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How Does SEO Work & Why Is It Important?

There are entire text books (or maybe eBooks in this case) that detail how exactly SEO works, how to cater to its preferences and why it’s critical for anyone with a website. At a higher level, SEO can be broken down like this:

Nearly all online traffic is driven by search engines (think Google, Bing, etc.).

Search engines populate both organic and paid results based on dynamic algorithms that crawl the internet looking for the most relevant results to the query.

SEO utilizes things like keywords, internal and external links, and optimized content to help search engines find content and rank websites higher on search engine results pages (SERPs).

It is important to understand that the way search engines crawl and rank content is constantly changing, so SEO experts have to regularly update and refresh their tactics to keep their content and websites relevant. This is also what makes SEO so important — an organization that wants high SERP rankings to increase their traffic needs to implement the most effective SEO strategies, such as:

Focus on user experience

Implement non-manipulative ranking tactics

Understand searcher intent/behavior

Monitor the latest search engine algorithms

Types of SEO: On-Page SEO vs. Off-Page SEO 

So what does an SEO strategy look like? Start by breaking it down into on-page SEO and off-page SEO tactics. These are obviously related, but each type has its own unique nuances that will help your efforts be more effective.

On-page SEO: As the name suggests, on-page SEO analyzes what the page (and your website) are about. On-page SEO strategy focuses on optimizing the content hosted on your own website, so things like your title tags, page content, site speed and more. To optimize this content, you need to understand the relevant keywords your audience is looking for and use that as a guide to build your site content. 

Off-page SEO: This involves everything that is not on your own website. Off-page SEO determines how authoritative your content is, which is typically achieved through backlinks from other websites. Backlinks are links from an outside website back to your site.

To understand how these two types of SEO impact your site performance, think of it this way: on-page SEO determines what you rank for and off-page SEO determines how well you rank.