You might have heard the saying that no question is a stupid question and asking ‘What is SEO’ is a perfectly common question if you are a new blogger. So, in this post, I am going to explain the absolute very basics of SEO.
This post might be too basic for you if you have been online for a while and if you have any experience at all of trying to rank your site in search engines. If you are new to this though, this post is for you!
Table of Contents
What Does the Term SEO mean
SEO is short for Search Engine Optimisation and is an expression that refers to the concept of improving the position of your own website in the search results for a search engine online.
So if you have a website on Italian food, chances are you would like to come on the 1st page of Google Search results when someone types in best pasta recipes.
Or you might have a website or blog about travel tips and advice, so having your website show in the top 10 results on page 1 for a search of the term how to finds cheap flights would be good for you.
What Exactly Is a Search Engine, Just to Be Clear
A search engine is a website that allows you to enter a search term or expression and then will provide you with what it considers the most related results from the Internet.
The natural question here to ask is how the search engines work. How do they decide what the top 10 or top 100 results are? And do search engines then all give the same results?
In order to answer these two questions let’s discuss how search engines work.
How Do Search Engines Work
So let’s imagine that you do a Google search. You go to www.google.com or your local version (for me I use google.co.uk) and then you write in a term that you want to find search results on.
For this example, I am going to do a search for “Plymouth Gin”.
Once you press ENTER on your keyboard, the Google search engine will incredibly quickly crawl its database and throw out its results.
This is NOT a human task as it would take months to do of course, but is a computer-generated task that uses super-computers.
These computers are constantly crawling and evaluating every page on the web and ranking and categorizing them, based on numerous factors.
Google does in fact use human evaluators for going through websites to check the quality of sites online.
The actual search results though are produced using complex algorithms, algorithms that Google updates constantly as they try and make the results more relevant.
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What Is the Benefit of Showing High in a Search Engine?
So ranking (meaning showing) in search results means that you are getting visibility! Imagine if you have a high-street shop selling shoes.
If people can see your shop and walk past it, you have a chance to draw them in and to make a sale.
Your goal might be to make friends online, to network, or to make a sale. Either way, it is about finding a way to get people to visit your business and in your case, online.
So this is where SEO comes into it all.
You want to do whatever you possibly can to meet the criteria that give you the best possible chance of Google’s algorithm showing you in a high position in search results.
How Do I Optimize My Website or Blog for Search Engines?
This post is aimed at providing the most basic information just to introduce what SEO means and is.
We have a whole course dedicated to SEO for Beginners (our SEO Gold Dust Course) so I cannot cover everything here in a few sentences.
BUT – just to give you some example techniques that are used. Some techniques to optimize a website, to give it a much greater chance to show high in search page results, are:
- Build links from other sites to point at your site.
- Make sure your site has a clear theme throughout (this can mean removing or changing old content if it does not fit this theme).
- Have clear headings throughout your posts
- Ensure you have a good Meta Title and description on each post.
- Name your images to relate to the post you are writing.
In fact, there are dozens of things you can do. You might find the SEO Blog Post checklist really helpful for this in fact!
What Search Engines are There?
You can be forgiven for thinking that there is only Google as a search engine as it is everywhere.
The idea of Googling something has even made it into the English language as a commonly used expression.
Popular search engines include:
- Bing
- Pinterest (it is a search engine even though it is often classified as a social media site)
- DuckDuckGo – a lesser-known search engine but has a solid following by its users.
There are dozens of search engines, large and small.
If your business involves selling or promoting something that is highly visual, then Pinterest is a great option. Pinterest is a search engine based on photos and images.
What Is the Difference Between Google AdWords and SEO?
You might well have seen things listed in Google search results that have the word ‘ad’ written underneath it. These are what is known as Adwords.
When you scroll further down a search results page, you will then see natural results, that is, results that are not sponsored or paid for.
So, in these results further down the search results page, you can see that there is no ‘ad’ text in a box and alongside the listing.
With SEO you are trying to get listed here with these natural results, i.e. the unpaid ones.
Adwords are not SEO.
SEO, as mentioned, is about improving and optimizing your site so that you show high in search results.
Adwords , on the other hand, is about paying to get a high position as opposed to improve your site to show high.
Adwords, in essence, is an instant and immediate way to show in search positions, and the more you pay the better chance you have to show for the terms you bid on/sponsor.
SEO itself is a much longer-term technique for showing in searches. It takes months and often one to two years to really gain traction, to get your site to show for competitive search terms.
The reason why SEO is so useful is that once you are getting what is called organic results (meaning naturally showing in search results without paying out for Adwords or the equivalent) you save a lot of money.
It does though take time to optimize your site and time is money right?!
If you sell things online and really want immediately push to get sales, then using paid advertising whilst working on the SEO for your site can often be a good strategy.
What Next? I Want to Improve the SEO on My Site.
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Thank you! Very informative!
Great to hear you found the explanation of what is SEO useful. Good luck with your art business (which I saw from your profile).
This is an incredible beginner’s guide. Super easy to understand and detailed. Thank you for sharing
Yes, I think everything you need to get started. Enjoy!
I’m a beginner and this guide is amazing! Thank you Paul & Valeria! You do a great job.
I also found free tutorials on semrush that are quite good from experts that helped me to deepen my knowledge.
Thanks Christos. I have used SEMRush before. I also find Ubersuggest also very good.
Thank you so much for sharing the guide for beginners! I found it very informative! This will surely help me and other beginners like me.