What is SEO? A simple explanation and answers to 7 frequently asked questions.

16/11/2021

Learn what SEO is, where the name comes from and what the most important factors are that influence the position of a website in search results. A simple explanation and an effective tool for shop and website positioning.

Find out the meaning of the SEO acronym and answers to 7 frequently asked questions.

  1. What does SEO mean?
  2. What is the difference between SEO and SEM?
  3. Does SEO only concern Google?
  4. What are the popular search engines, top 10?
  5. What is SEO Factors?
  6. What are the most important elements of positioning?
  7. What is the best SEO tool?

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1. What does SEO mean?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which means "website optimization for search engines". It is a marketing and programming activity aimed at optimizing the content, structure, composition and content of a website (content). Properly understood SEO requires increasing the number of internal and external links when designing a website, service, etc. in order to achieve success in terms of visibility and valuation of the website by search engines. SEO is also any activity that uses knowledge of the quality and value of the main page and subpages of the website, the aim of which is to arouse the interest of the potential recipient (e.g. a customer in e-commerce) in order to achieve a high degree of conversion.

E-commerce dictionary: SEO Definition

The SEO process involves obtaining traffic from organic search, i.e. free entries to our website from search engines.

2. What is the difference between SEO and SEM?

SEO is a process of obtaining free organic entries, unlike SEM, which concerns entries from paid ads.

These processes are related to each other, but in terms of definition, they are separate issues.

SEM allows for faster results, but a higher position in search results comes with a higher price for advertising. For good SEO results, we have to wait longer, but we don't have to pay for the position we gain.

3. Does SEO only apply to Google?

The term SEO probably came into use in 1997 thanks to analyst Danny Sullivan, that is, before the Google company was founded (1998). Initially, SEO was used as a process of optimizing pages for search engines popular in the 90s, such as Altavista and Infoseek. Nowadays, SEO mainly applies to Google, but it also refers to the Bing, Yahoo or other page indexing systems.

4. What are the popular search engines, top 10?

Analyzing various top 10 lists of the most popular search engines in 2021, the following sites most often appear:

  1. Google
  2. Microsoft Bing
  3. Yahoo
  4. Baidu
  5. Yandex
  6. DuckDuckGo
  7. Ask.com
  8. Ecosia
  9. Aol.com
  10. Internet Archive

The undisputed leader is the Google search engine, which has several times more entries than the sum of all the others. In addition, the results of Google should be added to the search in YouTube.

It is also worth taking into account that many websites on which you can share your content or products have a high position in search engines. This applies not only to global services, but also to those operating on the local market or industry portals.

Example sites whose results appear high in search results.

It is worth preparing your own list of services for which we will track the position of our pages and places where we can add our offer.

5. What is SEO Factors?

The English term SEO Factors refers to the factors taken into account by the search engine algorithm. Based on this data, the position of a given page in the search results is determined.

The number of factors is very long and constantly changing. Some of them are more important, others have no key influence on the position. The importance of factors also changes over time. For example, in the coming years, the importance of keywords in external links will decrease, and the importance of user behavior after entering the page will increase.

List of example SEO factors (random order):

  • Correct display of the page
  • Content consistency with the query
  • Number of words on the page
  • Number of different words
  • Frequency of repetitions
  • Number of links
  • Titles
  • Subtitles
  • Paragraphs
  • Pictures
  • Mobile version
  • Page speed
  • Error handling
  • External links
  • Texts in links
  • Own domain
  • Number of domains linking to the page
  • Location path
  • Organized data
  • Language complexity
  • Rejection rate
  • CTR
  • And many others

Learn more about SEO factors from the article: SOTESHOP Online Store SEO. 30 SEO elements.

6. What are the most important elements of SEO?

The positioning of the store depends on many elements and is a complex process, but it is worth knowing the most important elements of positioning in order to be able to focus on SEO optimization according to the appropriate priorities.

10 most important SEO elements:

  1. Own domain
  2. Domain ranking
  3. Time of domain ownership
  4. Query compatibility with page content
  5. SSL certificate
  6. Time on page
  7. Text length on page
  8. Internal and external links
  9. Keywords and related expressions
  10. Many pages on a similar topic in a given domain

For different queries and results, this list may change. The best way to determine whether certain factors are key for a particular query is to analyze the first 10 search results and compare the results with your page.

What is the best SEO tool?

People professionally involved in positioning use many different tools that have specialized functions for different tasks.

However, if we run our own website or want to take care of the positioning of an online store, one or a few simple tools and basic knowledge of positioning will be enough for us. This will not only help us better manage the content on the page, but also help us verify the results in the event that we outsource the page positioning to an external company.

Ubersuggest & Neil Patel

In conversations of people involved in SEO and marketing, the SEO guru Neil Patel often appears. According to Forbes, one of the top 10 best marketing specialists in the world. His tools, which he makes available to customers, can provide data that does not even appear in Google tools, such as less popular keywords, which are so important for niche industries or specialized content. What's more, many features are available for free.

In many cases, this one magical tool will replace a whole range of complex programs and give better results. It's worth checking out.

Do a free SEO audit of your website: https://neilpatel.com/ubersuggest

Summary

In general, SEO is about enabling the search engine to understand what we have on the page and convincing it that our results are the most relevant.

Algorithms are constantly changing, but regardless of the whole range of technical aspects, changes are aimed at providing customers with the most relevant results and pages on which customers spend more time, share them and are happy to return.


Set up your SOTESHOP online store for free for 14 days.
Check out the new version of SOTESHOP 8.

Set up your store

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