By Jennifer Chan, Staff Writer
If your primary business isn’t digital, the ins and outs of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be confounding. To help, we’ve broken it down to the essentials:
- What is SEO?
- How do I optimize my website for search?
Don’t worry if you don’t understand every nuance of SEO. This breakdown will give you enough information to make smart choices and engage a little DIY SEO for your small business.
What is SEO?
SEO is the art of getting your website to appear when a user searches for your business, services or products.
When you want to find something online, you often start by typing words into a search bar on a search engine like Google or Bing. You type “how to shoe a horse” and presto—the search engine provides the search engine results page (SERP): a list of websites about horseshoeing.
Meanwhile, in order to provide that list, the search engine bots have been working away. Search engines use algorithms to determine:
- Which websites appear on any particular SERP
- The order in which those websites appear
Computer robots are simply programs that automate repetitive tasks at speeds impossible for humans to reproduce. The term ‘bot’ on the internet is usually used to describe anything that interfaces with the user or collects data.” —www.searchenginehistory.com
In order for a website to be submitted to the algorithm in the first place, the search engine needs to know what that website is. If you go to a library and ask the librarian for books on horseshoeing, the librarian uses a very human (and extraordinary) brain to direct you to the right place. In place of a librarian, search engines have bots that periodically examine and quantify all websites (yes, every single website on the internet). In SEO-speak? Bots crawl websites so correct and useful search results can be produced when a user conducts a search.
Now, a human librarian intuitively understands that someone learning to shoe a horse isn’t trying to visit the Lucky Horseshoe Saloon (yet). Bots don’t have intuition. Instead, they have ranking factors. These are the criteria search engines use when evaluating web pages. In order to be effective, the bots use more than 200 ranking factors to determine the relevancy and authority of a website.
In the context of SEO:
Relevancy: How relevant is the content of the website to a user’s query? Is a user looking to shoe a horse or get drunk at noon? Bots use ranking factors to answer this question.
Authority: Is the content on a website reliable? Is it true? Is it accurate? Again, a human librarian might be able to steer a user toward a relatively reliable manual on horseshoeing. Without ranking factors, a bot wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between a definitive how-to guide and something written by a horse.
Here’s another definition of SEO:
The art of making the bots happy by meeting as many of the 200 ranking factors as possible.
When the bots have judged a website to be both highly relevant and highly authoritative, that website will appear in search results.
An important distinction: The SERP will usually list both organic and paid search results.
- Organic search results are unpaid listings. Website owners do not pay the search engines anything to appear in these listings.
- Paid search results are advertisements. Website owners pay the search engines to show ads that mimic organic search results on the SERP.
For the most part, SEO involves optimizing a website for organic search.
How do I optimize my website for search?
Daunted by the 200 ranking factors? Don’t worry. You don’t have to tackle them all. There are many straightforward, DIY SEO tasks you can do to improve your rank on the search engines. We have a checklist of the 10 most important SEO tasks for small-business owners. But before you start checking things off, here are two things to understand:
Consider SEO in two buckets: onsite SEO and offsite SEO
Onsite SEO: Any SEO tasks that involve making changes to your website. This includes back-end tasks like creating a secure website and front-end tasks like text, fonts, colors, photos, etc. (Our SEO service provides onsite SEO.)
Offsite SEO: Any SEO task that involves making changes to the way your business is represented elsewhere on the web. For example, when you update your listings on Yelp or Facebook, it can have a positive impact on your search ranking even though you haven’t touched your website. (Our Local Listings service, formerly known as Local SEO, provides offsite SEO.)
One core ranking factor considered by the bots is how often a website gets updated. As a result, you should update your website on a regular basis. One of the best ways to do this is by performing SEO tasks. In other words, SEO isn’t “set it and forget it.” Instead, work on your SEO gradually over time for better ranking results.
With that, you’re ready to start optimizing your website for search. See our checklist of the 10 most important SEO tasks here, and if you have any questions, leave a comment, shoot us an email or give us a call.