ELI5: What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO for short. SEO is a strategy used to increase a website’s visibility in search engine results.

It’s the process of making your website more attractive to search engines like Google, Bing, or Yahoo.

Imagine you’re a librarian. The world wide web is your library, and every website is a book. SEO is the method of organizing these books in a way that makes it easy for people to find the one they’re looking for.

Imagine that you’re Google

Google is like a librarian. It has a huge number of books (pages) and its job is to organise them for searches. This way, we get the correct results on the first page.

SEO is the process of organising all these books (search results).

Thus SEO professionals edit their website. The aim is to help Google understand why their page is the book relevant and authoritative.

SEO works by targeting specific keywords or phrases. Someone types these keywords into a search engine. Google will scour the internet for websites that are most relevant and useful. The optimized websites include relevant keywords and are authoritative. These websites rank at the top of the search results page.

An example of SEO

Now, let’s talk about an example of an SEO strategy. Specifically, “on-page SEO”.

This strategy involves optimizing individual web pages. The aim to rank higher in search engine results and attract more visitors.

For instance, let’s say you have a website about gardening. One of your web pages is for tomato plants. An on-page SEO strategy may involve including key phrases. The page will also answer questions like “how to grow tomato plants?” or “best conditions for tomato plants?” in your page’s content.

Google is able to scan the text on your page and know that the page is about gardening tomato plants.

So when someone searches “how to grow tomato plants,” your website appears higher.

Remember, SEO is all about improving your website’s visibility. It’s about making it easier for potential visitors to find your content. And on-page SEO, like our tomato plant example, is one method to achieve that.