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Off-site optimization

There are several activities that may not be “SEO” in the strictest sense, but nonetheless can align with and help contribute indirectly to SEO success.

Link building (the process of acquiring links to a website) is the activity most associated with off-site SEO. There can be great benefits (e.g., rankings, traffic) from getting a diverse number of links pointing at your website from relevant, authoritative, trusted websites. Link quality beats link quantity – and a large quantity of quality links is the goal.

And how do you get those links? There are a variety of website promotion methods that synergize with SEO efforts. These include:

Brand building and brand marketing: Techniques designed to boost recognition and reputation.
PR: Public relations techniques designed to earn editorially-given links.
Content marketing: Some popular forms include creating videos, ebooks, research studies, podcasts (or being a guest on other podcasts) and guest posting (or guest blogging).
Social media marketing and optimization: Claim your brand’s handle on any and all relevant platforms, optimize it fully and share relevant content.
Listing management: Claiming, verifying and optimizing the information on any platforms where information about your company or website may be listed and found by searchers (e.g., directories, review sites, wikis).
Ratings and reviews: Getting them, monitoring them and responding to them.

Generally, when talking about off-site, you’re talking about activities that are not going to directly impact your ability to rank from a purely technical standpoint.

However, again, everything your brand does matters. You want your brand to be found anywhere people may search for you. As such, some people have tried to rebrand “search engine optimization” to actually mean “search experience optimization” or “search everywhere optimization.”

SEO specialties

Search engine optimization also has a few subgenres. Each of these specialty areas is different from “regular SEO” in its own way, generally requiring additional tactics and presenting different challenges.

Five such SEO specialties include:

Ecommerce SEO: Additional SEO elements include optimizing category pages, product pages, faceted navigation, internal linking structures, product images, product reviews, schema and more.
Enterprise SEO: This is SEO on a massive scale. Typically this means dealing with a website (or multiple websites/brands) with 1 million+ pages – or it may be based on the size of the organization (typically those making millions or billions in revenue per year). Doing enterprise also typically means delays trying to get SEO changes implemented by the dev team, as well as the involvement of multiple stakeholders.
International SEO: This is global SEO for international businesses – doing SEO for multiregional or multilingual websites – and optimizing for international search engines such as Baidu or Naver.
Local SEO: Here, the goal is to optimize websites for visibility in local organic search engine results by managing and obtaining reviews and business listings, among others.
News SEO: With news, speed is of utmost importance – specifically making sure you get into Google’s index as quickly as possible and appear in places such as Google Discover, Google’s Top Stories and Google News. There’s a need to understand best practices for paywalls, section pages, news-specific structured data, and more.

How does SEO work?

If you found this page via Google search, you likely searched Google for [what is seo] or [seo].

This guide is published on Search Engine Land, an authoritative website with great expertise on and experience in the topic of SEO (we’ve been covering all SEO changes, big and small since 2006).

Originally published in 2010, our “what is SEO” page has earned a whopping 324,203 links.

Put simply, these factors (and others) have helped this guide earn a good reputation with search engines, which has helped it rank in Position 1 for years. It has accumulated signals that demonstrate it is authoritative and trustworthy – and therefore deserves to rank when someone searches for SEO.

But let’s look at SEO more broadly. As a whole, SEO really works through a combination of:

People: The person or team responsible for doing or ensuring that the strategic, tactical and operational SEO work is completed.
Processes: The actions taken to make the work more efficient.
Technology: The platforms and tools used.
Activities: The end product, or output.

Many other things factor into how SEO works. What follows is a high-level look at the most important knowledge and process elements.

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