 SEO is also known as search engine optimization. And if you look up the definition of SEO on Google, it's going to say that it's a set of practices designed to improve the appearance and positioning of web pages and organic search results. But what exactly does that mean? Well, let's pretend like the entire internet was a library and the books inside of the library were individual websites. If you wanted to go to the library and pick up a book on gardening, you would probably search a database. And this database would organize the millions of books in the library based off of how related they are to your search query and how good they are. So the top suggestion for the right book would not only be related to gardening, but it would be highly rated. And this is exactly what Google does as well when you have search queries. When you type in a query to a search engine like Google, it exhibits the best answer. So how do you get your website to rank at the top of Google and be suggested as the best answer? Well, that's basically what SEO is all about. You optimize your website for the search engine. And by doing this, your website is going to get featured at the top of Google. And when it's featured at the top of Google, it's going to get a lot more traffic. And this isn't just any type of traffic. If the search engine does a good job, it's going to be the type of traffic that is highly related to the topic that you're writing about. So if you're writing about gardening, for instance, these are going to be people who are very interested in the subject of gardening. And the more people that are on your website, the more money you can get paid from AdSense, affiliate marketing, as well as selling your own products. So whether you're trying to create your own website or you work professionally as a digital marketer that specializes in SEO, this can be an incredibly valuable skill set. One of the greatest things about finding your website organically or naturally using SEO is the fact that not only is the traffic highly targeted, but it's free. You don't have to pay for ads in order to get these customers. Now let's go over the different types of SEO. The first type of SEO is internal or on-page SEO. This SEO deals with the modifications of the website that you own. This is where you optimize certain aspects of your website so that it gains heightened chances of being suggested to the public. Your goal here is to increase your website's chances of being chosen by a search engine to a query. Examples of good practices with on-page SEO are going to be having title tags, using HTML headers, having content that's relevant, having content that's high quality, using meta descriptions with your website to increase website ranking, using interlinking techniques between different articles on your website and using your website's content to guide visitors into other content on the website itself. The second type of SEO is external or off-page SEO. Off-page SEO deals with the external factors that can affect your website's popularity. A few examples of off-page SEO are using other traffic sources to get people to your website. For instance, writing a really valuable article and then posting it on a forum to get people to view it. Another thing you could do is reach out to a famous influencer and have them shout your website out. Also having backlinks to your website from your social media and having people actually follow those backlinks to the blog itself. And then of course, having other blogs link back to your blog, especially if those blogs have high levels of authority. And authority basically means how much the blog is respected by the search engine. The third type of SEO is technical SEO. Technical SEO talks about the structure and organization of your website. Some examples of technical SEO are ensuring that your website is logically built, improving your website's user interface, speeding up your website's loading time, making sure that your website is adapted to mobile users, optimizing your own links and URLs and avoiding repetitive content. Next, let's talk about the specific benefits of SEO. After all, it typically does take years of doing SEO before you can build your blog up to the point where you're making a full-time income from it. So why would business owners invest in search engine optimization when they can just pay for ads and then get money right away? Well, first of all, with SEO, you do actually have an opportunity to build a massive audience. It just takes time. And these are random people who have never met you before that discover you organically. And the fact that they discover you organically rather through an ad, oftentimes makes them trust and like you more. So why is organic traffic so important? Well, if people discover you organically and they benefit from your website, you can actually have a pixel on your website that will retarget them with paid ads. The third thing is that SEO is free. This is pretty obvious, but it's nice to be able to advertise and acquire customers for free. The next point is that SEO produces consistent traffic. Typically, when you build your blog up to the point where it's getting, let's say 10,000 viewers per month, you're gonna continue getting 10,000 viewers per month, even if you stop working well into the future. The reason for this is because your articles rank for certain keywords, and they'll continue ranking for a long time into the future. A lot of the time people who create blogs will work really hard on them for about one or two years. And then after that, they just basically do maintenance on all of the articles and they update them every once in a while and then repost them. Oftentimes, YouTube channels, for instance, can die, but blogs are typically more evergreen and can last for decades. Google processes about 63,000 queries a second and 5.6 billion queries a day. So if you can consistently create valuable, relevant content over a period of time, Google will trust you enough to rank your blog on the first page. And that's why SEO is one of the most valuable skills that you can learn.