What Is SEO? Meaning, Examples & How to Optimize Your Site

SEO (search engine optimization) is a set of processes aimed at improving a website’s visibility in search engines, like Google, with the goal of getting more organic traffic. SEO is about SEOAce fulfilling users’ search needs by creating relevant, high-quality content and providing the best possible user experience.

SEO activities can take place both on-site and off-site. That’s why you may often see SEO divided into “on-page” and ”off-page” categories.

Why Is SEO Important?
Every day, Google users conduct billions of searches for information and products. It’s no surprise that search engines are usually one of the biggest traffic sources to websites.

To harness this traffic source’s potential, you need to appear in the top search results for your target keywords.

The correlation is very simple—the higher you rank, the more people will visit your page.

The No. 1 organic result is 10x more likely to receive a click than a page ranking in position No. 10.

How Do Search Engines Work?
The ultimate goal of any search engine is to make searchers happy with the results they find.

To achieve this, search engines need to find the best pages. And serve them as the top search results.

Crawling: Google uses “bots,” or computer programs, to crawl the web and look for new or updated pages. In order for Google to find a page, the page should have at least one link pointing to it.
Indexing: Next, Google analyzes each page and tries to make sense of what the page is about. Then, it may store this information in the Google Index—a huge database of webpages.
Serving results: When a user enters a query, Google determines which pages are the best, in terms of both quality and relevance, and ranks them in the SERP.

Your job as a website owner is to help search engines crawl and index all the pages on your site that you want them to. (And none of them that you don’t.)

You can ensure the crawlability and indexability of your pages through a number of actions and best practices commonly referred to as technical SEO.

Now that you understand how Google finds and categorizes pages, it’s time to take a closer look at how the top results are selected. And the role of SEO in this process.