What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an online marketing process that focuses on getting organic and free traffic naturally from search results on search engines. Search engines use a complex algorithm to rank websites based on the quality of content published on a web page, user-friendliness and responsiveness. Sites and pages that meet these specific requirements receive a higher rank as compared to those that do not. Website developers and owners, therefore, have to work hard to ensure their pages meet all the stipulated requirements to advance their search engine rankings.
Why Search Engine Optimization Is Important
Optimizing your web pages and website for search engines can not only help your business grow but also make it possible to meet most of your business objectives. Billions of people rely on Google, Yahoo, Bing, and other search engines for answers and solutions to their queries and underlying problems. Search engines, therefore, make it possible for your target audience to find you or your website. One thing you need to know about search engines is that they display results based on a page’s rank on its database, with top ranked pages making it to the top page of a search result.
Some Of The Factors That Make SEO Essential Include:
1. Increased traffic: Pages and sites that make it to the top page of a search engine result get the highest exposure and have a higher click rate than those in subsequent pages. The increased exposure, therefore, helps your target audience to find your business/page fast, which translates to more inbound traffic from the search engines.
2. Improved website usability and user experience: Search engine optimization isn’t all about promoting your website for search engine crawlers and bots. Google releases updates on what needs to be done to improve website usability and user experience, which marketers also have to abide by to get higher ranks. Websites that are easy to navigate and use get more return visits that complicated ones. Thanks to SEO guidelines from Google Updates, Internet users get to benefit from more responsive sites and pages.
3. Returns on Investment and cost effectiveness: SEO strategies are very easy to track and monitor. This means marketers can track various optimization tactics used to see whether they are responsive or not. This ranges from off-site SEO to On-site SEO to help ensure everything performs optimally. As long as everything is handled as required and no black hat tactics are used, you can then be assured of very high returns on investment. SEO is also very cost effective as you never have to dig deeper than you can to fund these optimizations.
4. Increased brand awareness: Having your pages show up in the top positions of a search result increases brand exposure significantly. With your brand showing up on the first page of targeted keywords, you can then be assured of more traffic, sales, and trust from target audience and customers. In addition to this, most people want to be associated with a successful brand.
Main Stages Of A Search Engine Optimization Process
Search Engine Optimization Can Be Broken Down Into Two Stages:
1. On-site SEO
2. Off-site SEO
On-site SEO
This is the most important part of SEO. On-site SEO entails using specific elements to make your website easy to find, use, and content rich. Some of the essential aspects of On-site SEO include keyword research and optimization, title tags, header tags, internal linking, and body content. The content published needs to be highly informative, rich, and unique.
Off-site SEO
Off-page SEO mainly entails making your website and pages visible to search engines. It is more of a marketing strategy (link building) that seeks to boost search engine ranking factors. Some of the important elements used in off-site SEO include social media marketing and backlinks.
Link building is primarily needed as it helps improve visibility to search engine crawlers and bots. As long as your web content is visible to these crawlers, then the search engines can index parts of your website for easy retrieval. One of the best ways of getting quality links includes publishing articles in article directories, forums, and blogs as well.
The Difference Between Internet Marketing And SEO
Although these two are interconnected, SEO focuses on optimizing a page for search engines while internet marketing targets organic traffic and the human aspect. Most marketers succeed by combining the search engine and human element to help drive more sales. Good and quality content is, however, the driving force in all these, hence should be considered very carefully when optimizing your pages.
If you are looking for a better way to influence your target audience, you should then consider having your website optimized for search engines first before implementing any other marketing strategy.