Chapter 1: An Introduction to SEO – Still Kicking
If you want to get the maximum amount of profit from a website, then you need to get as much traffic as you can. If you want to get the maximum amount of traffic to your website, then you need to get to the top of Google.
And if you want to get to the top of Google, then you need SEO or ‘Search Engine Optimization’. Search Engine Optimization is the process of optimizing a website so that Google will be more likely to index it and ensure that it ranks highly for the most relevant key words and phrases. For example, if you have a website the sells hats, then you might try to get it to rank for the phrase ‘buy hats online’. To do this, you would go through an optimization process that would involve both ‘on site’ and ‘off site’ strategies.​
With any luck, you would eventually be able to get your website to the top of the SERP for that term (‘Search Engine Results Page’) and thereby attract a huge amount of traffic. More importantly, that traffic would not just be from random visitors but would rather be from specific people who are looking for hats. Better yet, those people will be looking for hats at the very point that they came to your website (why else would they search for hats?) which thereby means that they’re ready to buy and it should only take a small push to get them to make that decision.
SEO can be a slow going process but it is still possible to very reliably climb the ranks and to get your website to a point where it will start getting more and more organic traffic from searches.