What Is SEO? The Beginners Guide With Examples in 2025

When executed well, search engine optimization (SEO) tactics put your brand name at the top of search results—a huge win if you’re looking for more organic traffic and brand awareness. But ramping up your SEO efforts can feel overwhelming if you’re unsure where to begin. Before crafting content or chasing backlinks, ensure your website’s technical setup is airtight.

Keyword relevance

what is seo

Social media platforms also leverage this meta information when serving content to their users. Similarly, for the garden center, Cadence ensured that every page adhered to SEO best practices by fixing meta tags and headers and adding internal links to key pages. These steps improved SEO performance and the overall user experience. In summary, SEO is all about optimizing content, building authority, and improving the overall user experience on your site. On the other BHS Links hand, social media marketing is centered around building relationships and engaging with your audience on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, X, and LinkedIn. It’s all about aligning your website and content with what the search engine considers valuable for search results.

what is seo

If you have a brick-and-mortar store, more web traffic can even increase in-person visits from potential customers. Therefore, successful SEO strategies often use a combination of these types of SEO based on the content. Also, try to keep images on the smaller side as far as file size goes.

  • On-page SEO is the process of optimizing webpages to improve their search visibility.
  • On-page SEO is everything you can do on the website – from the optimization of content through technical aspects.
  • In this SEO for Dummies guide, you’ll learn 13 tips that’ll ground you in the basics and give you access to all the SEO fundamentals.
  • Paid results don’t always appear on search engine results pages (SERPs).
  • By focusing on various search intent types (including the informational one) you’ll be able to target various stages of the buyer’s journey.

But you need to cover the key components of SEO to be successful. Search engine optimization focuses only on organic search results and does not include PPC optimization. Finally, track the backlinks your content picks up with tools like Semrush’s Backlink Analytics. So you can understand if your content optimization efforts are working, and which pages you might need to revisit. For that, you need more data beyond the list of keywords themselves.

Image optimization

what is seo

Many professionals don’t seem to get noticed on LinkedIn, despite their expertise and qualifications. If you’ve ever launched a business website, you probably faced the same issue at some point. If you’re looking to ground yourself in modern SEO practices, this list of SEO statistics is a great place to start.

Useful SEO Tools for Beginners

AI-driven changes are reshaping how users search for information. Generative AI chats like ChatGPT and Perplexity and social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram have diversified search behavior. Businesses must optimize content for multiple digital touchpoints to ensure visibility where users actively seek information. On the other hand, black hat SEO uses questionable techniques to trick search engines into quickly raising a site’s ranking. These techniques may include keyword stuffing, cloaking, and link farming.

what is seo

First, you can pop in a seed keyword and see what the tool comes up with. That’s why I recommend trying a few tools that specialize in bubbling up burning questions that people have. If you’re on a tight budget, we have a free backlink checker that’s halfway decent. Last up, I recommend promoting your content to people who link to your competitors. Plus, multimedia makes your content much more interesting and compelling. Multimedia may not strictly fall under the category of “SEO writing”.