What is Search Engine Optimization(SEO)?¶

Generally speaking, search engine optimization (also known as SEO) is a set of techniques and strategies to help a website get better results (SERP) for keywords that are searched on different search engines.

Most successful online business need to maintain a healthy flow of traffic to their website from search engines and specifically Google which provides around 70% of total search traffic.

Many studies have also proved that between organic search results and paid search advertisement, the most valuable customers are visitors that came to the website through ogranic search results.

It is easy to see why SEO can help a business grow by winning more customers over a longer period of time and by a fraction of advertising cost and with much engaged clients.

How does SEO work?¶

When Google or any other search engine visits a website, they index the content of each page. This is done by search engine crawlers or bots. In the early days of search engines, a search engine would try to determine of a page to certain keywords based on the content of the page and usually based on keyword density of where in the page the keyword appeared.

Google was the first search engine that seriously used the whole internet to decide the importance of each page using a somehow decentralized voting mechanism based on backlinks. The idea was (and still is) that the more backlinks to a specific page, the more vote that page has and is more relevant.

Of course, the simplicity of this approach opened up pandora's box of spam, which forced Google to implement many new anti-spamming and ranking factors.

Nowadays, an SEO expert should know how to improve a website ranking without triggering Google blacklisting algorithms.