What is SEO?
You have often asked yourself the question “What is SEO?” without ever getting a clear answer.
The definition of SEO is (Search Engine Optimization) also called SEO optimization. These are all the techniques that allow different search engines to understand what you are and what you offer in order to place the pages of your website correctly in their search results.
You understand the importance of paying attention to it: this is what will also determine the positioning of your website's pages when searching for visitors. If you want to be among the first suggestions, you need to take care of your content in order to optimize it.
SEO is dead – long live web marketing!
In the past, SEO was achieved by purely mechanical operations. All you had to do was fill in the right fields with your keywords and it was done. To take Google as an example, the algorithm in charge of sorting pages did not distinguish between content.
Today, tools have evolved and things are no longer as simple as they used to be: in particular, search engines are able to grasp the meaning of your content, to grasp the relevance of a particular page for an Internet user based on multiple criteria linked to, for example, geography, language or age, Internet use or online social practices.
To be well referenced you will have to show a benefit and provide quality content. Now asking the question what is SEO is like asking what is marketing! By addressing Internet users and their interests correctly, we are effectively responding to the search engines' request to produce quality content stamped for a particular user, use or purpose.
What is quality?
Providing quality content means producing content that is relevant to your site but above all that will interest your readers. The principle is simple, the more you do in quality:
the more you segment your content according to what you offer, to whom and how you propose it: by answering a specific problem, you will offer search engines the opportunity to highlight you as an expert on a problem, translated by Internet users in the form of searches. The more your readers will share your content: a dimension that search engines take into account and which is in itself a means of distributing the content.
To create quality content, focus on these two things:
Consider the different problems your potential Internet users encounter
Understand what they are looking for.
The answers you provide them by creating content or offering a solution should be useful, interesting or entertaining content that will be valued by them… and by search engines.
Web marketing is always based on tools
Despite the quality of your content, you will have to use other levers that could also be described as tools: you still have to help search engines understand you. For your SEO to be effective, you must act on two fronts:
The inner part:
… Adopt a functional and quality website creation tool (Content Management System) to optimize the indexing of your pages – easy to modify the content and elements of the pages (URL, title or meta description for example), fast loading…
… Write new quality content regularly.
The external part: by generating links that point to your content, through social networks or because other people consider you as reference in a particular domain, you give weight to your website.
You understand that SEO requires you to know how to measure quality and quickness. From this blog post, remember that the SEO makes sense only if it is used in a combined marketing effort that focuses on proposing answers to individual persons before thinking about search engine’s needs!