SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization (caution, not optimization), which is often slavishly and misleadingly translated as search engine optimization. The complication comes from the moment we ask what a search engine is. The English Wikipedia rightly tells us that this is a "software system that is designed to search for information on the World Wide Web".
That is, any program that can search the Internet. So this does not only apply to search engines such as Seznam.cz or Google (Bing, Yandex, Baidu, Naver), but also to YouTube, Facebook, Twitter or the Czech catalogs Firmy.cz and Najisto.cz and many others. This opens the way to the English definition on the English Wikipedia: Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine’s “natural” or un-paid (“organic”) search results. In general, the earlier (or higher ranked on the search results page), and more frequently a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine’s users. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, video search, academic search, news search and industry-specific vertical search engines.
This corresponds exactly to the definition of Marek Prokop from 2009, which explains and defines SEO as "optimization of searchability on the Internet". Which is a term that many SEO experts, myself included, are committed to. How misleading is the current definition on Czech Wikipedia in comparison: Search Engine Optimization (SEO, search engine optimization) is a methodology for creating and editing websites in such a way that their form and content are suitable for automated processing in Internet search engines. The goal is to get a higher position for a given website and thus more frequent and at the same time targeted visitors in the search results in search engines that match the content. Even if I deviate from Mark's broader definition and conservatively insist on search engines, SEO is a set of methods that will help you improve your search engine visibility (and it doesn't matter which search engines they are). With these methods, your website or page will start to appear better in the results (visually it may be higher) and more often.
SEO activities can be relatively well divided into two fundamentally different jobs - onpage SEO and offpage SEO. Onpage SEO includes all the actions we do on our own websites. Its main task is to expand the set of targeted keywords, move the site to better positions on long tail keywords, and improve clickthrough rates. However, onpage SEO alone will not be enough for you to be in a good position for highly competitive terms. Onpage optimization solves the following: Web technical settings - How to encode and program web pages so that search engines can find them and understand their content as well as possible (semantics).
These are mainly selected states from the rules of accessibility and usability of the website, but also various modifications for the management of Googlebot - Google's software that crawls the website. Web Information Architecture - This is the part of onpage optimization that addresses how to incorporate individual topics from keyword analysis into a web project. So it solves how, where and if it is necessary to expand the structure of the website.
This then leads to recommendations for better navigation on the web. Content strategy - It is mainly about creating exceptional content (text, images, videos, audio) and partly about the placement of selected keywords in the text content of individual pages. Setting page elements - This is setting page elements such as URL, title, etc. Offpage SEO includes all the actions we do outside of our own website. Its main task is to move the website to a better position on all targeted keywords (including primary ones), to get conversions using SERP features and, if possible, to increase the search for relevant keywords.
To a limited extent, offpage SEO can also help target a larger set of keywords. It is about: Getting Backlinks - If one website links to another, Google will interpret this information as a vote to suggest that the linked page is of interest. This gives the linked website a better position in Google's results. Brand Building - The more your brand is searched on the web, the more it is written about, the better position your website will have. Various settings in external systems - This is registration on Google maps, registration in a catalog, etc. They know. Other marketing channels are used for this, e.g. social networks.