What is SEO?

SEO definition and types

People often ask me what SEO is. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization.

Back in a day people would think of SEO as of their own website content optimized. Nowadays people think of SEO as of bigger marketing industry which consists of 2 major components: the on-site SEO and the off-site SEO.

The on-site SEO is what I have told above: it’s having your own website content optimized properly. Obviously, it’s your website and you want it to look good in search engines. The point is that you identify the keywords, you optimize your website pages according to these keywords and the plan is that the search engine see what your page is about. Therefore when people are searching for something on Google, presumably Google will offer link to your website just because it’s optimized for that keyword. In the perfect world it would be that easy.

How the off-site SEO works

Since our world is not that perfect and search engines consider more complicated model or a lot more factors before they show your website link to the searchers, people started doing what is called Off-site SEO. The off-site SEO is an attempt to manipulate the search engine logic by having other people websites content optimized according to your keyword strategy. The most importantly it means that they will have link to your website and the link text will be of the certain structure – which is what you want. It’s harder to do since you have zero control of other websites and it’s often hard to convict people to behave the way you want them to. What is also harder is that search engines like Google try to fight back those links and prevent manipulation practices by paralyzing sites for excessive links or over optimization. People dealing with the off-site SEO should be very careful with what they do in order not to get into trouble with Google. The off-site SEO is something that should be done after you complete the on-site SEO. There’s no sense to start with the off-site SEO until your website content isn’t complete: it can be compared with inviting people to come over for a party to the house that has no walls.

What the on-site SEO is

• First identify keywords that you want to target for.

• When you have the keywords strategy, you will need to optimize the pages URLs or addresses: each page should contain the primary keyword.

• Then optimize the meta titles.

• Meta descriptions.

• Optimize images: by that I mean both the file name and the ALT attribute of the image.

• The last but not the least, the page texts. You also really want have them properly optimized but not overly optimized because this is also something that Google doesn’t encourage.

Also do not forget about the site map which is also a very important component of the SEO.

I hope that this explains a little bit the SEO concept to you. Feel free to explore this topic on your own: there’s a lot more to learn.

We would also recommend you to view the seo wordpress templates in case you need a wider choice of website building solutions.