By Colette Nichol, SEO & Story Strategist
SEO stands for search engine optimization. At its core, SEO is the act of creating helpful content that meets the searcher's intent so that you can rise to the top of the SERPs (search engine results pages) and get more traffic.
However, within the world of SEO you have white hat, blue hat, grey hat, and black hat SEO. Not everyone is simply trying to create helpful content. There are techniques that are entirely unhelpful that do work because the SEOs are exploiting parts of the algorithm that can be gamed.
These techniques evolve as Googles algorithms and search technology evolves. And Google is constantly trying to knock down the low-quality pages that are gaming the system. They achieve this with varying degrees of efficacy.
Is Google the only search engine that matters?
While there are many search engines online, Google is still the leading search engine by a long shot. So when you're doing SEO, you're usually focused on how to get to positions 1, 2 or 3 on the first page of Google.
The higher you are on the first page of Google for multiple relevant searches, the more organic traffic you'll get. And as long as your traffic is relevant to your business, and you have a solid website and sales system, then you'll be able to increase revenue consistently with your organic traffic.
How Does SEO Work?
Whether or not you're able to get a page or post to the top of Google depends on many many ranking factors. "Ranking factors" are basically elements in the many algorithms that make up Google's complex retrieval system.
If you think of Google as basically the world's most hardworking librarian, you'll start to get a better idea of how SEO works. Somebody comes into the library and says, "Hey, I need helping figuring out this thing."
The librarian, then turns around and wracks her brain, trying to figure out what the absolute best possible book would be to give this person. In the case of our intrepid Google librarian, she's trying to surface the best possible pages for the searcher.
But what makes a search result the "best"?
A search result could be considered "the best" possible result if it truly answers the searcher's intent and provides unique and valuable information or actionable steps (like shopping results) sot that the searcher can get what they need and move on with life.
Our librarian is trying to be helpful, and she doesn't want someone to have to keep coming back and doing the same request over and over. She wants to be able to hand you a book or a couple books and have fulfilled your needs.
It's the same with Google search. They don't want to show you search results that don't help you (in most cases).
Can you have the best content and still not rank at the top?
You can have what you think is the best, most helpful content and still not rank at the top. That's because there are specific factors that help Google's algorithms identify whether your content is valuable or not. And it's not subjective. An algorithm is just a bunch of numbers. Meaning, there's no magical creature inside the internet judging whether your content is good or bad.
Instead, there are ranking factors which can push your content up or down. And, of course, these ranking factors can change. Or someone else can come along and do better than you.
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