What does SEO stand for? What does SEO mean? Questions I get often when I tell people what my job is. I want to discuss here why what it stands for is so beautifully fitting.
Search Engine Optimization
In essence, it’s rather simple. It’s an aggressive battle for digital real estate. Google is a place really. People go there and interact with it spatially.
So you have a new business or even an old one. And you want to make your product available to the widest interested audience possible. As in SEO always works with the premise that someone is already looking for something like your product. Which works because then it’s just a matter of beating out other competitors on the list.
We are already dealing with an interested audience. What you want to do now is position your website in a space where the broadest amount of people are drawn to visit your site.
To Understand SEO You Need to Understand Google
Not just Google of course, really search engines on a whole. Search engines are trying to bring information as effectively and efficiently as possible into your hands. They try to chase human intuition and model their product almost entirely based on human response.
Google is trying to fuse with human thinking. The most optimal hypothetical product for Google would be that you think of something and what you want to know is inserted into your brain, with mere thought provocation! As relevant data as available to what people are searching for.
That sounds kind of creepy, but I think the point is clear. So Google is chasing human behavior and you are chasing Google behavior. The cycle everyone who works with SEO is familiar with.
The Place to Start is Keyword Research
You can literally create businesses just based on keyword research. Keyword research is identifying what terms and words people are searching for. So you find terms which are of a reasonable volume – which will depend on the size of your business – and the competition that surrounds that word. Just like in real real estate everybody knows location is everything. So you want a block that is well traveled but slightly underdeveloped.
You are connecting people searching for your product to you. Once you see your terms and translate your website into easily understood phrases for Google you can expand.
The more keyword research you do the broader you can see an audience for your product. Often times just using a synonym will provide you with a new set of people to target. Be extensive spend the time, the results will pay off.
SEO Website Design
After you have identified the terms you would like to rank for it should influence your entire site design. Given the keywords, you are given indicators as to what the audience is looking for. Always you want to respond to what the market is looking for. You should create content with the keywords you want to target in mind.
Google Is Heavily Influenced By Feedback Mechanisms
Google is always seeing how people react to your content to rank whether the information is relevant to their query. A big determining factor search engines use is called bounce rate. So your bounce rate is statistic made from a pattern of people clicking on to your site and then immediately clicking back out of it. Google sees that as being a sign of an inaccurate relation from the query to the content. You will get penalized for this!
Meta Data
Search engine use indicators on sites to glean necessary information to classify your content. So I’m not going to get into the details here, but a lot of what people see on Google results is called meta data. Meta titles, and meta descriptions.
SEO Marketing Services
What I find really fascinating about this term ‘search engine optimization’ is that you are actually providing optimization of Google. This is funny because people usually think of search engine optimization in terms of their website. And understandably because that is what you affect and modify. But you are actually making the search engine more optimal. Of course, the only way to make the search engine more optimal is by making your own site more optimal. So it necessitates a win-win.
When all websites become totally aligned Google’s protocols Google will be the one to benefit most. The entire search engine will be bringing more relevant information closer to users while making it more intuitive and closer to a human language.
In summary, SEO is your introduction to creating a presence on the internet. It gathers a rough category of who your website is catering for, and then brings them to you.