What is SEO, Really?

I find that, at my advanced age, my attention span is less than that of a 5-year-old. I know this because my granddaughter is 5, and I base it off how long she listens and vice versa. Plus, I can turn on a helpful video that’s under 10 minutes, but if it takes 3 minutes to explain how the idea is not gonna bore you, you’ve lost me. I’m out.

I choose my education videos based on:  (1) length, (2) content, and, not really essential, (3) who’s doing the talking. I subscribe to several YouTube channels, but rarely make time to watch them all. I liken it to the number of emails I get because I wanted the free [fill in the blank] and they asked for my email in order to provide it. I simply forgot that next step which is to immediately unsubscribe if I don’t want additional content. I feel guilty, but some of these folks send more than 7 emails a week and I can’t do that. I literally spend 15 minutes a day just deleting unwanted/unsolicited emails before I can get down to reading the ones I choose to keep.

As a business owner, there are always folks sending me emails to improve my site, enhance my products or invite me to sell on their platform. I totally get why businesses have a dedicated online employee to answer all of those questions and cold emails, and your products are “lovely, don’t you want to sell with us, too?”

Now, let’s go back to the video length:  I recently watched a “how to” where the host repeatedly said how he was going to get to the point of whatever the video was, but it took over 3 minutes and 5 mentions to get to the meat of it. I was ready to quit the second time he repeated it, but I had to struggle through so I’d have something to write about here, right? Indeed. So, I sighed, I listened and I slapped one hand with the other when it instinctively went to click to the next video, I mean, how bad can it be to listen to 2 more minutes. It . was . TORTURE as said by the-then 8–year-old Gia Guidice once upon a time in Jersey.

It really was horrendous, as he never got to the point while fawning all over the video that that’s what he was there to do. I don’t even remember how I got to the video, but it was most likely via a thumbnail in the sidebar that was what I thought would be a quick, informative video. It was not.

And that, my friends, is how easy it is to get to Point E by way of Point A and you end the conversation so very far from where you started:  SEO.

Well, what is SEO?

[We’ll pay $5.00 to anyone who can describe it in the shortest time possible. Post in the comments below.]

SEO = Search Engine Optimization

SEO provides search engines, like Google, an optimal way to rank your website. If you’re wondering how many search engines there actually are (and we thought it was just Google), that number is well “over 1500” … I kid you not. That’s incredibly high, and most can’t name 5, or didn’t know there were five. There are actually 30 search engines dedicated solely to general web searching. Why there are that many is puzzling.

During research for this blog post, I realized no two infographics or images showed SEO steps in the same order, or had the same categories, and they all appeared to be quite different, but describing the same topic:  SEO. No wonder it can be confusing to truly understand what it means and how to make sure you’re implementing the right tools to make it comply and work for you at the same time.

Mind you, this is coming from the perspective of a seller, so it behooves us at A Wee Bit More, to make sure we’re in compliance, in a good way (more on that later) and then we can quiet the naysayers who write us emails daily, yes, indeed, daily, starting with a compliment about how lovely our site is and the products most divine, but we aren’t ranking high on Google and they have just the thing we need to get on the right track and not let the train derail at the seams. In other words, we need them and do I want to receive their suggestions and price menu?

Gotta Love a Twofur

Two thoughts on unsolicited emails:  One, it takes forever to delete them or send them to spam (but they keep coming back into the Inbox, or “unsubscribe” to someone or something I never subscribed to, and two, we often receive follow-up emails saying they got the first polite decline, but are we sure?

Two thoughts on blog post comments:  We discontinued comments a few years ago, as we were suddenly inundated with a slew of comments, initially on one specific blog post about knitting, that were about anything but knitting. They contained comments about other products/services, on other websites with links directing to those websites ... talk about your backlinks  ...

At first, getting comments alone was rare, so we didn’t even notice, and the comments seemed to be just between individuals, still nothing to do with the blog post, but benign. Around 5-7 comments, spread over the course of a few weeks, then they increased, and once I realized they weren’t valid, they had to be deleted. However, they couldn’t be deleted in batches because we couldn’t be sure they weren’t valid until they were read, and some read like typical infographics, over a page long. Again, I kid you not, they were long comments. When I printed one, it exceeded a full page. I had to copy and paste a portion into Google translate just to be sure I knew what language it was in. So now I have to quickly scan each comment and they were coming in at over 30 a day, still to only one blog post.

Fast forward a few weeks and the tone began to change for the worst and increase in volume;  let’s add in the not so pleasant vulgarities and thankfully, they didn’t upload photos. These comments were now offensive and disgusting and I couldn’t understand why it was still happening as we had uploaded an app to filter that out. I was so offended and spending so much time on scanning and deleting them, and peeking through my fingers to make sure they didn't upload images or I accidentally clicked something as I scrolled to take me to some awful site, that I had to disable comments entirely and that hurt.

They also caused friction not only with the content on my site, but also to the point that my newsletter provider, disabled access to my account due to over 300 new signups in a couple of days.

They understood and deleted all 300 as they deemed fraudulent and luckily I was back in business. Geez, the things you have to do to keep from running the ship aground. As the captain, I'd have had to go down with the ship and that just wasn't on my list of things to do.

This was more than two thoughts, but I’ll pull it back into perspective as it pertains to SEO and how crucial it is to know what’s happening on your site:

1. our website contained offensive, vulgar and lascivious comments;
2. a specific blog post was targeted daily so it took tremendous energy and fortitude to go through that muck daily, to make sure it didn’t continue to harm our site;
3. with the increase in comments to that single blog post, another was chosen and the same content and excessive comments were targeted daily, so now there were two unresolved problems;
4. the links to other sites were equally offensive, vulgar and lascivious (no we didn’t click, but hovering over a link will give you the .url and most left nothing to the imagination; and
5. some comments were from random folks, and quite often, the same email address was used, but as often as I typed these emails into the app to prevent them, they still allowed the users access to comment.

So, what’s a store to do?

Take charge and remove the obstacle, meaning:

No more comments for you, A Wee Bit More

Luckily, we were able to delete them as they were being posted (all were from overseas email accounts) and we disabled all comments to restore our peace of mind and our SEO ranking. It did hurt our stats, but we didn’t drop off the face of the earth, so to speak. 

These 2 charts demonstrate the connection between SEO and ALL aspects of the internet footprint:

Source:  LYFE Marketing

Source:  my theme shop

 WORDS of the Day

Yep, we’re back and here’s the first triple of 2025

op·ti·mize
/ˈäptəˌmīz/
verb
1.   make the best or most effective use of (a situation, opportunity, or resource).

"to optimize viewing conditions, the microscope should be correctly adjusted"

o   Computing

rearrange or rewrite (data, software, etc.) to improve efficiency of retrieval or processing.

op·ti·mal
/ˈäptəm(ə)l/
adjective
2.   best or most favorable; optimum.

"seeking the optimal solution"

las·civ·i·ous
/ləˈsivēəs/
adjective
3.  (of a person, manner, or gesture) feeling or revealing an overt and often offensive sexual desire.

"he gave her a lascivious wink"

_____________ oOo _____________

Visually, there is an obvious connection to SEO to everything that exists on the internet, and the more detailed you are, the more visibility what you put there has. In a nutshell:

optimized web content = maximum web visibility

or

if you want to rank on pages 1-3 = make it easy for the search engine to find you

Example: If you sell rocks (yes, I said “rocks”), don’t just upload an image with a filename of IMG_1935.jpg as no one will know what that is. There are amazing options to enhance images, and, for the visually impaired, a screen reader will read the filename. It’s best to name it as whatever it is. If it’s “the world’s prettiest rock,” name it theworldsprettiestrock.jpg (it's best to remove the apostrophe as that character is often used in coding and we don't want any confusion):

On the web, it’s called “Alt text.”

Another real quick tip, “niche” is your next favorite word. Find a spot and stick with it, branch out from it, but don’t add 50,000 extraneous things to it. Okay, “extraneous” was too far outside most 5-year-olds’ vocabulary, unless, like me, you talk like that with them all the time. Before you know it, “actually,” “of course,” and “exactly” will be sprinkled throughout their conversations and you’ll do a double take to see who’s talking. Really, that happens in my house all the time.

Since we’re reeling it back in … Did You Know?

As I was researching this blog post, and I was doing so based on the multiple cold emails A Wee Bit More received in the past 3 days, I discovered something I’d never heard or seen before:  there’s such a thing as Black Hat vs White Hat SEO:

Source:  my theme shop

This phenomenon is due to there being two types of SEO:  good vs bad, oops that’s backwards:  it’s bad vs good. To successfully rank high on pages 1-3 of any search engine, what we need is the SEO that creates quality content, not the clickbait that gets page views with no substance, false content that doesn’t resemble what you clicked to get there, and gets you banned permanently. You not only lose any type of ranking, you lose it all and become:

No more indexing for you, my friend.

So, how’d we do? Is SEO clear to you or did we muddy the waters? I wrote a different kind of post about which side of the tree you stand on, so click this link, not to be confused with a backlink, to have a read. We promise you’ll like it, and the images are cute, too: 

https://www.aweebitmore.com/blogs/news/who-s-side-are-you-on-the-good-guys-or-the-bad-guys

Or, as I like to call it, the original Kid N Play

_____________ oOo _____________

And Last, But Not Least

Here, again, is our own, straightforward, infographic (while I do like the length of infographics, printing that irregular, scrolling-never-stops, size is a mission):

A Wee Bit More’s SEO Infographic

While it’s not a complete list of items found in SEO reports, infographics and articles, it is a comprehensive start and if you have these 7 items checked on your list, you’re set for a great SEO ride. All aboard!!!

 _____________ oOo _____________

P.S. I cringe every time I write something that is “technically” incorrect, but sounds right:  referencing starting a sentence with “And” which is a no-no, but I have to excuse it sometimes, as it fits the bill.

P.P.S. The vocabulary sprinkled throughout this post is a nod to my newsletters, which is where I would nearly always have at least one Word of the Day. Since I hadn’t written many newsletters in the last 2 years, I suddenly found myself writing paragraphs in my head and had to put them to paper before they disappeared. It seems like I might wanna start writing again so I’m excited and ready to apply that lovely SEO to everything to make sure we have good juju.

P.P.P.S. Feel free to sign up for our newsletter (we won’t bombard you with a ton, we promise), and we just got cool and learned started offering text communications, so sign up for that, too, please. 

AWBM Blog Post #046 | 27 March 2025 | What is SEO, Really? | 2013-2025 © A Wee Bit More, All Rights Reserved.