Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic to a website or a web page from search engines. SEO targets unpaid traffic (known as "natural" or "organic" results) rather than direct traffic or paid traffic.
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Understanding how search engines work is only the first step of the process in improving a site's search rankings. Actually improving a site's rank involves leveraging various SEO techniques to optimize the site for search:
Keyword research is often the starting point for SEO and involves looking at what keywords a site is already ranking for, what keywords competitors rank for, and what other keywords potential customers are searching for.
Once potential keywords are identified, content marketing comes into play. This can be updating existing content or creating brand new pieces of content. Good content also has a greater chance of being shared on social media and attracting links.
Because links from external websites (called "backlinks" in SEO parlance) are one of the core ranking factors in Google and other major search engines, obtaining high-quality backlinks is one of the main levers that SEO has.
In addition to off-page factors such as links, improving the actual structure of the page can have tremendous benefits for SEO, and is a factor that is entirely in the control of the webmaster.
External links are not the only thing that matters for SEO play a large role in SEO as well.Creating an XML sitemap can also be a good way for larger pages to help search engines discover and crawl all of the site's pages.
Another SEO strategy that SEO experts utilize is optimizing a website's semantic markup. Semantic markup is used to identify who the author of a piece of content is or the topic and type of content on a page.