What Is SEO?

If you're just dipping your toe in the SEO water, you've probably come across plenty of acronyms, jargon and, let's be honest, techno babble!

But as Einstein is sometimes attributed as saying, 'if you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough'

So I'm going to explain SEO as simply as possible.

SEO Acronyms and Terminology:

• Search Engine: Google's definition is "an automated system designed to organize the world's information, make it universally accessible, and match user queries with the most relevant, high-quality content available."

  • Basically, it's a digital library

  • As Google has the largest market share in the west, this is the standard search engine most websites are optimised for. Most other search engines run similar algorithms so optimising for Google usually means you're optimised for all.
    
    

• SEO: Search Engine Optimisation (or optimization if you're that way inclined)

  • Optimising your website, content, brand etc. for search engines.
    
    

• SERP: Search Engine Results Page

  • The page of information you see whenever you search for anything

SEO (free) Resources

• Google Search Central: Google's store of documentation explaining what SEO is and how it works.

  • https://developers.google.com/search/docs

  • In here, you'll find everything you need to know about how Google crawls your website, what it's looking for and how to make your website the best it can be
    
    

• Google Search documentation: The 182 page document Google gives it's human staff when manually reviewing websites.

  • This details how Google defines high quality content and low quality content
    
    

• Google Analytics (GA): A free tool offered by Google to help track what your website traffic does on your website
  
  

• Google Search Console (GSC): A free tool that shows how Google views and displays your website before traffic arrived on it
  
  

• Google Business Profile: Google's free listing manager for local businesses.

  • Great for local SEO, managing Google Maps rankings, local pack visibility, and gathering customer reviews.

SEO Content Terms

From Google's perspective, content is one of the most important elements of any website. Your content can make or break your online organic profile and it's incredibly important to understand exactly what Google is looking for:

• EEAT: Expertise, Experience, Authority and Trust: This is what Google wants to see across your website, woven through your content and reflected throughout your online presence.

  • Expertise: Whatever you're selling, promoting, talking about, you should be an expert in this field. This should be demonstrable through your content.

  • Experience: Your experience should also be clearly demonstrated through your website, how long have you been in this field? What qualifications do you have?

  • Authority: Do others also view you as having expertise and experience? Do they talk positively about you? Do you have any awards?

  • Trust: Why should Google trust you with its lucrative traffic? Why should someone trust you with their sensitive data or hard earned cash? Do you have reviews? Accreditations or certificates?
    
    

• Your Money or Your Life (YMYL): States that if your website/app directly impacts someone's money or their life, that content must be held to a higher standard

  • For example, if you offer legal advice, sell insurance or health products, those EEAT elements would have to be more demonstrable compared to someone who shares content about how to arrange flowers
    
    

• Duplicate content: This is one of the few areas that can activity damage how Google perceives your website.

  • If Google finds content on your website that it's already seen, it will view it with less importance. If Google finds content on your website it's seen many times already, it will start to ignore it. If Google finds large sections of your website that it's seen before, it will start to view your site as spammy and potentially stop it appearing in searches

  • With every URL, the accompanying content must be unique. If it's duplicated or repeated anywhere on your own website, it must be canonicalised (see below). Your content should never be copied from another online source without proper citation
    
    

• Helpful Content: Reliable information that's created to benefit people, and not content that's created to manipulate search engine rankings.

  • Google has a lovely long list of exactly what questions you should ask when reviewing your content but it boils down to being confident, your content offers the reader something they can't easily find anywhere else online

  • This could be having something new to say or having a new way to display it and having something of genuine note to say

Technical SEO Terms

• Crawler, bot, search engine spider: An automated software program used to systematically browse and discover content across the internet.

• HTML: HyperText Markup Language

  • The standard code used to build and structure web pages - press 'ctrl + u' on any webpage, this is usually what Google's looking at when trying to crawl and understand that page.

• Meta title & Meta Description: The HTML that tells Google what you page title is and what it's about.

  • This is usually what you see for that page in the SERP
    
    

• Anchor text: The HTML text behind (hyper)links

  • As links are one of the primary ways bots find their way around the internet, these are very important signposts.
    
    

• Canonical Tags: The HTML tag that explains to Google if there's a link between two pages.

  • As Google doesn't like duplicate content, the canonical tag is the best way to state if a page contains similar content to another page.

  
  

• Alt text: The descriptive text that should be behind any image.

  • Historically, Google has struggled to 'see' images so relied on the code to explain what the image contained. Alt text is very importable for accendibility as they're relied upon by screen readers.
    
    

• Core Web Vitals (CWVs): A set of Google metrics that assess the user experience on your website

  • Whilst a fast loading website is favourable by Google, there are many elements that go into 'speed' and the CWVs help assess these elements individually

  • They can be assessed for free in your GSC account

This is just one list and a short one at that.

When all is said and done, Google favours websites that offer the best possible user experience - put your customers first, present them with the best website you can and you've already won most the battle.

If you want to understand more, ask any questions or just get a sense check of how your site is performing, get in touch and I'll be happy to help.

Further reading:

1. Google Quality Rating guidelines

2. Google Search Central

3. Google Helpful Content guidelines