What Is SEO / Search Engine Optimization? A Step-by-Step Guide for 2024

What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

SEO stands for “search engine optimization”.SEO is a part of internet marketing focusing on increasing the visibility in organic search results (the organic system is a non-paid system compared to, for example, Google ads, formerly adwords, for which you have to pay to be visible).

SEO includes both the technical and creative elements required to improve rankings, increase traffic and increase search engine awareness.SEO has many aspects, from keywords and content on your website, blog or store to the way other websites link to you on the Internet (i.e. they see the value they want to share).

Sometimes SEO it is simply a matter of making sure that your site is built in a way understandable to search engines (most often in the case of low competitive phrases).

 

What is positioning?

Simply put, positioning is getting high positions in Google.com search engine for the user’s final phrases, or keywords. Visibility of the page in the search engine is currently a key element of effective business management, is a kind of showcase and a guarantor of acquiring new customers.

However, positioning is not only good positions and good visibility on phrases. Correct and effective positioningit is also website traffic providing new customers and increasing sales. Therefore, the most important aspect for us is the selection of appropriate keywords that will provide our customers after some time good positions for these phrases and bring new customers looking for their company, and specifically the services or products offered.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization), or positioning, is the total of activities that lead to an increase in the position of the site (for given keywords) in Google search results. Reaching one of the first places results in increasing the popularity of the website and the number of potential customers. If you are looking for a relatively cheaper and at the same time very effective form of advertising, positioning should interest you.

SEO together with PPC are components of the so-called search engine marketing, or SEM (Search Engine Marketing). While PPC (pay per click) is paid advertising, focused on quick benefits, SEO is a lengthy process that requires multiple marketing and IT activities (on your site and beyond) and constant monitoring of results. For positioning to be fully effective, it should be carried out continuously, preferably by a person well-versed in Google algorithms and all mechanisms that govern online marketing.

Effective SEO, thanks to which the company gains a leading position in the Internet environment, requires the use of many different activities, such as:

optimization of the HTML of the website;
preparation and proper placement of content on the site;
selection of key phrases;
actions aimed at achieving high conversion;
building the structure of links leading to the site;
technical optimization of the site;
adapting the site to mobile devices;
and other actions taken depending on the tactics of a given SEO engine.

SEO is not just building search engine friendly websites . It’s about making your site better for people too. At UniqueSeo, we believe these principles go hand in hand.

This article aims to describe areas of SEO – which generate traffic to your site, making your site search engine friendly, link building and marketing unique to your site. If you are confused because of this, you are not alone, and we are here to help you and explain everything.

 

Why does my site require SEO ?

Most of the internet traffic is driven by the largest commercial search engines Google, Bing, Yahoo and Yandex (mainly Russia). Although social media and other types of traffic can generate traffic to your site, search engines are the primary method of surfing the web for most network users.

It is therefore important whether the site contains content, services, products, information or just anything else that currently interests the Internet user.

Search engines are unique in that they provide targeted traffic – people who are looking for what you offer. Search engines are roads that enable this. If search engines can’t find your site or add content to their databases, you lose the incredible opportunity to attract traffic to your site, which automatically cuts your business.

Search terms – words that users enter in the search box – are of extraordinary value. Experience shows that search engine traffic can contribute to business success. Targeted website traffic can provide advertising, revenue and exposure like no other marketing channel.

Investing in SEO can have an exceptional rate of return compared to other types of marketing and promotions.

Why can’t search engines find my site without SEO ?

Search engines are intelligent, but they still need help. The most important engines are always working to improve their technologies to index the network deeper and return better results to users.

However, there is a limit on the way search engines work. While proper SEO can bring you thousands of visitors and more attention, the wrong moves can hide or bury your site deep in search results where visibility is minimal.

In addition to providing content to search engines, positioning websites also helps in increasing rankings, so that the content will be placed in a place where users will find it easier. The Internet is becoming more and more competitive, andcompanies that do SEO will have a definite advantage on visitors and clients.

As a result, they will become more known and earn more.

Can I do SEO for myself ?

The world of SEO is complex , but most people can easily understand the basics. Even a small amount of knowledge can make a big difference. Free SEO education is widely available on the Internet, including in various guidebooks and courses. Combine this with a little practice and you’re on your way to becoming an expert.

Depending on your time commitment, willingness to learn and the complexity of your website, website or store, you may decide that you need an expert who can handle what you have. Companies that practice SEO may vary; some have a highly specialized purpose, while others use a broader and more general approach.

In any case, it is good to understand the basic concepts well.

If you’re serious about increasing search engine traffic and don’t know SEO, we recommend that you read and study many materials such as our website . We tried to make it as concise and easy to understand as possible.

How can you try to understand SEO ?

Thanks to methods such as live analysis, experiments and tests, search engine marketing community has understood many basic search engine operations and critical elements of creating websites and pages that ensure high ranking and high traffic.

How do search engines work ?

Search engines have two main functions: indexing and index building, and providing users with a ranking list of pages that they have determined as the most important.

I. Indexing

Search and index billions of documents, pages, files, messages, movies and multimedia on the World Wide Web.

II. Providing answers.

Answering user queries, most often by means of lists of relevant pages that have been downloaded and ranked in terms of relevance.

Imagine a global network as a network of stops in the metropolitan metro system.

Each stop is a unique document (usually a website, but sometimes a PDF, JPG or other file). Search engines need a way to “search” the entire city and find all the stops along the way to use the best available paths.

Link structure on the web is used to link all pages.

Links allow automatic search engine robots, called “robots” or “spiders,” to reach many billions of documents linked together on the web. When the engines find these pages, they will decrypt the code from them and scan them, later storing selected fragments in huge databases, which will be recalled later when they are needed for searching.

To accomplish the monumental task of having billions of pages that can be accessed in a split second, search engine companies have built data centers around the world.

These huge warehouses store thousands of machines processing large amounts of information very quickly. When a person performs a search on any of the major engines, they demand immediate results; even a one or two second delay can cause dissatisfaction, so engines work hard to answer as quickly as possible.

Search engines are machines to answer. When a person performs a search on the Internet, the search engine searches its billions of documents and does two things:

first, it returns only those results that are relevant or useful to the search engine’s query;

secondly, these results are ranked according to the popularity of information websites.

It’s both relevance and popularityhave an impact on the SEO process .

 

How do search engines determine meaning and popularity ?

For search engine, meaning is more than just finding a page with the right words. In the early years, search engine networks did not go much further than this simplified method, and the search results were of limited value. Over the years, intelligent engineers have been developing better ways to match results to user queries. Today, hundreds of factors influence the meaning, and we will discuss the most important of them.

Search engines usually assume that the more popular a page, store or document is, the more valuable the information it contains.

This assumption proved to be quite effective in terms of user satisfaction with search results.

Popularity and relevance are not determined manually. Instead, engines use mathematical equations (algorithms) to sort (validity) and then to sort by quality (popularity).

These algorithms often contain hundreds of variables. In search engine marketing we refer to them as “ranking factors”.

What does positioning give you ?

SEO activities implemented correctly are a long-term process that finally brings a number of positive benefits such as :

• Increased visibility on Google.com for selected key phrases.
• Increased traffic to your site.
• Increasing the number of customers and people interested in what you have on the site
• Increase profits through your website or online store.
• A fully measurable form of advertising.
• The ability to compete with the largest.
• Big opportunities for company development.

Appropriate selection of key phrases

Keywords – anchors or anchors. Appropriate selection is one of the key elements to start effective SEO activities . Conducting an appropriate analysis is the basic activity before starting cooperation with a seo agency .

Appropriate tools used by SEO agencies can determine a specific number of people who search for a specific phrase, in addition, you can specify the competitiveness of this phrase and the strategy that will be appropriate for the industry and keywords.

Such market research by a positioning company shows the profitability of activities and effects that can be obtained thanks to positioning of websites, locally or globally.

 

Website optimization for SEO

After determining the key phrases and choosing the right strategy, it’s time for specific moves. Here, the most important activity is website optimization implemented under an individually selected positioning strategy.

At this very important point, we focus on relevant changes on the page that will meet all the requirements of Google search engine, and will meet the expectations of users asking specific questions on Google. The better we give answers to the searched phrases, the better our site will be perceived by Google.

Why is SEO a continuous service?

You ordered SEO a few weeks ago but you still don’t see any results? Because, some phrases have fallen by several positions and you are already starting to regret the cooperation? Chill. Positioning is not a racing game. Believe me – quick entry of the page to TOP 10 does not mean that it will stay there permanently.

Fast doesn’t mean good

It is better to wait for the results longer, but have the chance to maintain them for a long time. SEO activities take time – to create a strategy, implement it, and modify and improve it on an ongoing basis. If a positioning company promises you to achieve top positions in a week, you can be almost sure that it uses illegal methods (black hat seo), prohibited by Google. Their detection is only a matter of time, after which the site will be punished with an algorithmic filter or even an irreversible ban.

Inexperienced clients often expect the impossible from an SEO agency. They want to pay only when they notice the first effects. This approach is associated with a lack of respect for the work undertaken by an SEO specialist and a complete misunderstanding of the positioning process. It is in its initial phase that seo must bear the highest costs – financial and time-related. He buys the necessary tools, performs competition analysis, selects keywords, optimizes the source code of the site, prepares a link building plan, etc. It will take a long time before the implemented activities begin to translate into high positions in the search engine.

Can you skip competition analysis?

This is not advisable, because the conclusions obtained thanks to it will significantly simplify the task. This will even allow for the identification of best practices used by companies in a particular industry that are at the forefront of Google. You can check which keywords are positioning, find out the sources of external linking, internal linking scheme or applied User Experience (UX) solutions. However, it’s not just about duplicating best practices. You need to go a step further – in order to get a chance to outperform your competitors.

Keyword Selection

If keywords are not chosen correctly, positioning may be doomed to failure. Unaware customers are usually guided only by their popularity, requiring the SEO company to win top positions for phrases generating the highest web traffic. However, it turns out that it is not always profitable. Frequently, higher conversion rates can be achieved by using keywords long tail. These phrases are less competitive, which, however, in total often bring great business results. However, this must first be tested, trying different solutions and drawing conclusions on a regular basis.

Adjusting the content on the page

Before you can start getting links from external sources, you must first optimize the content on the page. The idea is for selected keywords to be included in the content – preferably several times in different variations. Only then will Google robots be able to correctly determine the theme of your site. Linking to a site that is low in content is of little use. Keywords should appear both on the main page and in the content of individual subpages. You have to remember about their natural distribution – the principle “the more, the better” does not work here.

Link building – getting links

Once the page has been properly optimized, it is time to implement the strategy for obtaining links pointing to the page. This is an extremely time-consuming process that requires a lot of sense and experience. It is not about getting links in mass quantities as soon as possible – without paying attention to the quality of linking sources. You should focus on the greatest possible diversification and link slowly but systematically. It is worth using sources such as:

– internet forums,
– company ad portals,
– blogs,
– sponsored articles and guest expert entries on thematic portals,
– social media,
– high-quality moderated catalogs,
– linking from back-up pages

Creating and running thematic facilities is the most time-consuming linking technique. You need to buy domains and hosting service, put pages on the server, install the template, create articles, optimize each of them for SEO and publish them regularly. It is also necessary to link the back pages themselves – both the main page and the subpages added periodically. Spent time and money are worth the effort – it’s harder to find a more effective and secure way to increase the value of the page for Google algorithms than just linking from the backend.

You can’t rest on your laurels

The work does not end with reaching the position in TOP 10. The competition is not asleep and when the SEO activities undertaken so far are stopped, there may be a change of places soon. It is therefore necessary to regularly monitor emerging sites and activities undertaken by existing competitors. You can’t stop positioning for another reason – Google’s algorithms are constantly being modified – what is effective today can be insufficient or even harmful to the site tomorrow.

Summary

Therefore, it is worth realizing that website positioning is a continuous process that requires regularity and continuous analysis of the effects of actions taken – also by competitors. You can’t expect instant results, because preparing a website for positioning is usually the most time consuming. A fatal solution is also the completion of SEO work when it reaches top positions in the search engine.

Do you hesitate to make a positioning decision?

Your competition is already doing it.

SEO and online marketing are the only right actions that are measurable and will allow you to grow your business on the internet. The number of people looking for products and services and information on the internet is still growing. Currently, a very large part of the traffic is shifted to mobile devices, which is why our actions are aimed at getting you to the first places in Google on your computer and on your phone.