What Is SEO?

At DMOZ we reviewed tens of thousands of websites over the years, and some of the sites we approved have since grown into major portals. Those years as editors taught us one thing: a well-conceived web project is bound to win. Size up the project correctly from day one and give it an original voice.

A link is the result of good work, not the cause of it. Collecting links to climb the rankings looks like it works in the short term, but Google has spent years weeding out exactly that. We work in the opposite direction: first we make the project worth talking about, then we put it in front of the right readers. Our own publishing network draws 10,000,000 unique visitors a month; together with our partners' publications, we reach 300,000,000 unique readers a month. What gets published, and whether it carries a link, is the publisher's own decision.

The Difference Between SEO and SEM

SEM stands for Search Engine Marketing: the advertising channel where you pay for every visitor or customer who arrives through a search engine. The SEM in Türk SEM's name comes from exactly that. SEO, on the other hand, is the umbrella term for everything you do to appear in the organic rankings. SEM costs money per visit; SEO does not.

1. SEO means ranking in the organic results, and no payment is involved.
2. SEM means ranking in the ad slots, and you pay for every click.

About SEO Consultant Tahir Dinç

Dinç started working on the web in 1999. In 2001 he did his first SEO work to make his own sites easier to find, and in 2004 he became an editor at DMOZ, the Open Directory Project, widely known at the time as Google Directory.

The roughly 50 portals in our own network draw around 7 million visitors a month, and Dinç owns 4 separate companies. In his words: “Everything I do rests on one idea: creating value for my country and for humanity.”

Dinç describes the work like this: with the New SEO Service we take your website to a place that is original and ahead of its time. You talk directly with the web design and development team. On-page SEO is configured correctly. The content is written cleanly, by the rules of the language. More important than all of that, we build the most innovative site in your sector. We love this work, and we take on only top-level projects for established companies.

A Quick Start Toward SEO Expertise

You can also listen to this section as a podcast, on Spotify or Amazon Music.

We set this section aside for anyone who wants to get somewhere in SEO. The quick start takes about 10 minutes to read. It explains how SEO works at its core and where to begin, and it is worth reading to the end.

First things first: go to Google Search Central and add your site to Search Console. The most important facts about your site live there, and it shows you where to focus.

SEO is a marketing discipline for making your site visible in search results. You do two jobs at the same time: you write the page that answers the searcher's question better than any other, and then you make sure the search engine can understand it. Every method and every tool serves those two jobs. Rankings are the outcome, not the goal.

SEO work is part sociology, part engineering. Luck has no place in it: on the other side sits an algorithm that knows good work when it sees it. That is what makes SEO a science.

What SEO Does for Your Business

A well-built SEO strategy gives your business five things:

• Visibility and traffic: the higher your pages climb, the more visitors you get.
• A better site: meeting Google's standards raises the quality of the site and your reputation with it.
• Consumer trust: people treat a site that ranks high as successful and trustworthy.
• Authority: original content makes you the source people in your field turn to.
• Staying power: SEO works slowly, but it lasts, and its effect compounds over time.

Understanding Search Engines

Worldwide, 88% of desktop searches and 96% of mobile searches happen on Google. Bing and Yahoo together take 1.5% on mobile and 8% on desktop. The leader is obvious, so this section is about Google. When Google finds new content, it follows three steps: crawling, indexing and ranking.

Crawling

Google's crawler, the "spider," visits your page and looks at what is on it; that is crawling. The spider likes fresh content, which is why you should update the site and the blog regularly. Links open the path for the crawler, and you should submit your sitemap through Google Search Console.

Indexing

After crawling your site with its Chromium-based browser, Google adds it to the index. It stores what it learned about your content, images, videos and keywords, and it draws on that record when it decides rankings.

Ranking

Once the site has been crawled and indexed, Google turns to that stored information every time someone searches. It weighs more than 100 factors, among them location, language, device, load time, trustworthiness, content and keywords; E-E-A-T is one of the most important. Above all of them stands one rule: the search engine ranks by what the searcher is trying to do.

Using Google Trends for SEO

When you publish matters as much as what you publish. Google Trends helps you build a content calendar and find new ideas. The Google Search Central team has a step-by-step walkthrough of how to use it, and we recommend watching it.

The 3 Pillars of an SEO Strategy

A strong SEO strategy rests on three pillars: keywords, content and website optimization. Let's look at each in turn.

Keywords

A keyword is any search query that could relate to your business and your customers. At the start of SEO, the first job is to list every word and phrase that might bring you a customer. The Keyword Planner inside Google Ads is right there for the job.

Once you have worked out the keywords and the themes behind them, you also know which words people will use to find your content.

Understanding the Customer and the Visitor

The visitor on your site is your customer: get to know them first, then understand them. Think about what they will want, and you will build the content right. The second step is to describe your likely customer, both by demographics and by how they think. A survey will tell you what they need, what interests them and what bothers them.

Keyword Research

With tools such as SEMRush and Google's Keyword Planner you analyze different terms and find the keyword groups that will catch your likely customer. Look at three things as you analyze:

• Search volume: how often that phrase is searched.
• Difficulty: how fierce the competition is for the terms you chose.
• Relevance: how closely the term relates to your product or service.

Our Keyword Priority Formula

Content

Once you have decided which words will bring people to your site, the next job is to write that content, and to write it well. Content has to come out of real research.

An SEO expert brings people to a site through content marketing. Look at your content the same way: as a marketing channel that brings you new leads.

How to Create Good Content

If your content does not draw interest, deliver value and hold attention, the SEO work behind it is wasted. Stay with content that is relevant to your audience, valuable, and realistic for you to keep producing. The types that work:

• Articles
• Downloadable PDFs
• Podcasts
• E-books
• Infographics
• Videos, newsletters and webinars

Good content shares six traits:

• Easy to read
• Original
• Relevant
• Optimized for SEO
• Includes non-text elements
• Valuable

Where Content and SEO Meet

Content and the way you optimize it cannot be separated. The content on your site should do more than promote your brand; it should give the reader something every single time. Content that was never researched, structured or optimized will not get you there on its own. The target is content that is interesting enough to share and clear enough for Google to understand without effort.

The SEO Diagram

We mapped the pattern that connects the different areas of SEO work. All of the diagrams we drew are collected in one file, the SEO and GEO Diagram Book (PDF, 17 pages). Download it and take a look.

What Have We Learned?

Everything begins with understanding the customer. Step one in a project is to define your customer; step two is to choose your keywords, and we shared our own formula for that. Step three is knowing what to pay attention to in the content on your site. On-page SEO, technical SEO and the importance of promoting your site beyond it are covered in the other sections of this page.

If you have read this far, congratulations. If SEO genuinely interests you, set up a site of your own and grow it; there is no better way to learn than by doing. As both an SEO expert and a teacher, I have tried to answer "What is SEO?" as well as I can. I hope I succeeded.