SEO, or search engine optimization, is something that most people have probably heard of, but know little about. (It has also been called SEM, or search engine marketing.) Contrary to popular belief, there is no magic SEO button that miraculously puts you at the top of Google search results. Most marketers and software use that lack of understanding to their advantage in attempts to sell you, the consumer, what you don’t need. Fortunately, we’re not those marketers.

So, what is SEO then?

It is what impacts the online visibility of your business or organization amongst your competitors on search engines. In other words, it is how your business ranks when people type something into a search engine.

For example, if I was looking for a hot new restaurant featuring Mexican food, I would type in something like, “best Mexican restaurants in [area of choice]” into the Google search bar.

Google then has to fish through 60 trillion+ pages (yes, you read right), and find the best result to my inquiry. To do this, Google takes several things into consideration:

• Pages are sorted by their content and other factors, which is all stored in a special Index.
• Google’s algorithms look for spellings, synonyms, autocompletions, search methods and other means of searching to better understand what the searcher means.
• Based on what the Algorithm finds, Google looks for relevant documents to pull from the Index, (that’s the stored content, remember?)
• Those documents are ranked using over 200 factors. To name a few, site & page quality, SafeSearch (that’s your security certificate), how new the site is and user reviews.
• Then, POOF! Your results appear in ⅛ of a second.

Not so bad, right? Let Google handle all the Algorithms. All you need to do, is play by their rules.  So what are the rules? Click the Marketing Puzzle banner below to find out!