What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
John has created a brand new website to talk about his favorite leisure activity, traveling. After building the website he started posting articles on different travel destinations providing tips and guides on traveling.
Even after writing a no.of articles he didn’t seem to get any traffic to his website. Therefore he consulted a few individuals to see how he can improve the website’s visibility and drive traffic to the website. He then learned about SEO and started using some SEO techniques to improve his website.
So, what exactly is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization is a digital marketing technique that improves the quality and quantity of a website. This increases the website’s visibility and ranking higher on search engines when people discover content online and drive more traffic.
Let’s first learn how search engines work.
How does a Search Engine work?
In order to make your website visible to the public it has to be discoverable by search engines, once the pages are properly adjusted the search engines will go through the following process to rank your web pages on search results.
🔍 Discovering: Search engines create programs on robots known as crawlers or spiders. These robots crawl the web to discover web pages or sites.
📈 Analyzing: When a page or website is first discovered the robots analyze the content. Then it determines what the page is about and for what topics it should rank.
🗂️ Indexing: Each page is cataloged and added to a massive database known as an index. This helps search engines quickly reference the data at any time and return matching results.
💻 Returning: When a user performs a search query, search engines determine the most relevant result matching the user’s query. Search engines rank them according to the authority of the website.
When we talk about search engines the first thing that comes to our mind is Google. The reason is that Google has a percentage of 92% in the search engine market. Therefore, it is important to consider and test out methods that work best for Google.
Google considers a huge amount of ranking factors when creating algorithms for SEO. These ranking factors may update from time to time with new trends but having an understanding of the basic factors will help in ranking your website on search results.
Why is SEO important?
In the earlier example, initially, John was not able to gain much traffic as his website was not optimized for SEO. He might have shared the travel stories on his social media platforms and gained a few page views.
By optimizing the pages for SEO he is now able to appear on the top results for certain keyword searches as billions of users browse the internet to find solutions to their daily problems.
SEO plays a major role in ranking your website in Google or any other search results. It is also one of the biggest traffic sources to attract potential customers or visitors to your website.
SEO takes a lot of time and effort. But once your website is ranked for certain keywords on organic search results it’ll be a free source of traffic to your website. It’ll keep generating traffic, unlike paid ads which will disappear once you stop paying for the ads.
Where can I learn more about SEO?
There are many blogs and websites providing information related to SEO and how you can optimize your website for search results ranking. Below are a few of the popular places to learn more about SEO.
Google Search Central: this platform enables website owners and webmasters to optimize their website visibility by providing a range of tools, guidance, and best practices for maintaining a website. It includes the Google Search Console tool which is a free tool that helps to monitor traffic and improve website performance.
Google Analytics Academy: Google offers a collection of online courses covering a range of topics on setting up Google Analytics to understand user behavior and analyze web traffic. These free courses can be accessed by beginners to understand the basics of web analytics or even by experts to learn the advanced features of google analytics.
There are other online platforms such as Semrush, HubSpot, Ahrefs, and Moz offering free and paid tools to analyze website traffic to better understand user intent.
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