What Is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
The term SEO stands for “search engine optimization”. In plain words, it is the process of improving a site in such a way that its visibility also increases at a time when people search for services or products related to it in Bing, Google, or other search engines. The website will be more likely to garner attention if it has better visibility in search results.
If want to know how it works then this article can provide you with that. The search engines, namely Google or Bing usually use bots that crawl through all the pages on the web, goes from one site to another site, while collecting information about them and putting them in an index. After that, the pages present in the index are analyzed by algorithms in hundreds of ranking signals or factors are taken into consideration to determine the order in which the pages should appear in the search results for a given doubt, question, or any kind of problem.
The estimation of exactly how much or how well a site or page can give the searcher what they are looking for is done by the search bot, and unlike paid search ads search engines cannot be paid to get higher search rankings that are organic. This is when SEO experts put their work to improve the website or webpage. The algorithms are designed to surface pages that are authoritative and relevant and provide the users with an efficient search experience. SEO optimizes the site as well as the content in it so that the pages can rank higher in the search results.
Importance of Search Engine Optimization
SEO can prove to be very efficient to grow any website and its importance is listed below.
1. Increase Web Traffic
In simple words, if a potential customer can’t find your website, it means that sales opportunities are getting missed, and hence, to avoid that SEO increases the search engine traffic which is organic, which increases the number of visitors to the page every day. This is directly connected to the sales increase because when more people see a site, the more likely it is that it can be sold.
2. User Experience
A website is optimized well enough to clearly communicates what service or product it offers and how to obtain it and any answers relating to it. The search engines like Bing and Google cater the site build to the experience of the user and by doing this they are easily able to pull the information which needs to be relayed to the users. If it is seen that users ate struggling to find a website then chances are that search engines face that problem as well.
3. Improve Visibility and Rankings
Users will most probably choose the suggestions that come out at the top when they search for a service or a product online. The search engine shows the top five suggestions to the users and SEO helps the website to rank higher in the search results and garner more visibility online to make the potential customers more likely to click on the site.
4. Trustworthy
The chances of appearing in search engines like Bing and Google will be higher if the SEO score is high. If the website ranks high on the search engines then naturally it will be more appealing to all the other brands owing to the increased visibility and it also benefits when trust is gained with the potential customers. Users will think that your product or service is trustworthy if it has a higher position for the keyword searched by the user and usually the users tend to defer to the search engine’s recommendations only.
5. Growth of Website
As mentioned in the above points, the website will have more organic web traffic if it ranks higher in the rank of a search engine for a variety of keywords, which clearly implies that SEO is very important to grow any type of brand, site, page, blog, or service. People will be more likely to share their own brand across all social media platforms which include Instagram or Facebook if the website is well-optimized so that it can make more sales and gain more customers as it progresses.
Types of Search Engine Optimization
Four types of SEO exist at the present and all of them are listed and detailed below.
1. On-Page SEO
Also referred to as on-site SEO it is the process by which the content of a website is optimized, and it can include keywords, meta titles, images, body copy, headers, meta descriptions, and more. There are some ways to get better on-page SEO which include the following things.
Optimize the metadata
Make sure that the meta descriptions and meta titles present have relevant content and try to phrase the keyword so that it has a greater chance of ranking higher. Search engines can get to know a lot about the content from the metadata and it is also important to remember that search engines also rewrite the metadata of other web pages with another copy on that page which makes it quite important to make the entire page optimized.
Perform internal linking
Internal links, it is meant URLs that link it to other pages on the website or webpage and they ate frequently attached to the anchored text. The insert links are the targeted keywords on the website which link to other high authority pages which helps the search engines to better read the site and make it user-friendly in the process.
Research the keywords
Use the keywords which have higher search volume and relevance after doing some research on them. After choosing the most suitable words optimize the content of the webpage to include those words in it.
Technical SEO
It refers to all the actions which are performed to help the search engines like Google and Bing crawl the webpage or website and enhance the user experience. This type of SEO always keeps evolving since search engines and algorithms gradually become complex over the years. A technical SEO should have the following features.
- Site Structure
To make the site structure concise, you cam may use a clean navigation hierarchy, HTTPS hypertext, consistent internal links, and a user-friendly and consistent URL structure.
- Website Speed
Recently Google has included a variety of load time variables to be the ranking factors moreover, a faster website speed is always better, hence make sure that the template is limited redirected, and simple and it also optimizes the visuals.
- Mobile-friendliness
In recent times, there are a lot of people who are shifting from desktop to mobile to perform searches for services and products. Make sure to check the website you are operating on a mobile device so that you can ensure that it’s easy to navigate through the site for any visitor.
Off-Page SEO
It refers to pretty much everything which does not happen on the website and it’s all about creating trust and exposure for the company or brand you own. It all ultimately contributes to having more sales and visitors. Link building is the practice of getting other sites that are well-reputed to link back to your own site and a large number of off-page SEO work is focused on that. There are some great tactics when it comes to off-page SEO which include-
Pitching Articles
Many blogs or online publications publish the post which you pitch to them, so make sure that the site is also relevant to your work and includes a link that traces back to your company, and make sure to accept or exchange money while doing it.
Competitor research
Check out other sites or pages which are your biggest competitors and find out how and what they are doing like where they ate acquiring links from or which site would allow a hyperlink and try to do it better than them.
Helping reporters
You can offer a quote or information on the area in which you have the expertise to the journalists who often request insights from the industry experts and most probably, they would link back to your website in their article which can help your website to develop even further.
Conclusion
SEO can be very important if you have a website and you want to grow it and make it successful, but you have been unable to do so. This article gives a detailed explanation of everything you would want to know about SEO and we hope that it can help you to get your website to grow even more.
