What is SEO? Simple, Search Engine Optimization is the process of making improvements on and off your website in order to gain more exposure in search engine results.
And more exposure in search engine results will ultimately lead to more visitors finding you for the right reasons.
How SEO Works
Search engine optimization is all about impacting how visible your website is in a search engine’s organic results.
To better understand optimization, let’s start by looking at how search engines work.
First, let’s talk about relevance. When a user searches for something like Miami hotels, search engines want to show a list of results that are relevant to the topic of Miami hotels.
Search engines will analyze all of the webpages they have ever visited, and pick out the pages that they believe are the most relevant to Miami hotels.
They determine this by evaluating lots of different factors, including how your content is written and implemented in code, as well as how other websites around the internet are linking to you.
And all of this is stuffed into a very big, very complex, and very proprietary index. In a fraction of a second, the search engine is then able to use complex algorithms to rank and display all of those webpages in order of relevance to that phrase that the user just typed in, Miami hotels.
A company like Google will have a bot, basically a software program that crawls the web. It does this by following links. Links from your site to other pages on your site and links from one site to another. The crawler arrives at a page, reads the code and stores the information. That stored information is called the index and your initial goal is to be indexed by Google.
This is very important to understand, because search engines make a very clear distinction between content that’s about Miami hotels versus content relevant for other phrases, like Miami resorts, or a phrase like beach getaway.
Google even evaluates the quality of the pages that are linking to you. If they’re on brand, relevant and popular, it’s going to assume that you’re more credible than if off topic, unpopular pages are linking to your content.
SEO done well can provide an impressive ROI. Done poorly and it’ll negative impact your organic search efforts.
