What is SEO?

The acronym SEO, which stands for “Search Engine Optimization,” is one of the most commonly used acronyms on the internet.

When Google was first founded, its creators wanted to devise a way in which websites could be sorted by usefulness. The first algorithm that they came up with was called PageRank, and it evaluated each website by how many other websites linked to it and the relative popularity of those other websites.

Today, each search engine uses their own proprietary algorithms, all of which are far more sophisticated than the original PageRank algorithm. Furthermore, these algorithms are constantly evolving in order to eliminate low-quality websites and deliver the very best results to searchers.

In modern terms, improving SEO (sometimes written “seo” but always pronounced by its initials: S-E-O) is a full-time career for some people. The simplest definition of SEO is customizing a website in order for it to be ranked as high as possible by search engines so that it is more easily discoverable. No matter how big or small your website is, a significant portion of traffic is going to come from search engines, so SEO is essential.

For WordPress users, SEO primarily involves ensuring that the site is optimized in order to be classified by search engines as possessing authentic and worthwhile content. WordPress already contains a number of built-in SEO-friendly features, including optimizing images and semantic tags to identify the various forms of content and data on your site.

You can download SEO plugins, such as Yoast, to help further improve your website’s SEO, but the easiest and simplest way to be positively ranked by search engines is to provide relevant and authentic content. This means things like having the title of each post accurately reflect the content of that post, never plagiarizing content, using accurate tags and categories, and not linking to low-value, spam type websites.