Chapter 1
What is SEO and How Does it Work?
Why SEO Matters
Congratulations on starting your SEO journey!
Even if some of the beginning SEO stuff seems familiar or basic, we recommend giving it a read.
If you aren’t familiar with SEO, this chapter will help build a solid foundation to make it easier to understand and apply more advanced SEO strategies as you move forward. Let’s dive in!
What Is SEO?
SEO is an acronym for “Search Engine Optimization” and is the process of improving positions in organic (non-paid) search results in search engines. As a rule of thumb, the higher your website ranks for a search, the more people will click through to your website.
Learning SEO means balancing creativity with technical and analytical skills. Your goal is to create content that appeals to both search engines and your website visitors. A lot of people fail to do this because they’re only doing SEO for search engines. It’s crucial that you’re also focusing your efforts on your target audience.
Remember, SEO isn’t a “one-size-fits-all” strategy. As you can imagine, an SEO strategy for a local bakery might not be the most practical for a law firm. Understanding how your target audience searches and behaves online is key.
SEO isn’t just about ranking high in search results; it’s about ranking for keywords that attract visitors who are more likely to become leads.
SEO Basics
Search engines like Google evaluate countless pieces of content to determine which results best answer a search query and then give you your SERP (Search Engine Result Page) with the results. They do this by crawling and indexing content (we’ll cover this in more detail later) and then ranking it according to relevance.
Why Should I Care About SEO?
SEO is crucial because search engines are the primary drivers of website traffic, with over half of traffic coming to websites organically, which is more than paid ads or social media. If you want to get your website, business, or product in front of your target audience, you can’t fully accomplish that without paying attention to your SEO efforts.
Even with the changes to Google Ads layouts, SEO still has organic traffic leading the race (if not more depending on your industry). While paid ads stop showing once your budget ends, a well-optimized piece of content can generate long-term traffic, building momentum as it gains shares, backlinks, and other “signals” of quality.
And here’s a helpful note: Search engines want small businesses to succeed! Google even has its own SEO Start Guide, which complements this guide!
How Search Engines Work
Search engines have come a long way and are smarter than ever, which also means the algorithms they use are more complex than ever.
If you want to learn SEO, you should use what search engines are currently using and not go by what may have worked three, five, or ten years ago. One of the biggest improvements in search engines has been their consideration of the human element of searches.
One pretty timeless thing has been these three primary functions of search engines:
- Crawl – The process of looking for new or updated web pages.
- Index – Storing and organization of all content that is found during the crawling process. Once the content is indexed, it has the chance to be shown on SERPs.
- Rank – How search engines order search results based on their rank, or relevancy to a specific search.
What is Search Engine Crawling?
Crawling is the initial step in which search engines discover new content. New pieces of content are constantly being added to the web, so Google must constantly send out their virtual team of robots, known as bots, spiders, or crawlers, to find this content. As mentioned before, content can be a web page, a video, an image, etc., but regardless of how the content is formatted, it is always discovered by links (otherwise known as a URL or Web Address).
Once one piece of content is found, these bots follow links to discover additional pages, building a comprehensive map of the website’s content for indexing.
Note: Google doesn’t accept payment to crawl a site more frequently or rank it higher. If anyone tells you otherwise, they’re wrong.
What is a Search Engine Index?
When you create new content, the search engine decides whether it should be indexed. The index is a vast database where search engines store all content they’ve crawled and determine whether it is relevant and valuable enough to serve up for searches.
When your content is indexed, it is then ranked within the search engine’s relevant queries.
What is Search Engine Ranking?
When a user starts a search, search engines try and find the most relevant content in their index and organize the content based on what they believe will help the searcher. The order in which search engines display these results is known as ranking. Generally, you can assume that the higher a web page is ranked, the more relevant the search engine believes the content is to the searcher.
While search engines keep the specifics of ranking algorithms a secret, we do know some key factors that influence rankings:
Primary Ranking Factors:
Most of these factors are proven, but some are just speculative. Additionally, search engines put more weight and importance on some factors than others, but they keep these algorithms mostly to themselves so no one has a clear advantage.
Learning all of the ranking factors by heart isn’t a requirement of SEO, but it’s good to have a basic understanding of them (in no particular order):
Other important ranking factors include, in no particular order:
- HTTPS – Security and encryption
- Backlink Relevance – Quality of links from other websites
- Content Quality – Original, well-written (grammar), and valuable content
- User Engagement – Social sharing, dwell time, click-through rate, etc.
- Domain Age (and length of domain commitment) – How long a website has been “live”
- Keywords – Relevant and properly placed (best practices)
- Website Structure – Including sitemaps and readability
We’ll be diving more into most of these ranking factors in the next few chapters.
How People Use Search Engines
We’ve mentioned it a few times already in this chapter, but remember, the goal of SEO is to create web pages that serve human users first, rather than focusing solely on search engines. Search engines have become proficient at detecting whether your content benefits the audience you’re trying to reach, so always keep that in mind when creating content.
From the user’s point of view, the picture below shows how a lot of searches go:
The user journey typically looks like this:
- Identifying a need for information to solve a problem.
- Conducting a search using keywords relevant to their need.
- Reviewing search engine results (SERPs) and choosing the best fit.
- Scanning the info and seeing if the info can solve the problem at hand.
- If the info cannot solve the problem, return to SERPs to try another result.
For SEO to be effective, it is very important to understand how search engines work at least at a basic level.
White Hat SEO vs. Black Hat SEO
There have always been debates on how SEO can be done most effectively and what techniques you should use to get the best results possible. Any time one of these debates comes up, most of the time you’ll hear arguments about both White Hat practices and Black Hat practices.
“White Hat SEO” refers to SEO techniques, strategies, and best practices that comply with Google’s guidelines. These are ethical techniques such as:
- Overall website optimization
- Well-written, relevant content
- Natural backlinks
White Hat SEO is more of a long-term strategy and is proven to work with very little to no risk. We dive more into the ethical ranking factors below.
“Black Hat SEO” are unethical practices used to cut corners and improve rankings of web pages on the SERP. They generally are directly geared to search engines and lack human user experience. Some of these unethical techniques are:
- Link & keyword manipulation
- Cloaking redirects
- Hidden text
Although Black-Hat SEO can boost your website’s ranking in a short time, the long-term effects of these methods can severely damage your website, especially with Google’s continuing push for helpful content with their Helpful Content Updates.
Google Search Essentials
Google Search Essentials provides best practices for creating websites that align with Google’s expectations. Following these guidelines helps improve your site’s visibility in search results while also avoiding penalties. Here is a breakdown of key principles:
Basic Principles:
- Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines.
- Don’t deceive your users.
- Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A useful test for this is to ask: “Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?”
- Think about what makes your website unique, valuable, or engaging. Make your website stand out from others in your field.
- Have transparency in your SEO strategies. A good rule of thumb is whether you would feel comfortable explaining them to a Google employee, they may not align with Google’s guidelines.
Techniques to Avoid:
- Completely relying on artificial intelligence (AI) to generate content.
- Creating pages with little or no original content and/or plagiarism.
- Cloaking – the practice of showing search engine crawlers different content than visitors.
- Implementing hidden text or links.
- Creating landing pages with irrelevant keywords.
Check out the comprehensive list of violating practices in Google Search Essentials.
Next, let’s dive into how to pick which keywords you should try and go after in Chapter 2: Keyword Research
Frequently Asked Questions
SEO generates consistent traffic by focusing on organic ranking. Unlike paid commercials, SEO initiatives can continue to attract visitors without incurring continuing fees, resulting in increased brand exposure and potential long-term conversions over time.
Absolutely! SEO levels the playing field, allowing small businesses to compete with larger companies by targeting keywords and topics that are relevant to their specific audience.
Organic traffic is defined as users who find your website via non-paid search results. Strong SEO strategies aim to improve your site’s position in these organic search results.
Search engines use complex algorithms that consider various factors, including content relevance, quality, backlinks, and user experience. These factors help them determine which websites best answer user queries.
Search engines use bots (or spiders) to “crawl” the internet, following links to find new content. They then “index” this content and consider it for ranking in search results.
Regular updates, like new content and technical improvements, keep your site relevant and competitive in search engine rankings. It’s helpful to review and update content every few months (our company has seen a huge difference with updating content!)
Poor SEO practices can lead to lower rankings or even penalties. This can reduce your visibility, meaning fewer visitors and potential leads for your site.
Even the basics of SEO can help out your website and make a huge difference in how search engines index your content. We’re confident that if you read through this guide and put in the work you’ll be able to make a difference on your own.
If you don’t have the time to read this guide, you can ask an SEO company for assistance. Every year, we see an increase in budgets for SEO, especially for small businesses, as they strive to stand out from the competition.
We always recommend you don’t cut corners and make sure you work with someone who knows what they’re doing. Remember, there can be negative effects of SEO if you don’t follow Google’s guidelines.