What Is SEO? Search Engine Optimization

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the process of helping search engines interpret your website’s content and match it with user queries to provide valuable, relevant results.

The main aim of SEO is to secure a spot on the first page of search engine results (SERPs) for important keywords that resonate with your target audience, ultimately driving qualified traffic to your site.

As a recognized digital marketing practice, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be applied to any type of website. Whether your site offers products, provides services, or shares knowledge on a specific subject, SEO enhances its online presence and attracts visitors.

Greater visibility in search results means your pages are more likely to be discovered and accessed. This guide provides a deeper insight into what SEO entails in the evolving digital landscape of 2025.

With technology advancing rapidly, websites and their structures continue to evolve, as do the devices we use to browse. Searches can now be voice-activated, and clicks often come as taps on mobile screens. Search results are increasingly summarized by artificial intelligence (AI).

This guide will delve into various aspects of SEO and offer resources to help you further your understanding.

How Is Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Different from SEM and PPC?

SEO often appears alongside terms like SEM and PPC, commonly discussed in the world of search marketing. It’s helpful to understand how these terms differ and complement each other.

SEO vs. SEM

SEM stands for Search Engine Marketing, a digital marketing strategy that includes both SEO and PPC. SEM drives traffic through organic and paid search methods.

The distinction is that SEO focuses on organic results, while SEM encompasses both organic (SEO) and paid (PPC) efforts.

Think of SEM as a coin: SEO is one side, and PPC is the other.

SEO vs. PPC

PPC, or Pay-Per-Click, is a form of advertising where you pay for each click on your ad. Advertisers bid on keywords they want their ads to appear for, which then show up prominently in search results.

With PPC, advertisers pay directly for traffic, while SEO requires time and investment in optimizing pages. While some debate whether SEO or PPC offers a better ROI, both are essential and often work best when used together.

Why Is Search Engine Optimization Important?

SEO is a cornerstone of digital marketing. According to a BrightEdge study, organic search accounted for 53% of all website traffic in 2019. Google processes over 8.5 billion searches daily and holds 91% of the global search engine market share.

This dominance makes SEO vital for businesses aiming to capture audience attention. The global SEO industry is expected to grow to $122.11 billion by 2028, reflecting its importance.

SEO supports businesses of all sizes by driving traffic, as search has become the starting point for most online activities. Whether it’s research, purchasing, or finding information, people often begin with a search engine query.

Search behavior is fragmented, with users turning to web search engines, social platforms, or retailer sites. For example:

• 56% of U.S. online shoppers start on Amazon.
• 46% begin on search engines.
• 37% start on Walmart.
• Platforms like TikTok and YouTube are also gaining ground, especially among younger demographics like Gen Z.

Being search-engine friendly is critical, as high visibility and rankings translate into business success.

The Competitive Landscape of SERPs

Search engine results pages (SERPs) are increasingly competitive, featuring elements like AI summaries, knowledge panels, featured snippets, maps, and more.

Unlike paid campaigns, which stop driving traffic once they end, SEO delivers lasting results. It serves as the foundation for holistic marketing, helping businesses align campaigns, content, and social media with user needs.

Organic search fosters trust and credibility, key factors for better rankings. By investing in SEO, you position your business for long-term growth and success.

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Types of SEO and Specializations

Think of SEO as a sports team. To succeed, you need a robust defense, a strong offense, and loyal fans (your audience).

• Technical SEO acts as the defense, ensuring your site is in optimal shape for search engines to crawl and index.
• On-site SEO represents the offense, focusing on creating and optimizing content for both users and search engines.
• Off-site SEO focuses on building brand recognition and authority, attracting and retaining an engaged audience.

You have complete control over your content and technical optimizations, but off-site efforts depend on external factors (like backlinks and platform stability). Despite this, off-site SEO remains a key player in the strategy for success.

Technical Optimization (Technical SEO)

Technical SEO is foundational to ensuring a website is discoverable and indexable by search engines. As Google’s Gary Illyes famously advised in a Reddit AMA, “MAKE THAT DAMN SITE CRAWLABLE.”

The goal is to allow search engines to easily access all of your site’s content, including text, images, and videos.

Key technical elements include:

• Architecture: A clear URL structure, logical navigation, and effective internal linking.
• User Experience (UX): Fast-loading pages, mobile-friendliness, and overall usability are crucial. Core Web Vitals, HTTPS, and avoiding intrusive interstitials all contribute to a positive user experience.
• Structured Data (Schema): Adding schema markup helps search engines understand your content better and improves how it’s displayed in search results.
• Hosting and Security: Factors like web hosting, site security, and your CMS also impact SEO performance.

Content Optimization (On-Page SEO)

Content needs to serve two audiences: people and search engines. This requires optimizing the visible content and the underlying code.

To optimize for people:

• Cover topics you’re knowledgeable about.
• Use keywords that match user searches.
• Create original, high-quality, and well-written content.
• Ensure the content is accurate and up to date.
• Use multimedia like images and videos.
• Offer better content than your competitors in the search results.
• Make your content easy to read with subheadings, short paragraphs, lists, and proper formatting.

For search engines, focus on:

• Title tags and meta descriptions.
• Header tags (H1-H6).
• Alt text for images.
• Open graph metadata.

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is a new area focusing on optimizing content for AI-driven search engines like Google’s AI Overviews, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and others.

Brand and Authority Building (Off-Site Optimization)

Off-site SEO involves activities that build your brand’s credibility and visibility. While you can’t directly control these factors (e.g., backlinks from other sites), they’re vital for SEO success.

Link Building is a key component, where the focus is on acquiring high-quality backlinks from trusted, relevant sources. Quality always beats quantity in link-building.

Strategies to enhance off-site SEO include:

• Brand Marketing: Boost recognition and reputation.
• Public Relations: Earn editorial links through PR efforts.
• Content Marketing: Create valuable resources like videos, research papers, podcasts, and guest posts.
• Social Media Optimization: Claim and optimize your brand profiles on relevant platforms.
• Listing Management: Ensure accurate information on directories, review sites, and wikis.
• Reviews and Ratings: Manage and respond to customer reviews.

Off-site SEO may not directly affect technical ranking factors, but it plays a significant role in ensuring your brand is visible wherever users search. This has led some to redefine SEO as “search experience optimization” or “search everywhere optimization.”

SEO Specialties

Search engine optimization encompasses a variety of specialized areas. Each of these subgenres differs from traditional SEO, requiring distinct tactics and presenting unique challenges. Below are five prominent SEO specialties:

1. E-commerce SEO: This involves optimizing various aspects such as category pages, product pages, faceted navigation, internal linking structures, product images, product reviews, schema, and more.
2. Enterprise SEO: SEO at an extensive scale, often involving websites or brands with over a million pages or organizations generating millions or billions in revenue annually. Challenges here include delays in implementing SEO changes by development teams and managing input from multiple stakeholders.
3. International SEO: Focused on global SEO for multiregional or multilingual websites. This specialty includes optimizing for international search engines like Baidu or Naver.
4. Local SEO: Aims to optimize websites for visibility in local organic search results by managing and acquiring reviews, business listings, and other local elements.
5. News SEO: Prioritizes speed to ensure inclusion in Google’s index as quickly as possible. Key areas include appearing in Google Discover, Google’s Top Stories, and Google News while adhering to best practices for paywalls, section pages, and news-specific structured data.

How SEO Works

If you found this content through a Google search, you likely entered a query such as “What is SEO?” This guide, published on an authoritative website with extensive experience in SEO, has built a strong reputation over the years. Factors such as the accumulation of high-quality links have contributed to its visibility and ranking in top search positions.

Broadly, SEO works through a combination of the following elements:

• People: The team responsible for executing and ensuring the completion of strategic, tactical, and operational SEO tasks.
• Processes: Actions taken to enhance efficiency in SEO workflows.
• Technology: Tools and platforms utilized for optimization efforts.
• Activities: The tangible outputs resulting from SEO initiatives.

Critical Elements of SEO

1. Understanding Search Engines: To achieve visibility, it is essential to understand the technical processes of search engines. This includes:
   • Crawling: Discovering web pages through links and sitemaps.
   • Rendering: Generating how a page appears using HTML, JavaScript, and CSS.
   • Indexing: Analyzing page content and metadata and adding it to a database.
   • Ranking: Determining relevance and quality through complex algorithms.
2. Each platform, such as Google, YouTube, Amazon, or social networks like Facebook and Twitter, has its unique ranking factors.
3. Researching: Key areas of research include:
   • Audience Research: Identifying target demographics, their pain points, and relevant questions.
   • Keyword Research: Understanding demand, competition, and relevance of search terms.
   • Competitor Research: Analyzing competitors’ strengths, weaknesses, and content strategies.
   • Brand/Business Research: Aligning SEO efforts with business goals.
   • Website Research: Conducting audits (e.g., technical SEO, content, link profile, E-E-A-T).
   • SERP Analysis: Understanding search intent to create rank-worthy content.
4. Planning: Developing an SEO strategy with long-term goals and an action plan, including:
   • Goal setting (e.g., OKRs, SMART objectives).
   • Defining KPIs and metrics.
   • Coordinating with stakeholders.
   • Budget allocation.
   • Measuring and reporting.
5. Creating and Implementing: Turning research into actionable SEO initiatives by:
   • Creating new content.
   • Enhancing existing pages.
   • Removing outdated or low-quality content.
6. Monitoring and Maintaining: Regularly tracking website performance to identify issues like traffic drops, broken links, or pages falling out of the index.
7. Analyzing and Reporting: Measuring SEO performance using tools like Google Analytics and Search Console, supplemented by SEO-specific platforms. Reporting should narrate progress and compare results over meaningful time intervals.

By integrating these components, SEO becomes a robust process that enhances visibility, engagement, and overall online success.

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SEO Is an Ongoing Process

SEO is never static—it’s a continuous effort. Search engines, user behavior, and competition are always evolving. Over time, websites can experience changes, encounter issues, or become outdated. Content can lose its relevance. To stay effective, your SEO strategies must improve and adapt, becoming more efficient over time.

How SEO Evolves

SEO evolves continually, largely because it operates at the core of how people engage with information on the internet. To truly grasp the changes in SEO, it’s essential to consider search engines and the web within the broader context of human society.

Historically, libraries have existed for millennia, preserving cultural wisdom. In comparison, the internet is still in its infancy. Google, for instance, has only been around since 1998.

As users interact with search engines through devices like smartphones, computers, and smart assistants, advancements in technology shape their behavior. These shifts influence how search engines develop new features, necessitating corresponding updates in SEO practices.

Key areas of SEO evolution include:

1. Adapting to Technology:
   • AI in Search: Recent advancements have integrated AI into search, with tools like Google’s AI overviews and Bing’s generative results reshaping the user experience.
   • Mobile-First Indexing: Mobile optimization has become crucial, with mobile-first indexing becoming the standard for Google in 2023 as mobile devices dominate search activity.
   • Speed and User Experience: Faster technology has raised user expectations for quick-loading, seamless web experiences. These standards now directly impact SEO.
2. Adapting to Society:
   • Economic Shifts: Global factors such as economic downturns, conflicts, and inflation affect consumer behavior and demand strategic marketing adjustments, including SEO.
   • COVID-19 Pandemic: The pandemic triggered rapid changes in consumer habits, forcing businesses to rethink both online and offline marketing strategies.

As technology and society evolve, SEO adapts to meet these changes, becoming an essential tool for businesses to navigate shifting landscapes.

SEO as a Career and Service

The SEO industry continues to experience robust growth. According to a report, the SEO market is projected to grow from $75.13 billion in 2023 to $88.91 billion in 2024, ultimately reaching $170 billion by 2028.

SEO has become both a marketing discipline and a sought-after career. Professionals in the field can specialize in various areas and develop a range of skills to address the diverse demands of SEO. However, unlike traditional careers, SEO lacks standardized higher education courses or certifications, making the path to entry less defined.

To start a career in SEO, self-learning is key. Regularly consuming industry news, research, and best practices—whether through reading, watching, or listening—is vital. Attending industry events can also provide valuable insights.

Learning Resources for SEO

The expectations and habits of search engine users are always changing. Algorithms evolve to keep up with these shifts, and new technologies, like the rise of AI and tools like ChatGPT, continue to reshape the industry.

To stay updated and grow as an SEO professional, consider these steps:

• Follow trusted SEO blogs, podcasts, and research.
• Attend industry events and conferences.
• Stay informed about algorithm updates and technological innovations.

By embracing these practices, you can effectively navigate the dynamic field of SEO and continue to thrive as both the industry and society evolve.

SEO Resources

Since 2018, Tech Sakti has been committed to providing comprehensive coverage of SEO. Along with news articles crafted by our editorial team, we also feature contributed pieces from a wide array of subject matter experts. These articles are packed with valuable SEO tips, strategies, trends, and in-depth analysis.

While we may be a little biased, we highly recommend signing up for Search Engine Land’s free email newsletter. Delivered every weekday, it provides a curated roundup of the most recent SEO news and insights to keep you informed.

Tech Sakti offers an extensive range of categories on various SEO topics and platforms, including:

• All SEO
• Bing SEO
• Content SEO
• E-commerce SEO
• Enterprise SEO
• Google: E-E-A-T
• Google Algorithm Updates
• Google Search Console
• Google Search Features
• Link Building
• Local SEO
• News SEO
• Technical SEO

Google’s SEO Resources

• Google Search Essentials: This guide outlines technical requirements, spam policies, and best practices directly from Google.
• SEO Starter Guide: A comprehensive overview of SEO basics aligned with Google’s best practices.
• Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines: A detailed document explaining how Google trains human raters to assess the quality of search results. It covers aspects such as experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T) of content and websites.