SEO stands for search engine optimization. Search engines are software, that searches the World Wide Web for the keyword you’ve typed in. The most popular one is Google, but there are many other search engines like Yahoo, Bing, Baidu etc. So SEO means that you optimize your ranking on search engines, but who wants to be ranked high on search engines? Webmasters, Business owners, freelancers, startups, companies etc. are interested in SEO to get traffic, customers and sales, but most importantly it is sustainable.
Here is an example to show you how important SEO is. The website wikipedia.org has about 2 billion monthly web visitors and most of them through search. Not through social media marketing. No through Email marketing. Not through online ads like Google AdWords, Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ads etc., but through search. So people find the website wikipedia.org through search engines. Just to give you a rough idea, how important SEO is. You get targeted traffic regularly every month without doing anything any more. So it’s passive traffic. You just have to put the initial effort in the beginning. Social media users apply the same concepts when they decide to buy TikTok likes or similar metrics for their initial content.
The higher you are ranked, the more traffic you will get. The good thing is, that traffic is free and even targeted, because you are ranked on specific keywords. This kind of traffic you get this way is also called organic traffic. People click more on the search engine results than on ads. The reason behind it is, that the website is already regarded trustful and useful by the search engine. It is already pre checked, so the users can trust that website too. If you want to know, how keyword research works, read this: Why keyword research? The paid version is SEA, which is making an advertisement on Google. The good thing here, that it works instantly. Everything that drives traffic to your site increases your ranking, but if you don’t advertise any more, the traffic will decrease also instantly.
SEO is divided into 2 parts. The first one is called onsite/onpage SEO and the other one is called offsite/offpage SEO. Onsite means that you make your Website easy for search engines to find. So it is more technical. For example the alt tags of your page, your website performance, responsiveness etc. The offsite version is everything external from your website. The most popular ones are backlinks. Backlinks refer to your Website, which is an indicator for Google, that your Website has a good reputation. The more backlinks you, the better it is, but not only quantity is an indicator for Google. Also the quality of the backlinks. It is determined by the Domain Authority.
Social media also plays an important role. The more shares, likes and comments you have, the higher you will get ranked on search engines. My blog article about money as a sample has over 500 shares, which is impressive. It gives you a social proof and it also shows you which topic your reader is more interested in. You can read this article here. Maybe you want to share it too. Haha. Social media platforms are e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc. SEO takes a lot of time, because it takes time to build a reputation, but when you are highly ranked, you will get free and targeted traffic regularly. Once your reputation is established, you will get that traffic in the long run, but how long does it take to get ranked high on Google? It takes weeks even months until you get ranked on the first page of the search engine, if you do the right thing. You also can optimize your ranking on Video platforms like Youtube. The paid advertisement works instantly, but if you don’t advertise any more, there won’t be any traffic. In general there are about 200 factors that can have an influence on your search ranking, but one of the most important factors is content, which belongs to onpage SEO and backlinks, which belongs to offpage SEO. In the end, it is also recommendable to do a SEO audit.
