What is SEO?

You may be wondering what does the acronym SEO mean. Turns out, those three letters stand for search engine optimization. While that phrase sounds nice, what does it actually mean? What is search engine optimization?

Search engine optimization or SEO for short is the process of using concentrated strategies and methods in order to obtain a high ranking page placement on search engines in order to enhance traffic to a website. This kind of direction of traffic to sites through search engines is called organic traffic, whereas typing the url of the website you want to go to directly in is direct traffic.

All too often the first thing people do when they have a problem is Google it, and sometimes the winner of who gets the business is simply the first person to come up as a search result. Since so many people use search engines then, optimizing search engines or optimizing your rank on these platforms is critical for businesses.

However, how do people affect their rank on search engines? The website Search Engine Land provides a great video explaining SEO in even more detail and also goes into the different factors that affect your page rank. The creative way they highlight these factors is in their “Periodic Table of SEO Success Factors, as can be seen below.

This table simply highlights the many different factors these search engine algorithms take into consideration when determining page rank. The overarching categories of factors are content, architecture, HTML, trust, links, personal, and social. From there, these categories look at all different types of things from speed of service and answers and quality of content to number of links and the trust associated with the website.

Controlling all of these variables may seem like an immense tasks. However, by increasing your rank in search engines, you can directly increase business with zero to small amounts of money spent. The goal should be to start with enhancing one or two of these aspects, and when you finish, simply move on to two more.

For more information about SEO, see our informative infographic on the new versus the old SEO that explains why SEO is so important.