What a great question! What is SEO?

SEO is the process by which we transform content to engage readers, communicate with search engines, and increase visibility on search media. You may call it search engine optimization.

As writers craft content and design websites, they seek to entertain an audience. If you are reading this, then you are a part of an audience. And someone is doing an optimization just for you.

What is SEO? Explaining it in Child-like Terms

The SEO process involves making your website a desirable destination for users and search bots. It all begins with understanding the behavior of your prospects, thus creating content that resolves their frustrations and provides answers to their quest.

This is often called keyword research. Soon, you will discover that surfers use special words to find answers on search engines. These words or phrases are referred to as keywords.

Once you get to know the way your audience is searching for solutions, you then use these keywords in your content. Sometimes, your entire content may be about these words or phrases.

Search engines like Google prefer people-first content. This type of article is about the solutions, or answers to users' problems. Good SEO will focus on solving problems or resolving frustrations.

Phase 2 of the SEO Process is Fairly Easy to Do

However, although the content may provide solutions to your prospective users, it must be called and indexed by a search engine; Otherwise, people won't find your content. This takes you to the next step, where you tweak your content and website to meet search engine indexing requirements.

In child language, get your website content added to search results.

This is like translating your content into search bot language (titles, descriptions, meta tags, sitemaps, schema, etc). This is often called on-page SEO, although it includes some aspects of technical SEO, like page speed.

SEO is a tough market, and there is a lot of competition. Most often, search engines will show the most popular websites in their results. So, how do you make your website popular?

Most people jump for backlink building, but the real step is content distribution. You do not just need links, even though they still work. You need to have high authority websites talking about you or appearing alongside solutions.

For example: Instead of placing a backlink to soap bar, link your brand in comparison to a bigger brand. There are many powerful soap bars, Ajax, Scotchbrite, and your brand, etc

So, in essence, SEO is about transforming your content to meet desired results on search engines.