SEO stands for “search engine optimization.”
It is the field that is concerned with how to write articles that appear on the front page of search engines* for certain keywords.
*There are many different search engines like Google, Bing, Baidu, etc. but I will focus purely on Google since it holds ~92% of the search engine market share.
A keyword is a word or phrase that people search for.
For example “how to invest in stocks” is a keyword. The goal of someone with a finance website would be to write an article about how to invest in stocks such that their article appears on the front page of Google.
Once you have an article on the front page of Google, you can earn traffic (and income) over and over again in a completely passive manner since thousands of people around the world search for “how to invest in stocks” on a daily basis. You don’t need to promote your article anywhere. Your readers simply come to you.
The way to find good keywords to write about is to look for ones that have low difficulty and medium to high search volume.
- Low difficulty: Not many websites are writing articles targeting that keyword.
- Medium to high search volume: A good amount of people are actually searching for that keyword.
I like to use the following grid to visualize this idea:
- Bottom left: Keywords that have low difficulty are easy to rank on the front page of Google for, but if they have little search volume then you won’t actually get much traffic.
- Top left: Keywords that are hard to rank for and have little search volume are the worst possible keywords to go after. It will be hard to rank on the front page of Google for that keyword, and even if you do you won’t get much traffic.
- Bottom right: Keywords that have low difficulty and high search volume are exactly what you want to write articles about because you have a realistic chance of ranking on the front page of Google and by doing so you’ll be able to bring in decent traffic.
- Top right: Keywords with high difficulty and high search volume are hard to rank for, but offer high traffic if you are actually able to get on the front page of Google.
When you’re just starting out with a site, I recommend exclusively targeting the keywords in the bottom right of the grid. These are keywords that you can rank for and get traffic for.
Once your site gains more authority (more on this later), you can begin to go after more difficult keywords since you’ll actually have a chance at ranking for those keywords.
Lastly, once you have a list of good keywords to go after you simply need to write the best possible articles on the internet about those keywords.
The idea is that if someone searches for “how to invest in stocks” then you want your article on how to invest in stocks to be such a useful resource that the reader won’t have to read any other article to have their questions answered.
If your article truly is the most useful, then Google will happily display your article as the top result since their job is to provide readers with the most relevant and helpful articles that will answer their queries.
Most of SEO can be boiled down into a two-step process:
1. Find good keywords.
2. Write articles about those keywords.
That’s it.
If you can do those two things consistently, both your website traffic and your income will naturally increase over time.
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