Search Engine Optimization or SEO is simply the art and science of ensuring a website and its content be found, understood, and referred to by both search engines and the people who use them.

How does Search Engine Optimization work?

At its core, SEO is built upon a foundation of core guidelines established by search engines—principles of quality, relevance, and technical integrity that ensure the web remains a trustworthy ecosystem. It begins with a fundamental understanding of search types, from the navigational (finding a specific site) and informational (answering a question) to the transactional (ready to buy), and extends across the diverse landscape of search engine types, from traditional web and image search to vertical engines for video, news, and scholarly articles.

What does an SEO specialist do?

“SEOs” or web search specialists like me have evolved alongside the web by prioritizing short-tail keywords, then expanded nuanced long-tail phrases and user intent, and now advances into the era of AI agents and semantic search, where understanding context and providing comprehensive answers is paramount. The evolution is tied to principles of Accessibility and User Experience (UX) simply by having a website that is accessible to people with disabilities is guaranteed to understood by search engines crawlers and AI agents