In simple terms, SEO is a collection of best practices, methodologies, and software tools that marketers use to make a website and its content “findable” by search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. While it may not sound as obvious as tech skills like coding languages or web design, search engine optimization is a crucial skill for virtually any web-related role.
SEO focuses on organic traffic
The goal of any website is to attract users and convey information, sell a product or service, or collect contact details for future marketing opportunities. While some website visitors come from social media , paid ads , or marketing emails, a successful website also needs visitors who “stumble” upon your site through their own research.
“Organic traffic” is the marketing term for users who visit a website through the results of a search engine query. Let’s say someone types “what is SEO and how does it work” into the Google search bar, sees this article in the search results, and clicks the link to read it. They’re counted as “organic” visitors.
SEO “Optimization” (Pleasing Google)
But here’s the thing – these search results aren’t random. Search engines like Google analyze and index web content based on its relevance to specific topics and architects mailing list search queries. The more relevant your page’s content is to a specific query (or “keyword”), the more likely it is to appear at the top of a search engine’s results.
Google uses a complicated algorithm (which, funnily enough, changes constantly) to determine which sites, pages, and articles get the most bang for your buck. This includes topic relevance, overall global traffic to your page or site, content quality, and whether your page is structured in a way that makes it SEO-friendly (more on that below). Getting Google’s attention is the difference between being on the first page—or getting buried six pages deep.
It's important to keep in mind that, as Forbes points out, up to 92% of clicks in search traffic come from results on the first page of Google, dropping to less than 6% when you get to the second.
This statistic alone illustrates why websites MUST be optimized for search engines to viably attract users. And that’s really SEO in a nutshell – it’s the science (and art) of creating strategies to get your content to the top of the search pile.
How does SEO work?
Understanding the basic concept behind SEO is one thing, but how does it all work?
SEO generally revolves around two strategies:
Optimizing website architecture (the actual coding and design of a website)
Optimizing website content (text on sales pages, blog posts, product descriptions, etc.)
You'll need to apply both of these best practices to see your search traffic trend upward at the fastest possible rate.
SEO Site Architecture
Website architecture optimization may include:
Improve the overall user experience of a website (making your content easier for users to find and engage with) – this will encourage repeat visits and links from other websites, both of which increase search engine rankings.
Make sure that internal links in your content lead to other relevant and useful material. This encourages users to spend more time on your site, which corresponds to a favorable ranking.
Creating a sitemap – a collection of categories and links in the footer of your pages – will make your site more indexable (or “findable”) by search engines and more navigable for users (an SEO win-win).
Mobile-friendly design – Since most users view websites on a phone or other mobile device, Google rewards sites that are designed to be easily viewed on a small screen and desktop computer.
SEO website architecture improvements can also include working with web developers on specific code issues such as website loading speeds, outdated or broken links to URLs (web addresses), and optimizing HTML tags (tags that identify HTML documents to web browsers).
Content SEO
Along with architectural tweaks, the way you write, format, and present your website’s content also plays a part in making or breaking your search engine rankings. When we write articles, our goal is to make them informative, understandable, and engaging—but we also need to make sure you can find them! That means writing with an eye on SEO.
SEO content includes things like:
Keyword research – this involves using software programs to identify the search engine terms (keywords) driving traffic to your website. It’s then a dance of including these keywords in your content (so that search engines notice and improve your rankings) while avoiding “keyword stuffing.”
Keyword stuffing is the practice of overloading content with keywords at the expense of quality. With SEO, there may be a temptation to think this way, but it simply isn’t the case. Search engines like Google have tweaked their algorithms over the years to weed out keyword-stuffed content, and poor content (even if it includes keywords) will ultimately drive users away.
Pillar Pages – What’s better than individual pages of SEO content on a website? One big, optimized umbrella page that brings users in and takes them to each of those individual pages! When a website features multiple articles on different aspects of a topic, this is called a “content cluster.” For example, if your website has published a series of articles on JavaScript (“What is JavaScript?”, “What is a JavaScript Framework?”, “What is jQuery?”, etc.), that would be a content cluster. A pillar page is a page on your website that ties all of that content together and turns it into a powerful mechanism for attracting organic searches and improving your site’s topical authority in the eyes of search engine algorithms. Pillar pages cover all aspects of the content cluster topic, but they do so through thumbnail descriptions that link to more substantive individual articles. Pillar pages are sometimes referred to as 10x pillar pages, due to their ability to increase website traffic tenfold.
Consistent, easily navigable page layouts – This may seem obvious, but it’s a small SEO tweak that can go a long way. When creating content for a website, it’s important to add features like a table of contents that improve readability. This will encourage more time spent on each page by your visitors and also increase the ability of search engines to index your pages. Similarly, make sure your content is divided into sections with heading text that follows a clear hierarchy. Heading 1 for titles, Heading 2 for chapters or topics, Heading 3 for subtopics, etc. This is another technique that improves your site’s readability for users and indexability for search engines.