
What Is SEO? Why Does it Matter?
Backing up for a moment, “SEO” stands for “search engine optimization”. It’s an analytical, evidence-based set of practices that observes how search engines function and builds websites accordingly.
There’s a lot of possible variation here, so you have to narrow things down. At FORWARD Lawyer Marketing, we look at three main things when determining our SEO techniques:
- The overall goal of search engines (to connect searchers with the information they’re looking for)
- Observed and measured search-engine behavior
- The unique goals of our clients
SEO is usually focused on keywords and keyword phrases first. These are words or phrases that people use while searching for things online. We want to match your website with those searches by including the right keywords.
Of course, modern SEO techniques go far beyond diction. Search engines now track many different site attributes, user behavior, and link structures. We take all of this into account while making our recommendations and crafting our content.
There are many things to consider. However, regardless of how complicated it gets, SEO is still based on one common-sense principle: You have to build a website tailored to your ideal clients. Google’s algorithm is constantly learning in order to provide the best possible results for human searchers.
The most recent technological advancement in machine learning for search was developed by Google in 2018 and is called BERT for short. It means Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers. BERT is a Transformer-based machine learning technique for natural language processing (NLP) pre-training.