What is SEO?

If you are working for a company which has an online presence probably you have heard a word or two about it.

Do you really know what is SEO?

When people come to me they often say, that is that thing with backlinks and blog. Yes, you are right, but that is only a small part of it and if you are going to hire someone to get you backlinks and put a bunch of articles on your website you will probably never come up in daylight.

In this, I article I will try to brake SEO into several sections which I will explain in detail and if I am making a mistake please feel free to correct me.

SEO stands for“Search Engine Optimization” and in reality means, using the best practices in development, design, content production, and UX to provide relevant content for your users and crawlers.

It is not easy to satisfy all those requests under one roof, but all of those aspects must adapt to a certain extent. Beautiful design doesn’t mean the crawler will find your website or the user will want to interact. The best text content will not receive clicks if it is not styled properly. Most advanced technologies will not give you a ranking because they represent a challenge to crawlers.

All that takes you to the one premise in today’s SEO: “Keep it simple!”.

What are the pillars of SEO?

Technical SEO

Technical SEO is a technique of creating a footpath for crawlers so they can understand the website. How it is built, for which market is built, and what is it (shop, review site, commercial website, company website, services website…etc). Techniques of achieving this are different but these elements must be created properly to achieve basic technical optimisation.

• Declaration for which market the website is built
• Sitemap, Robots.txt
• Website verification
• Proper structure of the website
• Speed of the website
• Image optimisation & tagging
• UX
• Schema markup & schema voice search markup

Content SEO (SEM)

Content SEO is all about the relevance of the content on the website. No matter if you are running a business which is offering services or selling products, you need to give your customers the answers they are expecting. Assuming that users and crawlers will figure out that on their own is one of the biggest mistakes and reasons why your website is in dark.

Blog content is also important because it gives your website different dimensions and it helps you to write about specific things which are important to some users but there is no logical place to put that content on regular pages. Answering specific questions related to your business is beneficiary to your users and if users have benefits crawlers tend to give those websites more authority.

Backlinks

In the past, backlinks were a much bigger ranking factor than today, so most SEO guys were putting 100% of their effort into getting backlinks. Today backlinks still have an important role but are not even close as they were before. 
Buying backlinks is a very dangerous technique and it can hurt your website because crawlers’ algorithm is very efficient in discovering patterns and bought backlinks. There are legit ways of getting backlinks, but getting them is much harder because it requires you to be heavily involved in different activities (writing good content which others find useful for them or being present in some activities so other members can give you kudos).

Social networks

This one is tricky. Google, Yahoo, and Bing claim that social network activities not affecting ranking but if a social activity is stronger it will give more traffic to the website, more engagement, direct traffic, and more brand search. All those secondary activities which are a result of strong campaigns on social channels are an important ranking factor.

Advertising

Same as with Social Networks Activity, advertising of the website is not affecting ranking directly, but all those secondary results of advertising are big ranking factors.