What is SEO? A Beginners Guide

The abbreviation “SEO” stands for “Search Engine Optimization” which is the process of optimizing your website in several different aspects/areas to get your website to the top of organic search results for a specific search term or keyword and increase search engine visibility while at the same time driving in relevant traffic to your website.

Why SEO is Important?

As we learned in the above section, SEO is the process of optimizing your website to get higher search engines rankings for a specific keyword. But, before we answer the question of why SEO is important, let me ask you a question. How many times do you search for something online? You will not be able to count the number of times. And also, how many times do you go to the second page of a search results? The answer will be on very rare occasions.

Without a proper SEO strategy implemented on your website, your website will be buried in the inner search results pages where your target market won’t be able to find you. And what’s the point of a website if no one can find it online? Well, this is why SEO is so important as it allows your website to be in front of the right type of people at the right time.

Not only that, SEO drives high quality and relevant traffic in high quantity to your website on a consistent basis month after month for FREE! As SEO generates organic traffic which means that you don’t have to pay for the traffic that is brought in unlike PPC (pay per click). The only thing you will be spending is your time. And trust us when we say this, you will not regret spending a couple of hours a day investing in SEO when the ROI starts to kick in as SEO is known to be one of the most ROI generating marketing methods in today’s world.

For example, let say that you have a website to sell web design services. Wouldn’t it be great if your website showed up when some types in “professional web designer” to a search engine? Of course, it would as your website is presented to the perfect potential customer right when they are searching for your service and it would most certainly convert into a lead or even a sale.

How SEO Works

The way SEO work is quite an impressive and interesting process. But in order for you to learn how SEO works, you have to understand the basics first. Which means learning how search engines work.

What is a Search Engine?

A search engine is an online tool that allows people like you and me to search for things online and receive the desired information. For example, Google, Bing, and Yahoo are all search engines that allow you to search for the things you want to know on the world wide web.

How do search engines work?

Search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo all work in a similar manner. Each search engine has its own virtual bots called crawlers who crawls the entire world wide web (all websites and webpages on the internet). These crawlers then perform a function called “indexing“, which is the process of identifying what each web page is about and categorizing it in the search engine’s index (database).

For example, if you have a web page about web design on your site, their crawlers will go through the webpage, identify that it is related to web design and store a copy of that in their index in the correct category so that they can present it when a searcher search for it. 

The main goal of search engines is to provide the best results for what a searcher is searching for, in order to do that, search engines use advanced algorithms to identify the intent behind the search of a user and try their best to provide the best results that match up with that search.

Have you ever gone into a search engine such as Google to find something and got completely irrelevant results? No, this is because these algorithms are in constant development by these search engine companies to better understand what the user is searching for and provide them with the best results that satisfy the user.

Also, lets quickly learn what a keyword is. A keyword is known as the phrase a searcher types into a search engine to search for something. For example, if you type in “web design company in Sri Lanka” to a search engine, the “web design company in Sri Lanka” is the keyword.

Keywords are the heartbeat of your SEO campaign as most of your website optimizations are done towards the keywords that you wish to rank for.

Now that you know how search engines work and what a keyword is, understanding how SEO works is fairly simple.

1.  You will optimize your website’s web pages with relevant and profitable keywords.
2.  Search engines will then crawl your website and index your web pages accordingly to their topic.
3.  Your web page will be presented to relevant keyword searches that a searcher makes on the search engine.

That’s simply how SEO works. Now you might be thinking, “that’s really easy, I will optimize my website today and my site would be ranking tomorrow”. Well, not so fast! SEO doesn’t work that way.

Remember when I said about the advanced algorithms of search engines? Well, these algorithms play a major part in ranking your web pages as well. As I mentioned earlier, search engines always provide what’s best for the user and they have a specific set of conditions a website has to be met with in order to take those top spots of search results.

These search engines don’t want to rank any website that seems relevant, they want to rank the best of the best and when it comes to SEO, you have to prove to these search engines that you are one of the top players in the industry and your website deserves to be on the top positions of the search results.

Also, this is not something that you can do overnight as well, you have to constantly work on your website’s SEO and build your website’s authority over time.

 Keep in mind, SEO is not a sprint, it’s a marathon.

Of course, there are some ways that you can speed up the process a bit and we will discuss them further in this article as well. But for now, this is the basic outline of how SEO works.

Types of SEO

There are mainly 3 types of SEO that you can choose to implement on your website. Local SEO, National SEO, and International SEO. Now let’s dive into each of these and see what each means and in what instances should you choose each one.

Local SEO

Local SEO is when you target keywords and optimize your website to rank in your local area. For example, if you run a coffee shop in Beverly Hills Los Angeles, your target keywords can be something like “coffee shop in Beverly Hills Los Angeles” or “Best coffee shop in Beverly Hills” with the name of your local area in the keyword.  

As you might now already know, this type of SEO is best suited for local businesses that would like to get as much relevant and hyper-targeted traffic to your website with more commercial intent.

This type of SEO is also more profitable and less competitive than others are you are only competing with a small amount of other local businesses just like yours.

Search engines like Google have also introduced their own mini platform called “Google Business Profile” that allows you to set up your business information that allows you to be listed on a so-called “map pack” where all your business information such as opening hours, reviews and location are instantly displayed to a searcher.

Also, keep in mind that not only Google has this type of mini platform inside their search engine. Other search engines such as Bing have a similar platform as well to list local businesses.

National SEO

National SEO is referred to as when you target and optimize keywords on a national level rather than on a local level. For example, if you run a service-based business that you offer your service to all regions of your country, you can target keywords such as, “your service + your country“. To elaborate on this example a bit more, let’s say that you run a web design business in the UK and you offer your services in every region of the UK. In this instance, you can target keywords such as “web design services UK“.

This type of SEO is very common on medium to large scale businesses and note that this national SEO is not only for service-based businesses, you can use this type of SEO for product-based businesses that operate on a national level as well.

Also, bear in mind that the competition levels in this type of SEO are high as you are competing with all the businesses in the nation just like yours.

International SEO

International SEO as the name implies is the process of targeting keywords and optimizing your website for other countries as well as your own country of origin. For example, if you are a business that exports certain products or provides certain services to overseas customers and clients, you can target keywords such as “your product or service + the country you are targeting”. Let’s take the same example as before to elaborate this as well. If you are running a web design business that offers your services to Australia and you are in USA. You will have to have a separate page and optimize that page to target keywords like “Web Design Services Australia”.

These types of SEO campaigns require a lot of effort and advanced knowledge of SEO. To give you a little perspective, when targeting other countries, you will have to have separate landing pages for each country targeting only a relevant set of keywords that will not get mixed up with other pages of your website that will confuse search engines. This requires a great deal of planning and a full-proof SEO strategy. I am not going to dive into the advanced strategies here as it is a topic for another separate article. But I chose to mention this just to give you an idea of what you get into if you run an international SEO campaign.

This type of SEO is mostly used by big export businesses (although some small businesses also use this) and usually has very high competition as there are tons of other businesses competing for the same keywords.

Most Important Elements of SEO?

When we talk about SEO, it has three main elements as on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and technical SEO. In order for your website to be recognized as a top position worth website by search engines, you have to implement all three of these elements effectively. If even one element is not implemented and optimized properly, your SEO campaign will not perform at its full potential.

On-page SEO

On-page SEO is when you optimize your website with the keywords that you want to target and rank for. Some of the on-page SEO optimizations can be identified as optimizing your page title tags with the keywords, writing high-quality content, and including target keywords strategically in that content.

On-page SEO is very important as it allows you to indicate to search engines what keywords you are targeting. For example, if you didn’t do any on-page optimizations, search engines will not find the keyword that you are trying to rank for in the page and will not index the page in favor of that keyword as search engines will not know the relevance between the page and the keyword.

Search engines always prioritize relevance and if you want to rank higher for a certain keyword, you have to do proper on-page SEO and make the page you are trying to rank for as relevant as possible for that keyword.

Off-page SEO

Off-page SEO is the process of optimizing your website that you do outside your website. Sounds confusing right? Let me dissolve your confusion. What I mean by optimizing your website outside your website is the process of making your website more visible to your target market and gaining authority in your business industry. As I mentioned earlier in this article, search engines rank sites that both they and people trust.

Therefore, off-page SEO is when you build that trust and become an authority in the industry by building backlinks, promoting your website as much as possible, building a strong social following, etc.

Off-page SEO is not an easy task. In fact, off-page SEO is the most difficult of all three SEO elements to execute. It requires patients and a lot of hard work, but the results are well worth it.

Also, remember when I said that there are ways for you to speed up the process of SEO? Well, this is where you can do it. The more authority and trust you build, the faster you will become worthy of the top positions of the search results in search engines’ eyes.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO refers to all the technical optimization that you do on your website. Some of the technical SEO can be identified as checking the ability for search engines to crawl and index the website, optimizing website speed, making sure the website has a valid SSL certificate, fixing web hosting issues, checking to see if the website is mobile responsive, etc. The basic goal of technical SEO is to make sure that the website has no issues and provides the website visitors with the best user experience possible.

Technical SEO is also very important, this is because if a website has technical issues such as crawl blocking (the crawlers from search engines are), all your other SEO optimization efforts both on-page and off-page will be wasted as the search engines won’t be able to crawl or index the website.

Big search engines such as Google now put a much larger emphasis on this technical SEO when ranking a website. Therefore, having all the technical elements on point is a must.

Note: There are several tools that can help you achieve your SEO goals more efficiently and quickly on these important SEO elements. Here are 7 Important SEO Tools That Helps Rank Faster.

White Hat SEO & Black Hat SEO

While we are on the subject of SEO, it would be a shame to end off this article without talking about White hat and Black hat SEO. Therefore, let’s cover them quickly as well.

White Hat SEO

White Hat SEO is referred to like all the ethical SEO techniques that you can take to increase the rankings of your website. Search engines such as Google have given a set of guidelines that they request you to follow when conducting any SEO on your website. Some of these can be identified as writing high-quality content and earning backlinks, putting the end-user first and providing them a good user experience, etc. Basically, these guidelines are there to ensure that people don’t manipulate their algorithms and get an unworthy website ranked at top of a search result.

White Hat SEO usually takes a long period of time to see results as they are done using 100% ethical techniques.

Like the saying, good things take time.

Black Hat SEO

Black Hat SEO is the complete opposite of White Hat SEO. This is the process of using spammy and unethical techniques that search engines hate and do not recommend to get a website ranking on the top positions in the shortest amount of time. Some of the widely used Black Hat SEO techniques can be identified as buying backlinks, sending bot traffic to the site, keyword stuffing, etc.

Although people see quick results with these techniques, they are not long-lasting. Eventually, search engines catch up to these malpractices and will penalize the websites which will make it nearly impossible to get out of. And trust me, you don’t want that.

With that said, I would recommend that you stick to White Hat SEO. Although it will take a long time to see results, the wait will be well worth it as the results will hold for the long term.

Final Thoughts

Congratulations! You have reached the end of the article. I know it’s a long article but I am sure that now you have a clear idea about SEO and how it works. As I mentioned early on in this article, SEO is one of the most ROI driving digital marketing methods up to date. Make sure that you are taking advantage of it and aim for the long run with white hat SEO techniques.

If you are planning on hiring a professional SEO company to do it for you, make sure that they are qualified and have the results to back them up. Otherwise, you would be just wasting your money and will get penalized at the end.