SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is the process of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through free organic search engine results.

What goes into SEO?

To understand what SEO really means, let’s break it down:

Traffic Quality: You can have all the website traffic in the world, but if they’re coming to your site because Google tells them you’re a resource for something you do not do, that is not quality traffic. Instead you want to attract visitors who are genuinely interested in products that you offer, you want hot leads!
Traffic Quantity: Once you have the right people navigating to your site from search engine results pages (SERPs), more traffic is better.
Organic Results: Search Ads make up a large portion of SERPs. Organic traffic is any traffic that is free directly from Googles SERPs.

How does SEO work?

“SE” – Search Engine

You might know of search engines as websites you visit to type or speak a question into a search box and whatever search engine you’re using shows a long list of links to websites their algorithm deems as relevant web pages.

If you agree then you are correct! That is true, but have you ever considered what is behind the scenes of those links?

Here’s how SEO works: Google (or any search engine you use) has a “crawler” that sweeps up content across the internet. Then the crawlers bring all of the results it finds back to the search engine to construct an index (a list of pages). That index is then fed through an algorithm (a process or set of rules) that tries to match all that content with your search query.

There are many many factors that go into a search engine’s algorithm, they are proven through long hours of A-B testing by industry experts and companies like us.

SEO is not just a matter of inserting magical jargon into your site and tadaaaa you rank… SEO is a process that requires attention to detail. SEO is great for your business to get ahead of the competition, save money on Ads, and establish long term search dominance over your competitors.

There are a lot of factors that go into a search engine’s algorithm, and here’s how a group of experts ranked their importance:

“O” – Optimization

The O part of SEO—optimization—is where the people (ideally a reputable SEO company like us) write the content and put it on sites, then beautify that content and those sites data so search engines can understand that information and relay it to the user who wants it.

Optimization is an in-depth process. It’s everything from making sure your title tags and meta descriptions are informative and the right length, pointing internal links at pages, optimizing valid schema markup, and much much more.

Learning SEO

SEO strategies and techniques vary depending on your traffic goals. SEO Moz is the industry leader in research and SEO tools for agencies worldwide. Their Beginner’s Guide to SEO is a great basic overview of the topic and provides you with a comprehensive overview of what Hawp Media provides for its customers.

Here’s a general overview of what it takes to perform successful SEO:

Develop an SEO-friendly website.
Write compelling content your users want, and optimize that content with schema markup.
Perform on-site optimization.
Ensure your website is fast!
Design a strategic link building strategy.
Go even deeper and perform Local SEO or International SEO.

The Evolution of SEO

Search engine algorithms update all the time and white-hat SEO techniques are relative to those updates. This is exactly why SEO is not a “one and done” process. It is on-going, and if you want to achieve the best possible results for your business you must be on top of SEO.

This is where we come in…