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SEO Glossary /

SEO

What is SEO?

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the set of practices and actions aimed at increasing a website’s organic traffic from search results. SEO is one of the most important and effective marketing channels for various types of businesses.

When people talk about SEO, they often have optimization for Google in mind. However, SEO applies to any search engine.

Why is SEO important?

SEO is important because it helps drive organic traffic from search engines. Unlike traffic from ads, organic traffic is free. For example, we receive nearly 1.8 million monthly visitors from organic search. If we were to acquire the same amount of traffic from the same keywords from search ads, it would cost us $2.5 million per month.

Organic search traffic in ahrefs and traffic value

Besides, SEO efforts are scalable. This means that the more effort you put into optimizing your site, the more traffic you can potentially receive. In contrast, paid traffic will immediately cease once you stop paying for ads.

Additionally, achieving a high ranking in Google’s Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) automatically enhances the credibility and authority of your brand. This is because people trust that Google makes significant efforts to display only the best, most relevant, and high-quality search results.

What are the components of SEO?

SEO has many aspects and components. Here are the main ones:

Keyword research

Keyword research is the foundation of SEO. It involves the process of identifying the search queries that your target audience uses when they search for information, products, solutions, and more on search engines.

By understanding what people are searching for online, you can create and optimize your content to align with those specific queries. As a result, your potential customers will be more likely to discover your web pages in search results when they enter relevant keywords.

A comprehensive keyword research can be conducted using Ahrefs’ Keyword Explorer.

On-page SEO

On-page SEO (or on-site SEO) is the set of actions you can do on your website directly to help search engines better crawl and understand your pages and connect them to relevant keywords.

Some of the key on-page SEO elements you can optimize are:

  • Page content: Create comprehensive and quality content that satisfies users’ search intent — content that’s relevant to their search query.
  • Title tag: Keep it short yet descriptive enough to let users know what the page/content is about. 
  • Meta description: Write a meta description that expands on the title tag and talks about the benefits to compel users to click and visit your page.
  • URL: Use a short and descriptive URL that includes your target keyword.
  • Images: Optimize your images by compressing the file size. And use descriptive file names and alternative text.
  • Internal and external links: Link to relevant pages on your site and other external resources to provide value to users and help search engines understand the structure and context of your website.

Off-page SEO

Off-page SEO covers the efforts taken outside your website to improve its rankings in search results. 

Off-page SEO primarily revolves around link building — the process of getting other websites to link back to your website. These links are called backlinks or inbound links.

Getting backlinks from high-authority sites sends a signal to search engines that your website is credible, authoritative, and has valuable content. As a result, it boosts your site’s ranking in organic search.

Off-page SEO is closely related to media marketing, digital PR, and brand management. 

Technical SEO

Technical SEO is about improving the technical aspects of your website so that search engines can easily find, crawl, understand, and index your pages. 

Some of the key technical SEO tasks include optimizing site speed, structure, crawling, indexing, and schema markup. It also involves mobile optimization, submitting sitemaps, and resolving issues such as server errors, broken links, duplicate content, etc.

Overall, technical SEO is a foundational component of an SEO strategy that supports your on-page and off-page SEO efforts.

Local SEO

Local SEO is the process of improving your website’s organic rankings to get business from local search queries. Since most people use Google to find local businesses, local SEO mainly focuses on optimizing for Google users.

Some of the most important local SEO ranking factors are Google Business Profile, NAP (name, address, phone numbers) citations, customer reviews, and backlinks.

How to learn SEO?

Learning SEO may feel like a daunting task, given the complexity of the topic and the abundance of misinformation floating in the industry. But you can learn it if you invest time and effort and have the appropriate guidance.
Here’s what you can do. 

Learn SEO fundamentals

The first place to start is getting the SEO basics right. So begin with learning how the search engines work and then move to other topics like keyword research, on-page SEO, link building, and technical SEO.

You can take up our free SEO course for beginners.

Get a website and practice on it from the first days

The best way you can learn SEO is by applying the acquired knowledge to an actual website. Learning only SEO theory won’t help much if you’re not testing it on a site. Besides, testing things for yourself also gives you an opportunity to improve upon the conventional wisdom over time.

So, create a website and practice optimization as you learn—from basics to advanced tactics. 

Stay up to date

Although SEO fundamentals don’t change too frequently, the practices and processes keep evolving constantly. Other than frequent algorithm updates by Google, smart SEOs keep coming up with new and effective SEO tactics.

You can stay on top of these trends and updates by visiting SEO conferences, listening to popular podcasts, reading SEO blogs and participating in various communities.