What is SEO?

If you are learning about digital marketing, you must familiarise yourself with the SEO concept.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. But... what exactly does that mean?

Let's start from the beginning:

Internet Search Engines

When an internet user has a question, the first thing he does is to type it in a search engine website, such as Google. This search engine will:

1. Explore all the information found on the web until it finds the possible answers to the question this user is making.
2. Choose the answers it thinks are best from all these possible answers, that is, those that would better respond to the user's question.
3. Offer these possible answers on its site, placing those it considered the best at the top.

*It is in these top internet search engines options where you want your website to be for everyone to see.

How do you make it to the top of the search engines results?

There are two ways to make it as a "top result" of search engines:

1. The short (yet expensive) road
2. The long (more affordable and permanent) road

The Short Road

The short path is what we know as paid advertising. In the case of Google, it's what we know as Google Ads. Your company pays the search engine (Google) so your site appears as a first result. This is obviously a great way to make it as a top result yet, there are some disadvantages to this strategy:

• Its price is set by auction, which means that it'll be constantly rising, since you'll be competing for this ad with other companies in your sector
• You will be charged per click, even if the visitor doesn't buy a thing
• Obviously, as soon as you stop paying this ad, your page will no longer make ir as a top result
• Few people click on answers offered as Ads.

The Long Road

It takes a little longer to make it to the top with this option, since it's based on strategic content creation. Useful content gets ranked at the top by search engines since it does answer its users' questions, which is their final purpose.

Optimizing this content so search engines find it and offer it as a best result, is what we call SEO.

This road takes longer yet, offers several benefits:

• The cost of the content creation service is stable, it won't increase like paid-for Ads do (due to their auctions system).
• There are no charges per click. Since your website will offer good-quality and constantly updated content, search engines will offer its content for these very reasons, after all, their goal is to respond to their users questions with the best answers available on the net. All those users looking for the information that your site will happen to have will find it and thus, will also find information about the products or services that you offer (without having to pay for it).
• Since you are not paying search engines to appear as a top result, you'll never lose your place (as long as your content remains of good quality and relevant to the reader). In short, you'll remain well ranked thanks to your content, without paying a dime for it.
• Most users click on the answers that are not paid advertising

SEO and positioning your content on the web

Once we've explained how SEO works, we close this article with our starting point: SEO.

There's currently so much information on the Internet, that search engines follow certain rules or algorithms to find the content they believe is more accurate. These rules are not permanent, they are perfected over time and all websites have to update their content based on these rules if they want to stay at the top.

Now, what we want is to position our content as a top result, so what we have to do is design a whole content strategy that takes into account those algorithms that the most popular search engines use when choosing the content they'll offer as the best content possible.

SEO - Strategies that must be carried out and constantly updated in order to optimize a site's content. The goal is to make Internet search engines to find it and offer it as a best result to their users.

This is why we need to design and update our content following the requirements of search engines algorithms, following their rules of the game. This is what we call SEO.

Success isn't just about publishing content, it's about doing it with a strategy that will consider:

• Search engines algorithms
• The sales results we planned to achieve