What is Search Engine Optimization?
search engine optimization is a practice that helps businesses attract people to their websites through organic searches. It relies on the use of keywords and phrases to target potential customers at different phases of the customer journey. By establishing expertise, authority and trustworthiness online, SEO allows businesses to position themselves as a resource for relevant information and build long-term brand value.
Search engines have an enormous job: to serve results that are relevant and useful for a vast array of search queries. To achieve this, they employ algorithms that scan websites for keywords, identify user intent and then rank search results accordingly. This is how they know what to display for any given query, whether it’s a news article, hotel and travel listings or a list of FAQs.
Understanding how search engines work is key to effective SEO. This knowledge helps marketers craft content that ranks well for a variety of search queries and helps them optimize their own sites more effectively. There are many things to consider when building a strong SEO strategy, including keyword research, on-page SEO and link building. Fortunately, there are also new tools and technologies to help make the process faster, easier and more accurate.
SEO has evolved beyond the days of simple keyword rankings and one-size-fits-all best practices. As the industry has matured, we’ve come to realize that it is more important than ever to focus on a holistic approach to content marketing that considers audience context and search engine algorithms.
Ultimately, SEO is all about providing a better experience to users of search engines like Google. This involves delivering useful, relevant search results that provide answers to their questions or solve their problems. Search engine users are highly discerning: they will only click on links they perceive to be useful and credible. Ultimately, Google profits from its users trusting and valuing its search service, which in turn requires a high level of quality among the search results it surfaces.
The most important factor in determining relevance is the presence of the search query’s keywords on the page. However, this is just the start of a complex evaluation that includes matching search queries to a page’s metadata, the ALT text on images and aggregated user interaction data to determine how useful a page may be.
It’s also critical to keep in mind that search engines display a wide range of results, from paid ads to news results, featured snippets and more. SEO plays a role in the ranking of nearly all these types of results, but is most influential for organic listings and those with the highest visibility (i.e. those that appear on the first page of search results). Analyzing and learning from the top-ranking pages for your most important keywords is a great place to start when optimizing your own site. Check out Ahrefs’ Keyword Explorer to get a feel for the SERP features that are most relevant to your goals.