What is SEO? Explained in Simple Words

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is the process of getting traffic to your website from the organic (free) search results in search engines. In simple words, if you are a website owner you will not pay any money to get visitors (traffic) to your website.

Alternative: It is the process of getting your website ranked in top positions of search results for various related keywords/search queries

Example: Consider you are selling bags through your website. So if your customers search any of the following in any search engine “Cotton bags”, “Best leather bags”, “Recycle bags”, your website should appear in the top positions of the search results.

Important terms related to SEO:

There are 100+ important terms related to SEO which I plan to cover in separate article in future. For now I have added few general terms related to SEO in this article:

Search Engines:  A program that searches for various items, documents and websites that corresponds to keywords/search terms used by the user on the world wide web. Example : Google, Bing, Yahoo etc

Keywords: They are the queries, words that are typed by the users in the search queries. They are also called as search terms.

URL: A url is the acronym for Uniform Resource Locator. Each web page will have a unique URL. In simple words, URL specifies the web address of a page.

Backlinks: They are the links from other website that point to pages in your website. Its important to get quality backlinks for your website.

Why is SEO important?

As explained before, SEO is the process of getting your website ranked in top positions of the search results for various keywords. By getting your website ranked, you will get maximum traffic to your website and improves brand awareness. And the best part, you don’t need to spend anything from your pocket. SEO is mainly important for companies especially for start-ups who have budget constraints at the beginning and cannot compete with big players by investing money on paid channels. And if you do get your seo strarergies right, once your website is ranked, it will remain there for long run.