SEO Explained In Laymans Terms

For those that are starting up websites and becoming first time bloggers, the idea of SEO or ‘Search Engine Optimisation’ can seem quite daunting idea to get around for the first time. For that matter, I remember when I created my first website and it took me months to figure out what SEO actually was, even with the backing of reading tens of articles about SEO on the internet. For this reason, I thought it would be a good idea to explain SEO at its most basic form to benefit those that are being introduced to it for the first time. Here is SEO explained in layman’s terms.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation and, in one sentence, it is the process of optimising and improving how search engines look at your website so that you can gain more traffic from such traffic sources.

On the internet, the vast majority of websites out there will have many different traffic sources ranging from social media, PPC, email marketing and so on. However, by far the most popular traffic source online is from search engines – this is also known as organic traffic (since the way you gain traffic from search engines is natural and not forced unlike with other forms of traffic sources).

Why is SEO so popular then? There are many reasons for wanting to increase your organic traffic highlighted below:

• It is free – Above everything, it is completely free to do unlike PPC and other paid forms of traffic.
• Long term solution – With SEO, once you increase your organic traffic, it will stay increased for long long time. For my websites, I have found effective SEO can last years.
• High quality traffic – Every blogger loves organic traffic because it always produces highly contextual traffic. This is because for people to visit your website from a search engine, they must have typed in a search phrase that was related to an article on your website.

Search engine optimisation is an effective way to maintain consistently high levels of traffic for the long term and is extremely healthy for websites. If you can gain lots of traffic from search engines, it illustrates:

• That you have high quality content.
• Unique content.
• Your website is serving a purpose for people.
• Search engines think your website is worthwhile enough to be displayed on their search engine results.

Basically, treat high amounts of organic traffic as a compliment to you as it is the search engines telling you that you have good enough content to rank it high on their search results so web users can click onto it.

This is why SEO is so important. A lot of people would rather invest their time and money into improving the SEO of a website rather than PPC because, after using the budget, SEO will still be making an impact whereas PPC will not be.