What Is SEO [Search Engine Optimization Guide]

Unlock the secrets of SEO and supercharge your website's visibility. We'll teach you not only what SEO is and why it is essential, but you'll also learn the different types of SEO, and you'll start to see what you can do to get started optimizing your website. But first, let's begin by discussing what SEO is in the first place.

What Is SEO?

SEO is a form of digital marketing that focuses on improving and structuring a website to communicate more effectively with search engines.

Google and other search engines rely on algorithms to shape how each website is categorized and ranked in search results. In the various patents, Google and other search engines apply for, you can see how these algorithms work, what they look for, and what you can do to improve the quality of your content and, therefore, your ranking potential. SEO professionals focus on harnessing the knowledge divulged in these patents to improve their clients' websites.

Utilizing these patents lets you control how search engines view your website, which is a massive part of why SEO is so important.

Why Is SEO Important?

SEO is important because it uses the most updated information to improve and optimize a website. Once a website has been designed, optimized, structured, and improved using the most current standards, the potential for achieving higher success in search results goes up dramatically.

Using the information given in search patents, professionals determine what a website is doing that can cause it to hurt its ranking potential. Whether the website has been penalized and wants to remove the effects of the penalty, or it simply isn't getting the traffic the owner wants it to, using this information is a great way to improve the quality of the website and get more organic traffic coming in.

Because SEO can reverse penalties, drive more organic traffic to a website, and propel a website up in search results, businesses can significantly benefit from learning, or investing in SEO.

How Does SEO Help Businesses?

SEO can help businesses by getting them in front of more potential customers in search results. Companies can ensure they receive more quality traffic by doing thorough research, competitive analysis, and improving and optimizing the website to conform with modern SEO conventions.

This process is a form of digital marketing that goes in hand with a Google ads campaign. Most consider SEO a more robust form of marketing than an ads campaign because it improves the website to the point that search engines naturally give it traffic.

In fact, not only does SEO help a website receive more traffic naturally, but it also improves the quality of the content to more effectively analyze, channel, and convert the traffic the website is receiving. This significantly differs from an ads campaign because your messaging doesn't have to be dialed in to carry out the campaign. All you need is an ad budget.

Whereas, with search engine optimization, many different aspects can be harnessed to ensure you see a massive improvement in the amount and quality of traffic your company receives online.

What Types of SEO Are There?

There are many types of SEO that can be utilized to ensure the best results possible. Whether you're trying to improve your backlink profile and focusing on off-page SEO, or you're trying to improve and dial in your messaging by working on on-page SEO, we'll walk you through each aspect and how they can improve your online presence.

On-Page SEO

On-Page SEO is mainly focused on all things related to the information displayed on the page, as well as the user experience. The general focus with on-page tactics has to deal with how both users and search engines will understand and perceive your content. Whether this is optimizing the file sizes of your images or doing thorough keyword research, the focus is on improving the usability and enjoyability of your content.

Keyword Research

Keyword research is important in SEO because it helps you ensure you're making content that targets the right people in the right way. Researching your keywords thoroughly to ensure you're targeting the highest-traffic, most relevant keywords for your goals is the best thing you can do when setting out to create any page. Defining which keywords you'll target will also help with other aspects of SEO, like your content strategies as well.

Content

SEO content is a lot different than normal content in that it has one focus - providing quality, reliable, enjoyable, and informative content without compromise. You never want to damage your reputation in the eyes of search engines by creating cheap, low-quality content. It is also important to optimize the HTML on your page as well.

HTML

Semantic HTML is a great way to help provide semi-structured data to search engines. The benefit of providing this "semi-structured" data is that it will be much easier for the algorithms used by search engines to parse through your content and understand your website in the way you intend them to.

By this, we mean that you can use various element tags to help direct search engines through your content in a way that makes the most sense. In addition to improving the understanding of your website from a search engine's perspective, you'll also show any webmaster that you want to link out to your content that you know what you're doing.

Linking Strategies

Building backlinks is a great way to improve the perceived authority of your website. There is a wide variety of linking strategies that you can employ, but which ones you focus most on will depend upon the URL structure you're creating, the type of website you're working with, and what keywords you're targeting.

Search engines will carefully examine which websites link to yours (backlinks), and they will judge the quality of the backlink based on many different factors. Building backlinks is a huge part of off-page SEO.

Off-Page SEO

Off-Page SEO is important because it involves how your website interacts with others and vice versa. The goal of off-page SEO is to position your website so that search engines have no choice but to see you as an authority. You can build a virtual network of relevant, quality backlinks filled with variety.

Whether you're building backlinks on directories, guest posts, press releases, etc., your goal should be to make connections to other links in a way that validates the authority of your website and complies with the various patents Google has released regarding their algorithms.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO focuses on providing as much semi-structured data as possible in the form of schema, alt tags, robots.txt files, status codes, etc. The primary goal of technical SEO is to ensure that search engines know how to interact with your content. Whether they aren't supposed to crawl a certain page, or you want to highlight a certain part of a page's content for a chance to appear in a featured snippet, or even if you just want to provide more information about your business for local SEO, technical search is important.

Another important aspect of technical SEO is the usage of patents. SEO patents are incredible resources to take advantage of in your efforts. Whether there are patents published by Google, Microsoft, and other companies that influence the way all modern browsers work regarding search results.

By reading these patents, SEOs are able to more intimately understand what to do and what to avoid when creating SEO strategies.

Local SEO

Local SEO is essentially just everything we've already covered, but the focus is on a much more localized level. Typically local SEO only focuses on one centralized area. Local SEO typically focuses on location-specific topics, whether it is a specific city, a nearby cluster of cities, or an entire state.

How Does SEO Work?

SEO works by providing the highest quality content possible for search engines and users. Search engines use algorithms to determine which pages are the highest quality resources. The highest quality resources will then rank higher. They determine which resources are the highest quality by how expensive algorithmically they would be to rank. What this then means is that search engines have no choice but to rank the cheapest resource higher.

By ensuring that you are very explicit, comprehensive, and thorough, you ensure that the algorithms ranking your website have to do less work than they do on the competing pages. Once this is the case, search engines will have no choice but to rank you above the competition. However, it isn't quite this simple. You also need to prove that your website is an authority in the industry you're trying to rank for by providing consistent, quality content related to your niche.

You can create the best page that's ever been created for a topic, but if your competitors have less comprehensive pages but they cover all aspects of your industry, you have no chance to outrank them. You can, however, cover all aspects of a single part of your industry and outrank them for that, so long as your content is more comprehensive, higher quality, and optimized.

Then, once you outrank them for that part of your niche, all you need to do is continue creating more comprehensive and informative content for the rest of your niche, and you will overtake them in time. Four steps allow you to do this, and we'll discuss them below.

Keyword Research

Keyword research is the first step to any successful campaign. Depending on the industry, you need a solid keyword list of at least 100-300+ keywords. The research you'll need to do can is best if you do it alongside competitive analysis. You'll often find keywords you never would've found had you not carefully inspected the competition.

Generally, when you have a competitor that is wildly successful, chances are they have already done a lot of research into which keywords provide the highest ROI, so occasionally, capitalizing off of this is a great move.

Competitive Analysis

Analyzing the competition allows you to see why search engines are ranking them first. You'll see how they organize their URL structures, what keywords they're targeting, which backlinks they're building, and how comprehensive their content is.

The primary focus during this analysis is to compile the first 3-5 competitors in such a way that you can recognize the holes each competitor has in their strategy. Some competitors will have things no other competitors have, and in the end, you'll wind up with a ton of things that most competitors are missing that you can include.

In addition, anything you find that is essential to your topical map that none of these 3-5 competitors have is also a huge bonus.

Content Planning & Creation

Once you have your keyword list and have designed a topical map and URL structure based on your research and the biggest competitors, you can begin to lay out your content strategy. Your goal will depend on the size and scope of your goals, but ultimately it is best if you have at least 80-150 pages. You'll want to use a CSV file, like Google Sheets, for example, to contain each page.

Once you have each page in your topical map on a Google Sheets file, you'll want to create a separate tab for each page and begin doing the research required to complete the heading structure for each page. This will make it infinitely easier to flesh out your topical map. You can begin creating your content once you're finished with 20-150+ pages. The benefit of doing it this way is that you'll never be hard-pressed to find ideas to write about because you've already determined which pages you need to thoroughly cover your niche.

Monitoring & Adjustments

Next to research, this is the most important step. You'll want to use various tools like the Google Search Console, Semrush, Ahrefs, Moz, Google Analytics, etc., to ensure your pages perform how you want them to. If they aren't, you must make the proper adjustments so they will perform how you need them to.

What To Know Before Getting Started With SEO

One thing you should know before getting started with SEO is how search engines work in general. You'll want to begin to learn the basics of SEO. We have a ton of content on our website to walk you through the basics of how to do keyword research, how to build backlinks, how to create quality content, and much more.

How Search Engines Work

Search engines work by using semantics. Semantics focuses on the relationships between words. The algorithms behind search engines recognize relationships between certain entities, and the stronger of a connection you can make between your website and the thing you want to rank for, the less work search engines will have to do when processing your content.

The less work they have to do, the higher quality signals your website sends to the algorithms responsible for ranking websites in search results.

Search engines cannot quite yet read content, but they can recognize the relationships between entities utilizing NLP and LLM. This means that the algorithms being used by search engines run various algorithmic processes to determine what is being talked about in the context provided on each webpage.

So the best thing you can do for your website is to be as direct, explicit, and comprehensive as possible so that it is easier for the algorithms to understand your content, but in such a way that it is easier and more enjoyable for your users as well.

Give The People What They Want

Everyone has been on a website or platform that teases the solution. You have to drudge through tons of content to find the main information you came there to find. No one likes this form of information presentation.

In fact, the best way to provide the answer to something is right away. If you have a section on "Which Dog Breed Is Best With Children," you don't want nine paragraphs before getting to the answer. It would be much better to provide the answer immediately and then expand upon the answer in the following sentences/paragraphs.

Keeping your users drawn in and happy is one of the main focuses you should have when creating your content. If something bothers you when you're on a website, chances are you shouldn't use that same tactic on your own website.

People today want answers immediately. They want thorough information, and if you're citing some data-heavy statistic, provide a link back to the independent study that led you to your conclusion.

Quality Content

Quality content is an ambiguous phrase. What it means is comprehensive, unbiased, and logically structured content. You want a piece of content to follow a logical, easy-to-follow heading structure and an even easier-to-follow writing style. Quality content should answer any possible question someone can have regarding the central focus of the page.

If you're writing a page on Golden Retrievers, you should have information that covers all aspects of that dog breed. When it was first bred, what was it bred for, who bred it, common traits, common health issues, etc. Be as thorough, organized, informative, and concise as possible.

Hire Spirra Digital

Do you want more organic traffic to your website? Do you want your business to get in front of more potential customers each month? Do you want more people reaching out to you from your website?

If you want your website to perform better for your company in search results and you want to bring in more customers through your website, hire our SEO team today. Schedule a quick 15-30 minute meeting with us, and we'll see how we can help.