What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. In its simplest terms, SEO can be described as helping users find the information they are looking for by directing them to your site with keywords that they might use when searching on platforms like Google or Bing. For example, if you are a piano teacher and have a website devoted to teaching the art of playing piano, you might want to attract users searching Google for keywords or phrases like “learn to play piano” or “piano teachers near me”.
By using SEO tools, you can put these words or phrases in the “background” of the website. The keywords are referred to as “tags” and a list of these tags can be placed in the framework of the website itself, to direct the user to a specific page or to just the website in general. Google uses incredibly advanced algorithms to rank websites in order of appropriateness for the search. This is why when you search in Google, you’ll see pages and pages of results but that gradually get less and less of a good match to what you originally searched as you progress through page 1, 2, 3…etc.
Going back to our piano teacher, if they were to effectively utilize SEO tools and put a myriad of tags relating to teaching piano on different pages, articles, blog posts, etc. of their website, then Google’s search algorithms would rank that website as a better match for the user searching for “piano teachers” and the website would appear higher up in the list of results that Google produces. SEO is an easy way to help users find your site, is relatively easy and cheap to implement, and is the most cost-effective means of connecting to users searching for the information your website has to offer.
