The question \”What does SEO\” mean is easy to answer: SEO comes from the English and stands for Search Engine Optimization.
SEO = Search Engine Optimization
That already answers the question and the post is actually finished. However, I would like to expand a little at this point.
Why is SEO important?
Let’s be honest: When was the last time you clicked further than page 1 in Google results? More than 2? More than 3? More than 10? If you’re like me, then it’s as good as never. Well, visitors don’t just have to come from search engines. Visitors can also come via newsletters, advertisements on cars, business cards, Facebook or Twitter, but relying solely on these would be a bad idea.
Visitors who come via search engines belong to the \”organic traffic\”. Typically, this type of visitor has a problem, sits down at the computer and “googles” to land on your site, which hopefully provides the solution to their problem.
The more precisely the answer matches the visitor’s question, the more likely it is that the visitor will follow the website’s “Call to Action”. It is clear that not every visitor will buy something or contact you straight away. BUT: this visitor costs you absolutely nothing (yet) we don’t have to pay Google anything to be listed in the index.
What does SEO mean for Google?
There are many more search engines than Google: Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, DuckDuckGo, Qwant and more. But here in Switzerland, Google has a market share of 90%, so SEO is often equated with optimization for Google.
So what influences my ranking on Google?
It’s not such a clear science for us non-Googlers (I assume it is for the Google engineers). Many factors influence the ranking. These are also constantly changing, as Google is always striving to make the results even more accurate. Moreover, there is no such thing as THE ranking. If I enter a search term in Google, I will not get the same result as you. It may seem a little scary, but it’s the reality.
The following factors have an influence on the rank of a page in the Google results:
- Relevance of the domain (match of the search terms with the domain)
- Relevance of the headings in the text
- Relevance of the page title
- https is weighted higher than http
- How \”respected\” is the page -> i.e. are there many links to the page
- Age of the domain
- The domain extension -> .ch vs .com vs .de etc
- Description of the page
- How often a search term appears on a page
- Length of the content
- How fast the page loads
- How often the page is updated
- Quality of images
- Grammar and spelling
- Broken links
- Is a sitemap available
- Is the site optimized for mobile devices
There are many other factors. The basic principle is: Google will reward a high-quality page, while poor quality will be “penalized”. Some of these things are technical problems, while other criteria are tasks for people.
What SEO means is easy to answer. However, implementation is much more difficult. We have written a long, detailed article on SEO and WordPress here: Search engine optimization for WordPress – The ultimate guide.
Therefore: In most cases, it is not worth pursuing SEO too doggedly. However, thinking about this and providing the best possible content is definitely worthwhile and will be rewarded accordingly by Google.
Have we answered your question \”What does SEO mean\”? If you have more questions, just get in touch with us.