This is Article 1 in an SEO series written in plain language to help guide your business to the first page on any search engine. As a business owner, you've undoubtedly heard the term SEO. You may also know those are the first letters of the phrase they represent -- Search Engine Optimization. Super simple, right? But, what is it and how do you do it while also focusing on your core business? These are some of the questions we'll answer in this series of posts concentrating exclusively on demystifying SEO.
Unlike today when anyone can create a website, back in the day, website creators were computer programmers cranking out hand-typed code. We were years away from drag-and-drop website software. We had no way to find a website unless we either knew the exact web address, which could be numeric, or we needed the web address of directory sites.
Fun fact: my first website in 1995 was on a directory site called CitySearch and they're still in business today!
Businesses printed cards with long domain names. Mine would have been something like www.citysearch.com/tx/san%20marcos/florists/flower%20stop/. Crazy, right? I had to hope they would correctly type the whole thing into the address bar. We became familiar with typing those uncommon characters like colons in front of two forward slashes. Everything started with www. and ended with .com. And, some of us somehow taught ourselves basic HTML and created websites. Enter online payment solutions, e-commerce, and the Dot Com boom of the nineties and early two-thousands. The internet was here to stay and businesses needed a way for you to find their business online.
Over time, the need to quickly sort through all the disparate content on the internet became essential. Search engines you would have used back then were Netscape Navigator, AOL, and Internet Explorer. If you're interested, you can get a taste of the times through the magic of Hollywood! Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan immortalized the AOL notification phrase in You've Got Mail, released in 1998.
The overwhelming winner in the search engine race is Google. The darling of both the academic and investor class in 1998, from its humble origins -- you guessed it -- in a garage, Google still dominates the search engine landscape. Today, you can easily find whatever information you're looking for due to the unique formula Google uses to prioritize higher-quality content based on the keywords you enter.
The formula for ranking websites is proprietary to each search engine and is known as that other term we tend to throw around like we completely understand it - the algorithm. As you will see, at its core, SEO is how search engines organize and present information based on relevancy, quality, originality, and popularity.At this point, you may be wondering how search engines find websites in the first place. Proprietary search engine bots crawl the site maps on your website. You can view your website visitor logs to see which bots are crawling your pages. They employ these bots to explore the content of your website and add it to their directory in a process called indexing. Once crawled and indexed, the content of your pages is compared to similar sites. All the components work together to determine rank based on available signals.
Search engines are constantly updating their algorithm. The algorithm is proprietary, therefore it is inherently secret. Many algorithm updates occur when unscrupulous people use black hat techniques which is an attempt to game the system. The best long-term plan to increase your website ranking with SEO is to focus on quality, original content.
Search engines look at three core components to determine whether your site is worthy of priority placement on the first page of results. All three of these components work together to show search engines what your website is about, and the frequency and quality of new content. When you need to create content regularly you inevitably need to create it quickly. Luckily, there are tools to help you automate tasks, suggest better phrasing, correct your spelling and grammar, and generate an outline for you.
I excluded generative AI tools because using ChatGPT or Gemini to create your website content could cause you to lose SEO rank. Hypothetically, two similar websites with similar content should have similar rankings. This is where the search engine algorithm prioritizes the more original, relevant, and popular site.
A good way to remember what makes search engines rank certain websites higher than others, especially if your website always seems to be one of those others, is to publish only grammatically correct original content.
My writing usually rates between 70-95% chance of being human-created. This article received an Originality rating of 74% and I typed every word. That doesn't mean that 26% of the text was created with AI. It means that the Originality engine has a 74% certainty the content of this article was human-created.
Even seasoned writers can benefit from another of my favorite writing aids: Grammarly. It corrects grammar and spelling and suggests better phrasing when your sentences are clunky. Good writers get better. Better writers get faster.
It's available as a browser extension and mobile app. You'll be surprised at how quickly you come to rely on Grammarly for more professional presentations.
I've been using both of these AI writing tools for years. What I don't do (and I suggest you don't either) is use AI to create your website content. The core function of the Google algorithm has always been to prioritize well-written, well-presented, original content. I don't see that changing anytime soon.
Establishing yourself as an expert becomes harder when the content you create isn't your own. Write it yourself or pay for well-written text in your brand voice. You will thank me later when your site outranks all your AI-written competitor websites.
SEO is an integral marketing technique consisting of the quality, originality, and frequency of the content on your website, how it compares to similar businesses, and the interactivity of customers and visitors in search and social media. Consistently creating high-quality, original, interesting content is key to ranking higher.
After all, the ultimate goal of SEO is the first spot on the first page of your favorite search engine.