A General Overview of SEO

Nicole Krinsky
Jun 19, 2015
3 min read

What is SEO?

Search engine optimization (SEO). If you’re in the digital media industry in any sense, you have probably heard this term thrown around, but may not have known exactly what it is. In summary, SEO is the process of increasing the visibility of a website or web page by obtaining a high-ranking placement in a search engine’s organic (unpaid) results.

Why use SEO?

So what makes SEO important? Let me break if down for you. Commercial search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo!) drive the majority of web traffic. Therefore, if you want to increase the number of visitors to your website or web page, it’s probably a good idea to make sure your site populates in these search engines.

Ex. Let’s say you have a startup shoe company specializing in comfy women’s shoes. No one knows your name to do a direct search, so logically you would want your site to pop up in a search engine like Google when someone enters a search relevant to your site. SEO makes this happen.

Now you might be asking how you get your site to appear on a search engine’s results page? This is where SEO comes in.

Popularity Matters.

Just like high school, with SEO, popularity matters. The more popular and important a site is, the higher it will rank in search results. A site gains its popularity through link backs, meaning that the more links that link back to your site, the better your ranking. However, quality is just as important as quantity. The quality of a site is called its authority, and to earn authority, you need trustworthy sites linking back to yours. If you have a .gov or .edu site linking back to yours, your authority points go up. These link backs allow search engines to send out “spiders” that crawl through the web to find your page. The more links and higher authority they have, the easier the path for the spiders to find your site.

So the lesson here is to get as many link backs as possible with high authorities in order to increase your search results ranking because the higher you rank (preferably the 1st page of results), the more traffic you get.

Keywords.

Now that you’ve established enough link backs for search engines to find you, you need to let them know during what search queries your site should populate. This has to do with your sites keywords. Keywords are words relevant to your content that a consumer would use in a search engine to find your site. Specific keyword phrases are called long-tail keywords. They give your site a higher SEO ranking and less competition.

Ex. A keyword of “shoes” will have you competition with the big-box retailers of shoes (DSW)

A long-tail keyword of “women’s comfy high heel shoes” will specify results, decreasing your competition to be seen in a search.

If A Tree Falls But There’s No One Around…

As moz.com put it in their Beginner’s Guide to SEO, “you can build a perfect website, but its content can remain invisible to search engines unless you promote it.”

So how do you get to that #1 organic search engine results spot? We covered link backs and how to get them. We covered keywords…but where do you put them? One of the best ways to optimize your site’s ranking is to add keywords to the site’s title and text. Specifically, in the description meta tag, URL, section headings, and body copy. Multimedia like images and videos are non-text content, so in order to optimize them, you can add ‘alt img' descriptions to them.

EASY as SEO.

In conclusion, websites compete for attention and placement in the search engines, and those who have a comprehensive understanding of SEO will benefit from higher rankings and the increase in traffic/visibility that follows.

If this seems a little overwhelming, Moz has created an SEO toolbar that shows SEO metrics at a glance as you go between pages! Check it out here.