You’ve probably seen the acronym SEO before and maybe you’ve asked yourself “what is search engine optimization“? Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the act of configuring your website to rank high in search engines for specific keyword searches.
Let’s say you are searching for “an excellent example of SEO basics.” You would go to Google.com and type in “an excellent example of SEO basics.” Just for kicks, go ahead and do that.
What is search engine optimization
The first result that you should see is an article that I wrote for BretPhillips.com called An Excellent Example Of SEO Basics. It is not by chance that this is the first result, many different elements went into getting that page on my website to rank #1 for those specific keywords.
On-Page SEO solutions
First, you need to know what keywords that you want to target. In order to find these, think about what terms your target market will use when searching for your product or service. This can be difficult, and I have found that an outsider’s opinion is valuable, as he or she will be closer to your target market.
We will delve deeper into the Long Tail when we start discussing keyword research, but for now just remember that long tail keywords typically have less competition than short phrases. For example, “SEO Basics” is only two words and highly competitive, whereas “An Excellent Example Of SEO Basics” is much more specific, and thus will have less competition.
Once you have your keyword phrase, it is time to start building your content. For search engines, content is king. If your content is not relevant to your keywords, you will not rank high. Although you are writing to please the search engines, you also need to write to please your audience. By composing compelling articles, people will naturally want to share them. This can happen via social media—or ideally—people posting a link to your site on their own website, which brings us to backlinking and other ways to achieve SEO off your site.
Off-Page SEO solutions
Backlinks come in many forms, but ideally someone will read your article, find it relevant, and post a link to it from their own website. Depending on what words they use in the link and which page it points to on your site, you could be getting some serious link love from this random person.
Off-page SEO can be hard to come by, but if you can build it, it will help your rankings out tremendously. The biggest Off-Page solution is backlinks, or links to your page from other pages. The more relevant the site that is linking back to you, the more beneficial it will be to you for two reasons:
First, readers of that relevant site will be driven to your site where they can find even more information that will help them. In doing this, the linking website acts provides a direct-traffic referral for you.
Secondly, search engines see these links like “votes” for your website. If you get the right combination of anchor text (the words that are actually linked to your website, hopefully these are your keywords), link URL, and relevant linking website, you could see a serious boost in the search engines for your website article regarding that specific keyword phrase.
There are ways that you can purchase backlinks that can help you out, but I prefer to stay away from these and build backlinks organically. Purchasing backlinks can end up causing you some trouble while building them organically ensures that the links are relevant.
How Does WordPress Help My SEO?
WordPress is designed to be a lean, fast loading, scalable content management system. This means that you can easily set up a new ‘page’ on your website, specifically targeting a keyword phrase, and have all the options you need to optimize in the code and on the page.
There are several additional plugins, themes, etc. that can help make WordPress SEO management even easier such as All In One SEO Plugin and the Thesis Theme.
Recap
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is configuring your website so that it will rank high on search engines for specific keywords.
- Find keyword phrases relevant to your product or service.
- Write your content around the keyword phrases you have chosen.
- Write interesting articles; don’t just post a bunch of keywords optimized for search engines.
- Doing so will increase the likelihood that people share them, preferably by linking to the article from their own website.
- Backlinks from other websites to your website is another great way to boost your search engine rankings.
- WordPress offers an easy platform to create SEO friendly web pages.
If you have any questions or comments regarding what is search engine optimization, please contact us and lets chat it out 
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