What is SEO in a practical sense?

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is the practice of ensuring a website complies with the standards of search engines.

As the word suggests, someone conducting SEO on a website is optimising it for search engines.

At a basic level this includes optimisations such as:

• Effective title tags
• Keyword density through website content
• Article headlines
• Linking throughout the website
• Links to your site from other sites
• Image meta tags
• User experience

Google, being the predominant search engine, is generally what SEOs will try to optimise for. Other search engines will have similar algorithms, but with the strong majority of search traffic going through Google, it makes the most sense to focus on them exclusively.

Google has more than 200 ranking factors – some minor and some major. Searchmetrics has this great resource on the importance of various ranking factors.

The practical side

Much of the above is purely technical, but aren’t just optimisations for the sake of it. When you explore the logical side of each, you will see why they are part of search engine algorithms.

When you ask Google a question, you want an answer. Google’s algorithm will use its 200+ ranking factors to determine what the best results are for your question.

You may have written an amazing article answering a question perfectly, but if you have a poor headline, you will likely rank poorly.

The reason is the behaviour of people using Google. They are quickly scanning the top few results for something indicating that the page does answer their question. If your headline (which is typically your title tag) is something obscure, you will not be clicked on.

Now if you managed to rank highly somehow, but no one is clicking through to your page, Google will take that as an indication that your page isn’t relevant – even though it’s the best answer.

Google (and all search engines) are user-driven. Search engines operate by numbers. The more users they have, the better their ads platform (and other products) will perform. If your article ranks #1, but no one clicks, there is a risk that the users who aren’t clicking will not use Google in the future as they think they aren’t getting the answer they wanted.

So you can see how fickle a search engine can be, but logically it does make sense.

Don’t ignore the small factors

Some ranking factors might be extremely minor, but just like the example above, can have a ripple effect that renders your page useless.

To make things worse, Google may assume your site as a whole is something users don’t want to see. If this is the case, ranking highly for other site pages may become difficult.

Put yourself in the shoes of a potential user and start the journey from a simple search. See what you do and don’t do, see what you decide to ignore, and suddenly it will become clear what Google is looking for when deciding the rank of websites for various search terms.