What is SEO?
Search engine optimization (SEO), in quite simple terms can be explained as the umbrella term for all the methods you can use to ensure the visibility of your website and its content on search engine results pages (SERPs). This method can be used as a practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results. The very methods of increasing the natural or organic visibility of a certain website may differ. Some prefer technical help while some may like to go handy and off-page. By off-page means achieving behind the scene tactics like link building and social media marketing and advertising. One can also notice that off-page tactics for organically building up the SEO may result in much more amount of time and money as compared to simple SERPs and SEO professionals. And by organic results it means that those results which may appear naturally on the page rather than in the paid-for sections.
Why SEO?
SEO can be stated as a boon for certified and quality websites who are willing to offer a great deal to their visitors. In 2014, CONDUCTOR suggested 64% of all web traffic comes from organic search, compared to 2% from social, 6% from paid search, 12% direct and 15% from other referral sources. Indeed the above mentioned stats make it quite clear and relevant the importance of SEO. Few reasons of wanting SEO working are enlisted below:
- SEO builds strong site architecture and have the potential to provide clear navigation, all it helps the search engine to index the site quickly and easily.
- This in turn will provide a marvelous experience to the visitors and thus encouraging them to visit again. It is worth considering that Google is increasingly paying attention to user experience.
- When it comes to how much traffic is driven by search engines to your website, the percentage is substantial, and perhaps the clearest indicator of the importance of SEO.
- In 2015, it was found that Google accounts for more than 90% of global organic search results. So, obviously one needs a strong presence on Google SERPs.
The 3 principles of SEO
- Quality of traffic- attracting all the visitors on the site because Google tells them is not what called as quality traffic. Instead, the site must attract visitors who are genuinely interested in the product, services or expertise offered in the website.
- Quantity of traffic – once the site sustains right people clicking through from those SERPs more traffic is better.
- Organic results- as mentioned before, organic traffic is that traffic which the site needn’t pay for. Ads make up significant portions of many SERPs, so this is a way going through.
How SEO works?
What makes it possible the visibility of several links’ magical list on just one click answering all your potential questions?
- Google or any other search engine has a crawler that works out and goes to collect information about all the content they can find on the internet.
- The crawler then brings back all those 1s and 0s to the search engine to build an index.
- That index is fed through an algorithm that tries to match all the data with the visitor’s query.
- Then finally, the results appear.
The o part in the word SEO – optimization is indeed a important one. As it can take many forms. It’s everything from making sure the title tags and Meta descriptions are both informative and the right length to pointing internal links at pages one is proud of.
What do search engines look for?
Search engines are looking for certain important aspects which make them provide websites a much better hotspot for organic search results. All the below criteria’s make a website prone to search engines’ preference:
- Relevancy of the query
- Quality of the content by website
- Users experience
- Site speed
- Cross-device compatibility
- Internal linking, authority
- Meta descriptions
- Title tags
- Scheme markup
- Properly tagged images
- Evergreen content
- Domain names
- Headlines and permalinks
- Comments
- Local SEO
- Social
SEO Professionals
SEO is a fundamental skill in a marketer’s arsenal-maybe not on more technical aspects but a good and solid understanding should be perquisite. Optimizing for search shouldn’t be the only province of one or two specialists or teams. Any role that interacts with content has responsibility for SEO. A skilled SEO professional must possess the following eight criteria to succeed:
- Critical thinking
- Speaking and writing ability
- Technical and programming skills
- Social and drinking skills
- Analytical skills
- Excel skills
- Drive, motivation and adaptability
- A sense of humor
Conclusion
SEO is like helping the customers find out your business from among thousands of other companies. SEO is an integral part of any digital marketing strategy. Every search engine has an algorithm that decides which links will show up for a specific query. The SEO world is a world where slow and steady wins the race. Good SEO work only gets better over time. It’s only search engine tricks that need to keep changing when the ranking algorithms change. A successful SEO is not about tricking Google. It’s about PARTNERING with Google to provide the best search results for users. Today it’s not about ‘get the traffic’ – it’s about get the targeted and relevant quality traffic. Hence, your website can be the top most preferred or ranked according the search engines’ algorithm.