Welcome to the Inbound Certification!

that search engines understand the content on your pages, and start earning links from outside sources. To start, let’s define what search engine optimization is. Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the process of improving your website so that it attracts more visitors from search engines. SEO is an essential part of the first stage of the Inbound Methodology. It helps you attract strangers from search engines and turn them into new visitors on your website. So to understand SEO, let’s think about how people find information today. Let’s say someone moves into an old house and needs to replace all of the electrical outlets themselves. What would they do to figure this out on their own? Odds are, they’re probably going to head online and enter their question into a search engine. And they’ll be specific in that search. They might type in “how to install a 3 prong electrical outlet”. Google gets over 3 billion searches every day, from people who have questions and problems that they’re looking to solve. So search engines need to provide the most relevant, useful, and trustworthy answers. To find them, they send what are known as “spiders” to crawl through all of the pages on the web, searching for that content. Those spiders try to figure out what each page is about. From that data, they create a list of results that are relevant and useful to searches. Then, they rank those results based on the popularity and authority of those websites. The more visits a website gets, the higher it will rank. This ranking is what you see when you look at a search engine results page. The first few results and the ones listed on the side are ads - websites that have paid to show up at the top. But below that, you’re looking at the top 1-10 unpaid, or “organic”, results that contain the most popular, relevant answers. As marketers and business owners, your goal is to be listed in the top organic results because, let’s be honest, most searchers only click on the first few results that they see. In fact, 60% of all organic clicks go to the organic top 3 search results. So how do you get up there? That is where inbound marketing and SEO come in. You need to figure out what your prospects are searching for, so that you can make sure that they find your website. In the next video, we’re going to focus on how to do the essentials of SEO, so that you can start increasing traffic to your website.