*Warning this article assumes you have ZERO experience with internet marketing. It may seem basic to those who practice SEO but for those just starting out this article is invaluable!*

In today’s internet-based age, search engine optimization (SEO) plays a crucial role in the success of any online business. Anyone with a website can benefit from SEO, but if you’re new to it, you’ll need a primer for what it is and why it matters so much.

How Search Engines Work

The Internet is made up of billions of pieces of information, with the number of websites increasing every day. The task of search engines is to look through this massive amount of data and, using your search term or phrase as a guide, bring you only what you need. To do this, each search engine relies on a highly advanced algorithm, which is simply a set of rules or steps about how to analyze the available content. Significant changes to a search engine algorithm invariably alter what’s included in the search results and how those results get ranked.

So…Then What’s SEO?

SEO is a process in which you try to make your website include most, if not all, of what a search engine’s algorithm considers to be “good”. If you do this well, the search engine will list your website higher in its results. Subsequently, people will have a much easier time finding you, and you’ll likely get more visitors to your site. For something like a blog or news agency website, that can translate to more shares, support and the impression of reliability. For businesses, more visibility generally means more sales and profits.

What Optimization Really Involves

Search engines evaluate internet data based on the term or keyword you type into the text box. For this reason, a big part of optimization includes finding the words and phrases people are likely to use for their inquiries. Once you know what keywords people are entering for their searches, you make sure you’ve included those terms in your website content.

But optimization is about much more than just keywords. In fact, today’s algorithms are so sophisticated that just using a popular term is not enough to achieve a good ranking. You have to look at the actual intent or context the user had for their search too. Content relevancy matters.

In this regard, part of an SEO professional’s job is to cut out “fluff”, or information that is connected to the topic but which isn’t really focused on what the user wanted. Paying attention to keywords helps here. Although using some less popular or lower-ranking keywords isn’t necessarily a bad thing (they have less competition and can let you target specific markets), the content focus should match the keyword you use most often. There’s a difference between “pink umbrellas” and just “umbrellas”, for example. SEO experts actually spend a lot of their time “cleaning up” copy in this way.

SEO involves many other tasks, as well. For instance, SEO specialists make sure that a website’s URL is structured so that it’s simple, descriptive and easy to read, and they keep links on the site updated. They also look at the website’s meta descriptions and title and heading tags, making sure that they include elements like the primary keyword and truly describe what’s on the website.

They use metrics like the number of visitors from specific search engines to determine where the majority of their traffic is coming from and to make decisions about how to maximize marketing efforts. Although no one expects SEO experts to know all the changes that are happening for every search engine algorithm, they’re expected to develop and test strategies to keep the sites current and ranked high.

The Role of a Great SEO tool

SEO tools are software applications designed to make optimization easier. They often focus on just one SEO area, such as providing a set of metrics. Even so, one that’s more advanced often can take care of multiple SEO tasks, such as providing keyword suggestions in conjunction with a text editing environment.

Using these tools gives you the evidence you need to justify making specific website changes, facilitates the actual modifications and, very often, saves time and labor through automation. Perhaps more importantly, though, SEO tools give you “big picture” perspective about the success of your site, showing you where you sit compared to competitors.

SEO dramatically can improve where your website appears in search engine results. Although keywords are very important to the process, the focus isn’t on keywords alone. Optimization takes many aspects of a site into consideration. SEO tools are extremely valuable regardless of which element you might need to analyze or fix, providing excellent data and serving as good website modification platforms. If you have a website or plan to build one, investing in optimization is well worth the expense.