What Does SEO Stand for and How Do Marketers Improve SEO Performance?
What does SEO stand for?
SEO stands for search engine optimization. While most marketers are familiar with the notion of SEO, this article will provide a bit more detail on the topic, and answer questions such as “what does SEO mean?” and “what is SEO and how does it work?”
What is the definition of SEO?
SEO definition: The practice of improving the quantity and quality of website traffic coming from organic search results.
What is organic search? Simply stated, organic search traffic is traffic generated to a site by search engines’ proprietary algorithms. SEO is the practice of improving the presence of a website in search engine results.
How do search engines work?
Search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo work in a three-step process:
Crawling: Search engines explore webpages and flesh out a “map” of the internet that is then stored in a database.
Indexing: The search engine attempts to understand what websites are about by processing content—including keywords, videos, metadata and more.
Serving and Ranking: When searches are entered into a search engine, the search engine provides “best match” websites for users. A search engine’s goal is to serve a user the best website to fulfill his or her request.
What is SEO?
While organic search results are not a paid placement, they can still be influenced by a number of tactics. Marketers who practice SEO combine the understanding of search engine algorithms with the preferences of users to create websites that rank higher than other websites for a specific group of keywords. Websites with a strong SEO strategy attract more organic visits because search engines rank these sites at the top of their search engine results page (SERP). In other words, SEO is a practice of making search engines think your site is the best option to fulfill a user’s search query.
A website with effective SEO can generate a consistently large volume of organic traffic over time for very little variable costs. This can be an attractive option to pair with paid search programs, which are substantially more expensive.
What is SEO Marketing?
Organic traffic can be leveraged to grow a business. This organic site traffic can lead to revenue from on-site ad clicks, digital or physical product sales, or affiliate lead generation. Many businesses retain SEO experts either internally or externally for this reason—the ROI on SEO investments is typically very high.
Marketers generally focus on three “pillars” of SEO to propel their websites forward in search engine rankings:
Authority: Authority is a measure search engines use to understand how much “expertise” a website has on a particular topic.
Relevance: How relevant a website’s content is to the specific keywords being searched.
Trust: The reputation of other websites linking to your website.
How do you improve SEO performance?
For our purposes, let’s break SEO into two buckets: on-site SEO and off-site SEO.
On-site SEO, as the name suggests, refers to optimizations done within a website. Off-site SEO, on the other hand, refers to optimizations or actions outside of a website.
On-site SEO drivers
Schema.org and structured data
Think of search engines as robots. They can process data at superhuman speeds. However, even robots want to be as efficient as possible. Just think—there are billions of web pages online, and search engines need to understand them all in order to serve recommendations to users. To get through all of these data, a search engine like Google will use the most efficient process. These “shortcuts” allow marketers to prioritize site optimizations that will get the best organic performance .
Structured data is one such method. Structured data is a standard “organization” data format that allows most search engines to take shortcuts in understanding page content. Think of it as a special language that is written and added to a site. Search engines can quickly read that language and understand the substance of a website. Sites that properly implement structured data are typically rewarded by search engines and can have a higher SERP position.
So what is structured data and how is it formatted? Google, Bing, and Yahoo! worked together to create Schema.org—a standardized format of structured data that works across three search engines. However, most website builders require marketers to manually build and implement structured data. This can be a major advantage. Most websites do not use or do not properly implement structured data. While it’s complicated to implement, structured data can be incredibly beneficial to site performance. Use it!
Keyword selection and competitiveness for SEO
One way search engine algorithms determine the relevancy of a particular website to a keyword query is through the prevalence of similar keywords contained on that website. In other words, an important keyword for a business should be front and center on a website. As an example, a coffee shop’s website should ensure it uses terms such as “coffee”, “coffee shop near me”, “cappuccino” and “latte” across its website.
Note that there is skill to this exercise. The placement and density of keywords play critical roles in search engines’ decision to recommend your site.
How do you figure out what keywords to emphasize on a website? Marketers will target specific keywords based on a keyword’s search volume (how frequently the keyword is searched) and its competitiveness (a measure of how difficult it would be to rank organically for a particular keyword). A research tool such as Google Keyword Planner can be used to quantify the volume and competitiveness of a keyword.
In general, short-tail keywords such as “pizza”, “marketing”, or “coffee” can be tremendously competitive. However, long-tail keywords like “pizza in Houston, TX” or “coffee shop that makes cortados” are usually less competitive (and can provide a better search experience for users seeking specific information). Marketers generally try to rank high for a mixture of short-tail and long-tail keywords.
Header tags for SEO
Just as structured data helps search engines quickly understand the content of a website, section headers (called header tags) also provide a quick reference about a website’s subject.
Let’s look at an example. Suppose you are writing a website blog entry about chocolate cake. The title of your blog is “the secret for making a great chocolate cake”. Search engines will prioritize your blog title when evaluating the subject of your page. Again, think of this as another shortcut. Search engines could read all the text in your blog, but they can get a good sense for your article’s content by simply reading the title.
Note, search engines do typically read all the text. However, a title, or section header typically summarizes the substance of a body of text. Thus, search engines weight the importance of header text and title text higher. Good SEO marketers are very deliberate and strategic about the phrasing of section headers and titles because of this.
Navigation terms and structure for SEO
Navigation structure is also weighted disproportionately higher by search engines. The navigation menu serves the purpose of directing users to buckets of content. Because of this, search engines will use the navigation menu to understand what types of content a site emphasizes. This means substantial thought should be given to the text and section options contained in a website’s navigation menu.
Off-site SEO drivers
Offsite SEO is founded on the concept of shared authority. We discussed the concept of domain authority earlier. Shared authority is the process of websites sharing their page authority with other sites. Think of this as a form of digital vouching. If Website A “vouches” for Website B, Website A’s credibility is transferred to Website B. Getting links from other credible websites is extremely valuable for organic rankings.
Backlinks
The primary method for sharing page authority is through a process called backlinking. Backlinking is the process of acquiring links pointing to your site from other websites (a vouch). The number of backlinks a website has, as well as the domain authority of the linking sites are key drivers for increasing a website’s authority (and therefore the website’s organic ranking). For instance, a backlink from a .gov website is far more valuable than a backlink from tomsmarketingblog.net because the U.S. Government holds more credibility than a smaller blog site.
The process of building backlinks is quite expansive, and can include PR (with the goal of gaining backlinks from press releases and other coverage), collaborations and cross-promotions with similar websites, and many other tactics.
User interaction
Internet users commenting, rating, and interacting with a website also affects search engine rankings. A blog post with a thriving comment section typically increases domain authority because search engines view comments as individual user “vouches”.
Note, be careful not to artificially generate comments via bots or other spam tactics. Search engines can typically tell the difference, and may penalize sites for such tactics.
What are SEO KPIs?
A number of KPIs can be used to track SEO effectiveness.
Here are some commonly-used SEO KPIs:
Organic visits: The number of website visits coming from organic search. The more the better!
Keyword rankings: A website’s average rank of a particular keyword on search engines. Observing how rankings change over time can shed light on overall SEO effectiveness.
Pages-per-session: How many pages are viewed during one session. What is “good” will vary based upon the website size and content quality.
Session time: The amount of time spent on a website during one session. This sheds light on content quality and visitor engagement.
Domain authority: The overall rating by search engines of your website’s authority.
Number of keywords ranked: The number of keywords for which a website ranks organically.