What Does SEO Stand For?
SEO is an acronym that stands for "search engine optimisation," which is the strategic optimisation of website pages and other types of digital content (i.e., blog articles) so they can be found by people searching for relevant topics via search engines like Google and Bing. It is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results.
SEO is focused upon acquiring website traffic and high search result rankings organically. By organic, we mean without paying for web traffic via pay-per-click ads, among other methods. Within SEO, there is a wide variety of strategies to accomplish the goals—some of which are more effective than others. This could be anything from developing website content around keywords related to your industry to maintain a strong presence across multiple social media platforms. SEO practices and strategies are constantly changing to remain effective as internet search engines continuously update algorithms.
Since 93% of online experiences start with search engines, SEO is essential. Search engine optimization is how digital marketers and website owners quite literally optimise or tailor their website pages and other types of digital content (like blogs, podcasts, show notes, and so on), so search engines like Google and Bing can index it and serve it up in search results to relevant queries by actual people. Search engines use proprietary algorithms to constantly map, index, and rank content for display in search results for users.
The three unique defining features of SEO can be best described as
• Quality of traffic. You can attract all the visitors in the world, but if they're coming to your site because Google tells them you're a resource for Apple computers when you're a farmer selling apples, that is not quality traffic. Instead, you want to attract visitors who are genuinely interested in the products that you offer.
• Quantity of traffic. Once you have the right people clicking through from those search engine results pages (SERPs), more traffic is better.
• Organic results. Ads make up a significant portion of many SERPs. Organic traffic is any traffic that you do not have to pay for.
Google (or any search engine you are using) has a crawler that goes out and gathers information about all the content they can find on the Internet. The crawlers bring all those 1s and 0s back to the search engine to build an index. That index is then fed through an algorithm that tries to match all that data with your query.
While more than 200 ranking factors exist, you can break them into two areas: On-page and off-page. On-page SEO focuses on your website. It is 100% in your control. You determine your page titles, navigation bar layout, and content, for example. If you want to optimise your on-page SEO, however, you will need the help of a developer, copywriter, and marketer.
Off-page SEO focuses on your online presence. It is outside your control. You cannot make someone share your content or link to your website, for example. Instead, you must create content that people want to share or link to, which often requires outreach to get people aware of your content.
There are a lot of factors that go into a search engine's algorithm like domain-level link authority features, page-level link features, user/usage traffic, social metrics, page-level keyword-agnostic features, domain-level brand features, etc. All of these make up the "Search Engine" aspect.
The “Optimisation” aspect is where the people who write all that content and put it on their sites are guessing that content and those sites up so search engines will be able to understand what they're seeing, and the users who arrive via search will like what they see.
Optimisation can take many forms. It's everything from making sure the title tags and meta descriptions are both informative and the right length to pointing internal links at pages you are proud of. Your goal is to have your content show up as high in search results as possible.

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