SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is the process of getting traffic from the free, organic, editorial, or natural search results on the search engines. Simply put, it’s the name given to the activity that attempts to improve search engine rankings. In many respects, it's simply quality control for websites.
SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, video search, and news search engines. Employing a sound SEO strategy will help you position your website properly to be found at the most critical points in the buying process or when people need your site.
The leading search engines, such as Google, Bing and Yahoo!, use crawlers to find the pages for their algorithmic search results. Pages that are linked from other search engine indexed pages do not need to be submitted because they are found automatically.
Search engine crawlers may look at a number of different factors when crawling a site. Not every page is indexed by the search engines. Distance of pages from the root directory of a site may also be a factor in whether or not pages get crawled.
You should be careful to keep the following points in mind in order to ensure your brand is well positioned on search engines −
Search engines want to do their jobs as best as possible by referring users to websites and content that is most relevant to what the user is looking for. This is determined by the site content, how fast your site loads, how often your site is linked to from other credible online resources, and user experience, including design, navigation and bounce rate.
The items that the search engines don’t want are: keyword stuffing, buying links, and poor user experience (too many ads and high bounce rates).
Domain naming is important to your overall branding. As a best practice, use sub-directory root domains (example.com/events) versus sub-domains (events.example.com). Other best practices with domain names are to use consistent domains and keywords in the URL.
Optimize for different types of results. In addition to optimizing for desktop experience, focus on mobile and tablet optimization along with other media.
Content on the site should have title tags and meta descriptions. Although meta tags aren’t as important as they used to be in the past; if you do use them, ensure they are formatted correctly.