SEO today is an important part of Digital Marketing. It’s a necessary area of online marketing in 2022 and beyond, helping businesses boost their marketing efforts online. But, what does SEO stand for?
What does SEO stand for?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation.
No wiser? Search Engine Optimisation is the process of working to increase a website’s presence and ranking on major search engines including Google. If you have a website, SEO is necessary to improve and maintain a high organic ranking on Google. It’s especially important for a new website. Growing the authority of a website domain (www.example.com) is vital, for it to be seen as an authoritative source of information on Google. And in 2020 and beyond, the authoratitiveness of a website is a major ranking factor. It enables search engines to differenciate between good, quality sources of information and spam websites.
What is Website Authority?
Website Authority is a measurement of how a website ranks in the eyes of a search engine such as Google. Whilst Google doesn’t give websites a ranking score as such, there are various websites and tools out there that do. They are helpful in establishing how a websites fares in relation to other websites.
A popular and widely used website scoring system is Domain Authority (DA). DA is website ranking system developed by Moz. The scoring system ranks websites on a 1-100 scale. Predicting how a website will rank in search results.
Other companies have similar scoring systems, including Ahrefs, whose system is called Domain Rating (DR). Again, this evaluates a website’s backlink profile compared to others indexed by them, on a 1-100 scale.
These scoring systems take into account the backlink profile of a website. Why backlinks? These have been for some time, and will continue to be, the best way of judging how authoritative a website is. Simply because, if a well know and respected company link to another website, it’s generally for a good reason, and acts of a type of referral. This shows the content of the website receiving the link has valuable content worth linking to.
As the years progress, Google has gotten better at establishing genuine backlinks from bought or low quality links. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to cheat the system, which is a good thing.
What does SEO Involve?
Now we’ve answered the question – what does SEO stand for? – let’s take a look at what’s involved in SEO. Search Engine Optimisation is usually split into two main categories, on-page SEO and off-page SEO.
What is On-Page SEO?
On-page SEO is the optimisation of factors you can control directly related to your website. These include:
- Ensuring page content is well written and relevant
- Optimisation of page titles, headings and meta descriptions
- Navigation of website and ease of use
- Speed of website and page loading speeds
- URL structure
- Internal page linking
Google and other search engines crawl websites regularly. They look for signs that a website meets certain quality criteria. The automated crawl bots, use the information they find to decide the relevance and usability of a website. This helps in ranking the websites in search results.
What is Off-Page SEO?
Off-page SEO is factors away from the website itself. Factors that can’t be directly controlled, and affect it’s authority. The main gauge of a website’s authority is backlinks, especially by Google. Backlinks are websites linking to the website we are optimising. They show search engines that a website, page or article is notable and worth linking to.
Backlinks are a great way for search engines to establish what is considered to be an authoritative, useful website. Why? Good, reliable sources of information will eventually be referred to by other authoritative websites. These websites will have a high DA or DR. And, if they point to our website we are looking to grow, it’s usually for a good reason.
Checking backlinks is equally good for finding spammy websites. Websites that are trying to cheat the system by perhaps creating links in bulk, or buying links. Which tend to be from poor ranking websites, usually linking to thousands of other websites and lacking credibility themselves.
Conclusion – what does SEO stand for.
We’ve given you an overview of SEO, including the all important question – what does SEO stand for? We hope it’s a useful resource in pursuit of search engine optimisation knowledge.
If you have any questions about SEO, don’t hesitate to get in touch.
