What Is SEO?

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the process of growing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website by improving the visibility of the website to users (it’s done through organic search engine results).

It is important to highlight the fact that SEO is about the growth of unpaid results (“organic” results), therefore direct traffic and paid placements are excluded.

SEO can target various types of searches, such as image search, video search, news search, academic search, as well as industry-specific vertical search engines. Check out this SEO checklist that might help you get started. 

How does SEO work?

To better understand the concept of SEO, let’s break this definition down and take a look at the parts. First of all, let’s talk about the quality of traffic.

Be aware that if you attract thousands of visitors to your website, but they’re visiting your site because Google told them you sell smartphones when in reality you sell sweatshirts, well, this is not quality traffic. You have to attract visitors who are interested in what you have to offer.

Let’s continue with the quantity of traffic. Once you have the quality of traffic, the people choosing to click on your website from the other search engine results pages (SERPs) that are genuinely interested in your products, you can focus on getting more traffic.

Then, let’s explain the last part of this definition – the organic results. Keep in mind that ads represent a significant part of many search engine results pages.

The organic traffic is basically any traffic that you don’t need to pay for.

Why is SEO important?

Do you wonder how SEO works? Well, the goal of search engines is to give the best service for their users, which means delivering high-quality and relevant results on the search engine pages. In order to do this, the search engines have to scan or crawl multiple websites to clearly understand what those sites are about.

This process will help them deliver relevant results for the users who are searching for specific topics or keywords.