What is SEO?

Search  engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of increasing the quantity  and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine  results. 

 

What goes into SEO?

To understand what SEO really means, let's break that sentence down and look at the parts: 

• Quality  of traffic. You can attract all the visitors in the world, but if  they're coming to your site because Google tells them you're a resource  for Apple computers when really you're a farmer selling apples, that is  not quality traffic. Instead you want to attract visitors who are  genuinely interested in products that you offer.
• Quantity of  traffic. Once you have the right people clicking through from those  search engine results pages (SERPs), more traffic is better.
• Organic  results. Ads make up a significant portion of many SERPs. Organic  traffic is any traffic that you don't have to pay for. 

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 traffic is specifically any unpaid traffic that comes from SERPs.How SEO works
You  might think of a search engine as a website you visit to type (or  speak) a question into a box and Google, Yahoo!, Bing, or whatever  search engine you're using magically replies with a long list of links  to webpages that could potentially answer your question. That's true. But have you ever stopped to consider what's behind those magical lists of links? Here's  how it works: Google (or any search engine you're using) has a crawler  that goes out and gathers information about all the content they can  find on the Internet. The crawlers bring all those 1s and 0s back to the  search engine to build an index. That index is then fed through an  algorithm that tries to match all that data with your query.  

That's all the SE (search engine) of SEO.  

 The O part of SEO—optimization—is where the people who write all that  content and put it on their sites are gussying that content and those  sites up so search engines will be able to understand what they're  seeing, and the users who arrive via search will like what they see. Optimization can take many forms. It's everything from making sure the title tags  and  meta description are both informative and the right length to pointing internal links  at pages you're proud of. 

Learning SEO

 This section of our site is here to help you learn anything you want  about SEO. If you're completely new to the topic, start at the very  beginning and read the beginner's guide to seo. If you need advice on a specific topic, dig in wherever suits you. Here's a general overview:  

 

What is SEO?

 You're here! You may be new to the industry or may have heard a  colleague drop this acronym and been like, "What?" This is a very good  place to start if you want an overview of the players and jargon so you  can (at the very least) talk the talk.  

Building an SEO-friendly site

 Once you're ready to start walking that SEO walk, it's time to apply  those SEO techniques to a site, whether it's brand new or an old one  you're improving. These pages will help you get started with everything from selecting an SEO-friendly domain name to best practices for internal links .

 

Content and related markup

A site isn't really a site until  you have content. But SEO for content has enough specific variables that  we've given it its own section. start here   if you're curious about keyword research, how to write SEO-friendly  copy, and the kind of markup that helps search engines understand just  what your content is really about.  

 

On-site topics

You've already learned a lot about on-site  topics by delving into content and related markup. Now it's time to get  technical with information about robots.txt.

 

Link-related topics

Dig deep into everything you ever needed to know about links from anchor text  to redirection. Read this series of pages to understand how and when to  use nofollow and whether guest blogging is actually dead. If you're  more into the link building side of things (working to improve the  rankings on your site by earning links), go straight to the Beginner's Guide to Link Building.  

 

Other optimization

Congratulations! You've mastered the ins  and outs of daily SEO and are now ready for some advanced topics. Make  sure all that traffic has the easiest time possible converting with conversion rate optimization (CRO), then go micro level with local SEO or take that site global with international SEO. 

The evolution of SEO

Search  engine algorithms change frequently and SEO tactics evolve in response  to those changes. So if someone is offering you SEO advice that doesn't  feel quite right, check in with the specific topic page. For a more technical look at SEO, check out this short video from Rand Fishkin. Go forth and SEO…