The Definition of SEO in 100 Words or Less [FAQs]

Download Now: State of Marketing Report [2020 Version]

Search engine optimization (SEO) seems pretty straightforward. You pick a few keywords, and voilà! Your page is optimized for SEO, right?

Not yet.

Many people understand the basic principles of SEO, but a lot has changed in the last decade.

The SEO that we know and love today is not the same SEO that we knew and loved (or hated) 10 years ago. And that’s why SEO is something marketers should continue to define, and redefine. Here’s a brief definition in under 100 words:

What Is SEO?

SEO stands for search engine optimization — that much has stayed the same. It refers to techniques that help your website rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs). This makes your website more visible to people who are looking for solutions that your brand, product, or service can provide via search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and Bing.

What hasn’t stayed the same are the techniques we use to improve our rankings. This has everything to do with the search algorithms that these companies constantly change.

Here are some other frequently asked questions about this critical practice today.

How Does SEO Work?

SEO works by optimizing a website’s pages, conducting keyword research, and earning inbound links. You can generally see results of SEO efforts once the webpage has been crawled and indexed by a search engine.

Looking deeper: There are a ton of ways to improve the SEO of your site pages, though. Search engines look for elements including title tags, keywords, image tags, internal link structure, and inbound links (also known as backlinks). And that’s just to name a few.

HubSpot customers: you can check out the SEO panel in your HubSpot account to see how well you’re optimized for those things.

Search engines also look at site structure and design, visitor behavior, and other external, off-site factors to determine how highly ranked your site should be in their SERPs.

What Is an Organic Search?

Organic search refers to someone conducting a search through a search engine and clicking on a non-paid result. Organic search is a search marketing channel that can be used as part of inbound marketing to increase website traffic.

Looking deeper: In present-day SEO, you can’t simply include as many keywords as possible to reach the people who are searching for you. In fact, this will actually hurt your website’s SEO because search engines will recognize it as keyword stuffing — or the act of including keywords specifically to rank for that keyword, rather than to answer a person’s question.

Nowadays, you should use your keywords in your content in a way that doesn’t feel unnatural or forced. There isn’t a magic number — it all depends on the length of your keyword and article — but if you feel like you’re forcing it, it’s better to ignore it and continue writing naturally.