What is SEO exactly and why does it matter to you?

The acronym stands for Search Engine Optimization. Once upon a time, in an early internet galaxy far away there were many search engines. Remember folks like Lycos, Dogpile, Altavista? Now what people care about from a search perspective is only Google, (also bing to a lesser extent. And uhm yeah yahoo kinda sorta).

The core principle of Google is if people think you’re important, then you are. We’ll delve into that in a bit. First here are some statistics: https://www.demandsage.com/google-search-statistics/

Pretty impressive eh?- 2 trillion searches per year, a number that’s very hard to actually envision.

As for how much money by google made from paid advertising- in 2023 it was approximately $238 billion. Not too shabby.

It helps to think of Google as the biggest voting system of them all. Want to find a sandwich shop nearby or need to purchase a screwdriver? So you’re going to look up something like ‘good sandwiches near me’ or ‘closest hardware store respectively. Makes sense right? Guess what- if your neighbor performs the same kinds of searches, they will very likely get very similar results. Its not an accident, its just the way things work.

So how exactly?

Here are the fundamental principles of optimization of a website for google results that return desired outcomes.

Google doesn’t know off the top of its head what your website, or web page is about.

1. Tell it what your site/page/post is about by writing well organized, grammatically cohesively structured content. So kind of like is this post about how to best grow carrots organically in your manhattan apartment windowbox, or do drones that rain liquid fire hell on earth exist? More from a business perspective if you’re selling sandwiches around the corner, you might want to write some good sandwich around the corner content, with images, pricing etc.
2. What are known as meta title and meta description are very important, they summarize the essence of the page content for both users and search bots. Keep them catchy,descriptive, and simple. Make sure they fall within text length guidelines that any decent search plugin will tell you, indeed google itself will.
3. Make sure your website is fully mobile compatible, this means it renders perfectly on all device types. The underlying principle is a coding framework called bootstrap. A properly constructed website will re-order itself for optimal display based on the device type it detects- phone,desktop,pad,laptop. We in the industry call it device responsiveness
4. Website load time is critically important to be snappy and efficient. And load times vary dramatically between say your bank corporate headquarters in Los Angeles or Denver, and your cellphone in rural Nebraska.
5. High quality inbound links from external, credible websites are a fundamental backbone of successful SEO efforts. The underlying principle is that if websites think you’re important then they will link to you. Google search bots crawl across these links and assign what’s termed link juice based on what their algorithms view as the importance of said links, helping push your website up in the rankings.

There are many other SEO factors in play- this list contains what are recognized to be the primary ones.

Successful SEO breeds conversions, which of course generate income.