SEO is the shortened term for search engine optimization. If you’ve used the internet and Google, then you’ve likely already witnessed SEO without even knowing it. SEO is a process that is applied to websites to rank on the first page and particularly, in the first couple of spots of Google.
Basically, websites compete for these top spots because they get the most traffic. If you think about it, whenever you search for anything on Google or any other search engine, you probably only click on the first couple of results on the first page.
Search engine optimization is beneficial for businesses or anyone who wants traffic to their website. It is one of the most affordable and effective digital marketing strategies for traffic generation. It is also one of the very few strategies that actually allows your website to continue to get traffic even after all SEO activities have ceased.
Now, SEO can be split into two main activities, known as on-page and off-page SEO, where both the actual website and its backlinks need to be optimized to be ranked higher by the Google algorithm.
What is Off-Page SEO?
We will start with off-page SEO, which is backlinks. These are links from other sites to your website. Links have always been among the most prominent ranking factors and will continue to be in the future. They basically show how popular your website is and indicates that your website is of high quality, and that is why other people are linking to you. Now, Google and other search engines actively discourage link building since they believe that you should only get links organically. However, this will take a long time and is not the best way to quickly boost your SEO and rankings. Instead, it would be best if you focused on building high-quality white-hat links to your website, such as outreach links, guest posts, broken link building, etc.
What is On-Page SEO?
Next, on-page optimization refers to editing your actual website so that it is fully optimized for its keywords. This involves activities such as website auditing, keyword research, content creation, internal linking, etc. The key idea here is to find the best keywords for your website and then sprinkle them in the critical parts of each web page where they have the most weight. When this is combined with backlinks, your website will gradually increase in rankings and get more search engine traffic.
These are some of the main components of SEO, but there are many more details. It would be best if you continued to research more on SEO and practice it so that you can learn by acquiring your own experience.