Welcome to the first lesson in the SEO course, Defining Search Engine Optimization. To understand what search engine optimization is, so we need to start with the search engine. As you can see, we've placed the search term in the box, and from this, we will get a set of search results. This process is the same for any keyword or any search term. Put your keyword in and you get a set of search results. It is the order of these results that we as search engine optimization specialists, that we are interested in. How do we give our websites every advantage to show up here in the top results for our keywords or search terms? The answer is we need to do a lot of things, from indexing, to content optimization, to image and meta tags. But before we start any of that, we need to understand what keywords we are trying to rank for and how the format on the website will affect how our customers use it and that we are building a website that fits the customer's needs. This is at the basic level what SEO is is understanding your customers and what it is they're on your website for. Search engine will rank websites on a number of factors, and these factors include the same factors that affect customer behavior such as bounce rate, click-through rate, time on site, and load speed. We will address personal search in an upcoming video, but it's important to understand that just because you had a set of results here for this keyword does not mean that every search on the platform will have the same results. Again, we'll explain this in a future video. So how do we define search engine optimization? I would define search engine optimization as a group of factors and activities that will have the end goal of increasing the website's overall findability in search engines for a given term or phrase. SEO must by necessity then also encompass the factors that improve customer traffic and performance on a website. Let's look at an example and explain some of the factors we have discussed here and what this looks like in practice. Here, we have put in a search term for a model of a Whirlpool tub. As you can see, we are ranking well for this search term. So for the search term, we've put in 6032 Whirlpool bath, and as you can see here, Watertech is coming up in the very first ranking position for this search term. And again, these are ads within Google search results, but this section here is our first organic search result and as you can see, it's ranking extremely well. We can verify this, so let's look at the analytics and verify that its average position is somewhere in this range because we do have personal search and it does affect where we're ranking. So Whirlpool, Whirlpool should always be position number three, according to Google Analytics. Whirlpool baths, again, should be here, pretty close. So any combination of these words should rank as we see here, really well close to the top of the search results quite often. So let's get into the backend of the website and discuss some of the factors and some of the pieces that go into ranking a website so that it comes up in the first search terms here on Google. So as you can see here, we've got the backend of our website. We've got 6032 Elite. So what we need to do is we need to kind of discuss some of the factors here and some of the items that actually go into ranking this website so that it does rank exceptionally well in Google. So one of the things we have is we have the word Whirlpool here in our copy. The title of the page here, the H1 title, it has Whirlpool Bath, 6032 Whirlpool Bath in the title. We also have it in the permalink, and this is very important that your URL also fits your keyword if you can put it in. Okay, so the next items we need to look at is we're using Yoast SEO for WordPress. And again, this is a WordPress website, so we're going to be looking at this display a little bit for WordPress, and as you can see here, Whirlpool Bath is in the title here. Whirlpool Bath is in our meta description here, it's in our slug title and that's our Whirlpool. So we have the URL, the slug title, and the meta description all in agreement as to what these items say. And that's very important that our keyword is placed within these three and that they are in agreement on that given keyword and that we also have the keyword in the copy. Always remember when you're writing copy for a website that you're writing copy to be read by a crawl bot. So Google uses spiderbots to go out and look at websites and to pull content and it's these spider bots that we are writing for a little bit, but we also need to understand that we're writing copy for people, and we need to write the copy in a manner that kinda accommodates both and we're not spamming content, we're not spamming keywords. We'll get into in a later video what percentage of keywords our particular website page should have and how to configure those. One of the things I often see with new SEOs is that they push too many keywords into the copy or they copy and paste repeated sections. You don't need to do that. You need to write kinda organically and understand that sometimes we're going to let the robots crawl the site and find our keywords and just make sure they're in our copy. That's one of the biggest mistakes that new SEOs make is you kind of overstuff keywords. So let's get into images. So images need to be SEO'd as well and this is something when you build a website that oftentimes gets overlooked. So if you're looking at a website and you want it to rank better, you want it to perform better, this is an area that's often overlooked. And it's the pictures need to be, need to be set up for their alt text and alt titles. So let's get into that. Okay, so here you can see the image alt text and titles. Here's the alt text. Again, this is in WordPress, so it's going to look a little different if you're on Magento, or if you're on Shopify, or if you've custom built your website, but these are the areas that need to get built and you need to fill these in for all of your pictures, all of your logos. And it's this section here where we're talking about, we have our keyword in here, so in my alt text, I've placed my keyword in my title, I've placed my keyword. And then in my description, I've actually explained what the picture is. Now, descriptions are very important and I will get into this a little bit in more detail when we get into images and non-textual elements in a future video, but it is this description that will get read to individuals that can't see. So if you're blind or partially blind, you're basically depending upon SEOs to actually fill out this description so that people can understand what your image is, and if you don't fill this out and this caption out, then people won't know what your image is. In this case, we've decided not to go with the caption because the theme just makes it a little weird, but the description will be read to people that have visual issues. In this course, we've covered the basics of SEO, how to define it, and some of the factors that can improve your website overall rankings. In upcoming videos, we'll dive deeper into all the factors such as on-page, off-page, technical SEO, and some tips and link-building indexing. We'll see you in the next video.
