SEO is the process of refining your website so it ranks higher in search engine results pages (SERPs). Search engines employ bots to crawl through all website pages and use complex algorithms to categorize the pages based on known and unknown factors. SEO practices play to the known factors in the most favorable ways in order to rank web pages higher in SERPs while also ensuring web pages provide useful and relevant content.
SEO is broken down into on-page SEO and off-page SEO. On-page SEO refers to tailoring the actual content of your web pages for better rankings. For example: placing keywords and phrases that are commonly searched for by your target audience in the title of a blog post and throughout the blog copy itself. Off-page SEO is when you improve your page rankings without changing the contents of your website—such as implementing a backlink campaign. Good SEO results in more organic traffic, which is traffic that comes from search results, not ads.
SEO Pros and Cons
While there are clear advantages to generating organic traffic, SEO comes with a few challenges. Here are some of the pros and cons to this approach.