By far the most common question I get asked is “what is SEO?”. In this article I’ll explain it in a way that anybody can understand the basic idea of what SEO really is.


First SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It basically means designing a website, through the words and links that are on it and pointing to it, in such a way that the machines looking at everything can easily tell exactly what your website is about. To take it one step further it’s about doing the same thing for each of the pages within your website as well.


Within SEO there are a few sub-categories the first is on-site or on-page SEO which is about designing your site properly so it’s easy for the machines the search engines use to tell what each page on your site is about. Each page should be very specific and only about one topic. You do that so there is little to no chance of confusing the machines and having them categorize your page the wrong way. As an example you don’t want your hairless guinea pig page to show up when someone searches for hamsters.

This can happen if you write about hamsters on that page even if you only reference them and it makes sense to you. Remember machines don’t think they just do as they are programmed and infer nothing.


The next sub-category of SEO is off page optimization
. This refers to other websites that link (point) to you and the way they do it. The search engines look at the site(s) that link to you (what they’re about basically) who owns them and the way they link to you. There are a few other things as well but I’ll get into those in a later article. This is a way for them to see what everybody else on the internet thinks about your site – if people like your site they will tend to link to it and with that link tell others what they think your site is about through the words that you have to click on the go to your website. (links are the blue underlined words and/or pictures you click on to be taken to a different page or website).


The third major category of SEO is SEM or search engine marketing. This is mainly about getting the people that visit your site to do what you want them to. If you sell stuff it’s about getting them to buy from you. If you write a newsletter it’s about getting them to subscribe to your newsletter and things like that. Most traffic to a website comes from the various search engines so that is why it’s called search engine marketing instead of just plain old marketing. Someone that understands SEM help you design your website so that people can look around very easily and are very comfortable. So comfortable in fact that they trust you enough to take whatever step you want them to.


With that information you should have a good basic understanding of what SEO is all about and how it can help your website and business.

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