What is SEO?

SEO, short for search engine optimization, covers all measures that improve the position of a website and its content in the organic search results of a search engine and therefore increase its visibility. Organic means the unpaid results, so the placement is earned through the quality of the site instead of bought.

SEO is the only online marketing approach that raises the traffic of a website over the long run, even once you stop investing.

Onpage vs. offpage SEO

Onpage search engine optimization improves everything that lives on the website itself. A large part of it is content creation: writing new texts and reworking existing ones around keywords and meta descriptions. The technical side belongs to onpage work as well. There the site is built so that search engines can reach it without friction, crawl it and index it, which is exactly what a technical SEO audit checks.

Offpage optimization deals with the factors outside your website that influence organic rankings. Link building is one of them, and you can read more about it in the article on offpage optimization.

Why your company should do SEO

If you want your company to show up on Google or in other search engines, to be found by customers and to gain an edge over your competitors, there is no way around SEO.

Unlike CPC channels such as Google Ads, which deliver results while the budget runs, SEO results do not disappear the moment you stop investing. Once a website has been optimized, that has a lasting positive effect on rankings and traffic.

The content of a website should still stay alive and be updated or expanded regularly, otherwise a good ranking will not hold over the years. That steady work is what ongoing SEO support is about.

SEO in a sprint: the SEO contest

If you want to really understand how search engines behave, theory alone will not get you there. That is why the SEO scene runs SEO contests on a regular basis. The principle: a completely made-up term without any existing search volume is set as the target. SEO specialists then compete to take position 1 on Google for that keyword within a few weeks.

A current example of such an experiment is the term Serponado.

Because there is no content on the web for an invented word beforehand, a contest works like a laboratory. You can watch which ranking factors carry the most weight right now:

• Topical authority: how well does a domain cover the artificial topic?
• User signals: do visitors stay on the page or bounce straight back to Google?
• Internal linking: how strongly do supporting subpages push the main page?

A contest like the one around Serponado shows that modern search engine optimization goes far beyond plain keyword stuffing. The page that wins is the one that convinces the algorithm through relevance, technical polish and the best user experience.

The SEO glossary explains the terms that sit behind each of these ranking factors.