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What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results, e.g., through Google Search queries.

When a user submits a search query to a search engine, the search engine's algorithms determine which website links to serve back to the user. The higher a page link is to the top of the search engine results page (i.e. page rank), the more likely it is to be clicked by a user.

Factors that influence rankings include:

• the user’s location
• the user's search history
• the quality of the code: e.g., is it built with semantic HTML? it is accessible?
• the apparent relevance of the content: e.g., the presence of keywords, the number of links to the site from other websites, visitor traffic to the site, how often the content changes

Organic search and paid search

Every web page ranks somewhere in organic search. As most users are prone to look no further than the first page of search results for their queries, it is important to our web site pages rank high enough to be seen. With SEO, we can improve both the ranking and the user-experience of our pages in organic search.

Organizations can also pay to rank for specific search queries. We call this practice "paid search."

Usually, you find paid search results on top or on the bottom of search result pages. The most popular example of paid search are Google Ads.

The image below shows search results for the query "Google Ad." The first mentions is an actual Google Ad (paid search). This is denoted by the inclusion of the word "Ad" at the top left of the entry. The second result shown here is an organic search result.