Search Engine Optimizatio n, SEO for short, is the strategy that allows you to continuously optimize a website in order to position itself on the organic, and unpaid, search engine (SERP) results pages. The term SERP, or Search Engine Results Pages, indicates the page that contains the ordered list of web pages that a user gets when he searches for a word on Google, for example.
In a very competitive world, like the one we find ourselves in today, to be able to be found by potential customers and thus maximize your sales and profit, it is essential to invest in this tactic. In fact, when you are asked a question to the search engine, only the first results that appear are taken into consideration, and you never go to look at the second page. Hence, most of the traffic is received from the links to the websites that are in the top positions. In the digital marketing industry it is said that if you do not appear on the first page it is almost like not existing for users, who do not want to spend too much effort to answer their questions and needs.
Optimizing a website from an SEO point of view means working on technical aspects that allow the site to be easily understood by the search engine crawler. That is, in a simpler way, it means going to tell Google, or others like Bing, what your website is about, what questions it answers, how it might be useful for a potential user, and so on. Google uses more than 200 ranking signals in its algorithm to identify if a site is "good" or not, and therefore should be rewarded by appearing in the first results.
That said, SEO can be divided into four main sub-categories: On-page SEO, Off-page SEO, Technical SEO, and User Interaction Signals.