What Is SEO?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of getting targeted traffic to a website from a search engine’s organic rankings. Common tasks associated with SEO include creating high-quality content, optimizing content around specific keywords, and building backlinks.

In other words:

SEO is all about improving a site’s rankings in the organic (non-paid) section of the search results.

How Search Engines Work

Now it’s time to learn how search engines like Google actually work.

When you search for something in Google (or any other search engine), an algorithm works in real-time to bring you what that search engine considers the “best” result.

Specifically, Google scans its index of “hundreds of billions” of pages in order to find a set of results that will best answer your search.

How does Google determine the “best” result?

Even though Google doesn’t make the inner workings of its algorithm public, based on filed patents and statements from Google, we know that websites and web pages are ranked based on:

Relevancy

If you search for “chocolate chip cookie recipes”, you don’t want to see web pages about truck tires.

That’s why Google looks first-and-foremost for pages that are closely-related to your keyword.

However, Google doesn’t simply rank “the most relevant pages at the top”. That’s because there are thousands (or even millions) of relevant pages for every search term.

For example, the keyword “cookie recipes” brings up 349 million results in Google:

How SEO Works

SEO works by optimizing your site for the search engine that you want to rank for, whether it’s Google, Bing, Amazon or YouTube.

Specifically, your job is to make sure that a search engine sees your site as the overall best result for a person’s search.

How they determine the “best” result is based on an algorithm that takes into account authority, relevancy to that query, loading speed, and more.

(For example, Google has over 200 ranking factors in their algorithm).

In most cases, when people think “search engine optimization”, they think “Google SEO”. Which is why we’re going to focus on optimizing your site for Google in this guide.