Type a question or a series of words into a search engine. What happens next? You get a list of responses back in the form a Search Engine Results Page.
Why did you get those results? With all the data on the internet, why did the search engine choose these? - Read How Do Search Engines Work.
For this post, we will refer to questions as “keywords” and search engines as “Google”. There are two broad categories of content that appear in those results:
- Paid or sponsored results. Advertisers invested money to be at the top of the page for certain keywords. You can tell these results are ads by the small Ad icon next to the result. For more see What is Search Engine Marketing? (SEM or SEA).
- Unpaid results (also called organic or natural results). Google delivers these because the algorithm has judged them as the best match to your keywords.
It is not a wise practice to rely heavily on ads for website traffic or to appear high in the results page. Paying for people to visit our sites gets really expensive over time. So, how do we get our sites in front of people without using ads to do it? How do we get Google to serve up our site first in the natural or organic results? Answer - you enter the practice of SEO, or Search Engine Optimization.
SEO is adjusting our site
so search engines can easily find it, scan it, and match it
to words and images on it to the questions/keywords users are asking.
Google offers our content more consistently to users when it sees us as an authoritative source of answers. To be more credible and show up more often, we have to purposefully design (or optimize) our pages. In a sense, we are helping Google know more about our site by giving it more information. We are building digital roads for users to visit and see all the richness of our content.
Getting to the top
Just because SEO is not paid advertising, it does not mean that it is free. Appearing at the top of the first page of results takes planning, skill, and deliberate engineering. SEO is part technical and part artistic. The image below shows the two approaches to SEO.
- Some techniques and tactics are technical or site structure, format focused like our communication style or choice of wording. See What is On-Page SEO?
- Some are relationship building to other sites, other channels, or using communications to promote the site. See What is Off-Page SEO?
