Have You Been Asking What is SEO? Then Read This

Along your journey of learning the best way to promote your business online, I'm certain you have asked yourself the question, "What is SEO?" SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. That means to optimize your online property in order that it will be indexed and placed in the natural results list of Google and other search engines.

Some folks make the mistake of thinking that they can just pay Google to be included in their list of results. This isn't true!

You can't pay them to be listed in their natural search results (the key list that people look at). Your site and online presence as a whole needs to be optimized in such a way that the search engines' computerized system will include your site on the list. The 1st step to making this happen is to correctly optimize your website in order that it can be indexed.

Google (as well as other search engines) does have what's called a Pay Per Click advertising program where you can pay for inclusion into their paid ads, but your site still must be optimized in a certain way to be on this list too. When you go to Google and type in a search term (often referred to as a keyword or key phrase) for something, the list of results are sites, blogs, articles, promotional releases, videos, etc. which have been indexed in Google.

Before those webpages are placed in the index, Google's robot (also called a spider) "crawls" the content on every one of the pages. After the pages are in the index, Google's robot then sets the relevancy of each webpage to the keyword phrase that was employed, listing the pages ordered by relevancy to that term.

Let's assume that somebody is looking in Google for the phrase “how to lose weight”.

In this example, you may have a site that's all about losing weight, but if the pages of your weight loss site isn't optimized correctly for Google, then none of your pages will be listed in the results. Your target audience will struggle to find your site.

Regardless of whether your website is search engine optimized, it requires a lot of work and time to get it on the 1st page of results for certain popular terms. There are several SEO factors that are important and specific things that must be done directly to your website and indirectly to your site to get the required outcomes.

SEO enhancement of your site comes in two forms: On page optimization and Off page optimization. On page optimization consists of optimizing the individual page elements of your website while off page optimization consists of improving your web pages indirectly through assorted web marketing strategies such as link building and social media activity.