The video below serves to give a basic understanding of SEO and how you can organically boost your site's SEO. Below the video, you'll find additional tools, information, and considerations for how to make the most of your SEO.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and is the marketing concept of driving your website to the top of search results for certain phrases entered into search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Proper SEO practices will ensure your website content gets correctly indexed in order to show up when inputting relevant search terms related to your business. At the most fundamental level, getting a website to show up in results is estimated at about 80% of how your website is optimized for search engines and 20% what content is actually on your site. 

The best SEO practices include optimizing your content for search engines but the more content you have included with your website or blog will promote more reach and indexing options for search engines. 

For the purposes of Showit, we are most interested in the content on your site and making sure that the content in your site is indexed correctly by a search engine so that your site will display relevant results in a web search.

Google uses web crawlers (known as bots) to discover and index the ever-growing and changing web. Crawlers look at links and web pages to create a "table of contents" of the site. They go from link to link and page to page in order to bring the data they discover back to Google.

After Google collects all this data from the web crawlers, they index and categorize it in a directory according to the content. This directory is used for displaying search results to Google users when they search for certain terms. 

After Google creates an index of your website, it will determine what content is related to a user's search term or statement according to search algorithms. These algorithms determine the most relevant results for a search based on a handful of factors including text, images, freshness, content, and traffic. This infographic breaks down what happens in every Google search.

Check out this blog post to learn how to climb to the top of search results with your SEO!

With Showit, all the text, images, or content that you include in your site is automatically put into an HTML file (the standardized system for tagging text, graphics, fonts, color, or hyperlinks) that allows search engines to locate all your content. Because every website is different from the next, your target audience or clientele for your products or services, your SEO will be specific to your own website.  With this factor in mind, we are unable to automatically set your SEO for you. 

When building a site inside Showit, if you work to provide great content and use proper SEO methods, search engines will be able to accurately crawl and index your website in order to include it in search results. We provide different SEO tools to build a good indexable site that can be found through a search engine, but the specifics are really up to you to build a brand that drives your ideal clients to your site.

Keep in mind that everyone is trying to get to the front page for search results so search engines use a very complicated system to determine which results appear at the top. The most beneficial way to improve website rankings is to follow healthy SEO practices. Additionally, search engines work hard to prevent tampering of search results so it's highly recommended that you shouldn’t try doing "quick" tricks (know as Black Hat SEO) to get listed as these routes will often lead to your site getting completely banned from ranking. 

There are many ways to try to fool this system, but keep in mind that many of these options will only be effective in the short term and risk violating Google’s terms of service. The consequence of violating search engine's terms of service can result in your site being seen as a spam site and may cause your site to be removed from search results altogether.