behind every page on your site. This helps search engines identify what content belongs on that particular page.
What are Tags?
Tags, also known as ‘meta tags’, provide important information about your page to search engines. These include the ‘title’ of your webpage. This is what you will see when searching for a specific term or phrase on Google and other major search engines. It’s essentially the headline that lives in the HTML code behind each web page on your site. For example, if you type in “What Is A Web Page?’ into Google Search it would pull up all pages with that exact wording inside their titles (or headlines). The tag right below the title is called meta description. It tells visitors why they should click through to visit that particular website/webpage by giving them an idea of what will be on the page they’re about to click into.
Understanding how your target audience searches
Understanding how your target audience searches for information is the first step to writing a successful blog post. Begin by using Google Analytics, which offers free access to detailed reports about your website traffic.
What do readers search for most often?
Use these findings as inspiration for creating content that will keep visitors on your page. A good rule of thumb is to make sure each paragraph contains at least one or two sentences with industry-related words and phrases.
If someone searches for online types in “SEO basics,” what would be the best way to structure this article for them? What facts can I include that would help them learn more about SEO without feeling overwhelmed or confused by too much technical lingo? What questions would this beginner have? What are the best, most helpful resources someone can reference if they want to learn more about SEO later on?
What are the keywords people use when they find you?
SEO, also known as Search Engine Optimization, can have many meanings depending on who you’re talking to. The concept of increasing audience reach by improving search engine rankings has been around. Since the early days of Gopher and Archie indexes (the earliest parts of what we now know as search engines). And while SEO continues to evolve (in fact becoming increasingly more important). There’s always one constant: understanding how Google thinks, through analytics data and experience with keyword research along with knowing how users behave once they’ve found our site via organic searches.
SEO is the ultimate marketing game, where our goal isn’t just to get someone’s attention once. But instead earn their trust and loyalty over time.
There are several search engine optimization factors that you should optimize for on your website, including:
- Keyword research and competition analysis
- Title tags and meta descriptions
- Page content quality & relevance of keywords used in page copywriting
- Usability of site (for users)
- speed of load times, user experience etc.
Choosing good keywords.
- Optimizing the meta data and page copy for each of your target keywords.
- Making sure search engines know what your pages are about (via keyword research). So they can present it to users who might be interested in finding out more information on those topics.
