Hi, and welcome to Digittaly.com. What does SEO mean? You may have seen those letters around, you may have heard people talk about SEO, but what does SEO mean? The letters themselves stand for "search engine optimization" So SEO, search engine optimization. Now, what does search engine optimization mean? Search engine optimization, simply put, is doing whatever is necessary to rank well for your targeted keywords or your targeted search terms. When I say doing whatever is necessary, I'm not referring to doing things that are unethical or anything like that; I'm saying whatever is involved with getting your site to rank well for these targeted keywords. There are several things that are involved with that, so we'll take a look at a few of those things and just give you kind of an overview of what's involved with SEO. This isn't really an in-depth look at all these things, because that would be a very long video, but we'll give you an idea of what all is involved. The first thing is making sure your site is readable.
The search engines can't read everything that's online. For example, they can't read pictures right now. They're working on it, and they may get there, but right now they can't read those images. They also can't read Flash, so if your site is entirely made out of Flash, the search engines can't read anything on your site more likely. So there are different things the search engines can read and somethings that they can't, and so making sure that there is content on your site that the search engines can read is really important. There are also certain settings that can prevent the search engines from indexing your site or following links from your site and things like that. Even having bad code, in general, can hurt you in the search engines. Makings that you has a good, readable site with good structure which includes good navigation-- the way that people move from one page to the next on your site -- you want to make sure those search engines can crawl around your site easily and find all the pages on your site. So that's all the basic foundation of SEO. Then from then, you can do some on-page optimization. That's anything that you would do to your site to let the search engines know what your site is about. That's dealing within certain tags, certain meta tags, manipulating the content of your site to make sure that you're using keywords in your content. You want to do that in a natural way, but you want to make sure that you are using those keywords, because that will tell the search engines, what is your site about? What should they be ranking you well for? The next thing is how authoritative your site is. That's determined really by the links that you have coming to your site. When I talk about links, I'm not talking about the links that are on your site; I'm talking about links that are on other people's sites that are linking back to your site.
The way the search engines look at links is they're kind of like votes or recommendations. So the more votes you're getting, the more links you're getting -- and the more links you're getting from reputable sites -- the more important they will think your site is, and the more authoritative and trustworthy they think your site is. As you get those links, they're going to be willing to rank you for more and more keywords, and they're willing to move you up above other sites that maybe they don't trust as much, or they don't think are quite as authoritative. So getting links, usually by putting out really good content, is just a great way to be able to build your site up in the search engines. More recently, social sharing has become an important part of SEO. Social has been around for a long time, but for most of that time it didn't really affect search rankings very much. But now it's starting to. Facebook, especially within Bing, is affecting search rankings. With Google, to some extent Facebook affects things, but Twitter and Google+ are very important in their search rankings. These are all factors that go into that search engine optimization and what's going to determine the rankings that your site is able to get for those search terms. Just to review this: What Does SEO Mean? It's search engine optimization, which is doing whatever it necessary to rank well for your targeted keywords. And that involves making sure your site is readable and has a good structure. It also involves on-page optimizationas well as link building and getting social shares.