SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation, and it describes the discipline of tuning websites to increase their visibility and rank. The process of SEO also involves improving the incoming traffic volume and website visitors. It also promotes online brand awareness and increasing the ranking of the website in the search engine results. However, SEO is a long-term investment, meaning the results will come gradually, but they’re most likely going to be the most lucrative revenue source.
Is SEO important for you?
Today, the market is more competitive than ever. On Google alone, users carry out millions of searches every minute. Each is looking for a solution to their problem. SEO helps your customers find you. The return on investment can be in the double digits if your site ranks high enough, which it can with experienced optimization.
If you optimize your site for search engines, its visibility and accessibility will be effected. SEO does not follow a push marketing philosophy, but rather a pull marketing; hence, visitors are directed to your site based on their search, while their online privacy is upheld.
Different SEO techniques can help the search engine match “text” or a string of words on your page with an entered query. When the user enters a search query, the search engine finds the related site and includes it in the top of the results. As the rank of the page increase, so does the number of potential visitors.
It is always profitable to have an expanded volume of traffic to your websites; this directly relates to increased conversions, subscriptions, and sales.
If implemented correctly, SEO can be the single most significant factor when it comes to internet marketing. It becomes especially useful for e-commerce shops and for targeting mobile users. Any website aims to create an impeccable online experience for visitors to turn them into customers.
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Mechanisms of SEO
It starts with a user turning to the internet to find a solution. The user would open one of the popular search engines, like Google, Bing, or Yahoo, and type some keywords or phrases describing the problem. Here the search engine commences with crawling through countless pages trying to locate the material that the user needs. All the possible matches get indexed and then returned and displayed on the search engine results page for the user. Different factors such as content, pertinence, and the currency of information all affect the order in which the search engine ranks pages.
Therefore experienced SEOs employ different techniques aimed towards both anticipating likely search keywords and adapting the webpage content favourably for search engine algorithms. However, search engines have different strategies for ranking pages. For example, Google uses factors that include backlinks, content, and Rank Brain.
Backlinks
A link from another website is a backlink. For the past three years, the prominence of backlinks in search engine results skyrocketed. Google, the most significant online search engine, has already confirmed backlinks as being one of the website ranking factors. Google algorithm operates by measuring the number of links to a website and the sources of those links. This method works like a voting system, how many trusted votes does the website receive. Therefore, it is not only the number of links the site has but the quality of those links. Do they come from an authoritative source within this niche or not.
Role of SEO in Content
How relevant is content when it comes to SEO. Well, knowing how indexing happens will help show the importance of content. Search engines use spiders to crawl and index websites across the internet. However, these spiders are unable to understand images and videos to determine semantic relevance; instead, it will rely on words i.e., content. Crawlers aim to index websites to return the most suitable solution to the query of the searcher, ensuring that the website is authoritative becomes essential.
To increase your rank organically, you would usually use targetted keywords throughout your content. Knowing how to do so naturally while discussing the particular material will give you the best performance.
RankBrain
Towards the end of 2015, Google confirmed that it is using a machine learning-based search engine algorithm. This artificial intelligence system was to improve Google’s ability to handle unprecedented search queries. Google claims that RankBrain is the third most important factor in ranking.
RankBrain tries to map queries into words or groups of words that have the highest possibility of matching the query. It also attempts to guess what people mean and record results, which adjusts the results to provide more reliable answers.
SEO Tactics
Almost all SEO tactics can be sorted in two; those that adhere to Google’s Webmaster Guidelines are those that try to abuse them.
Adhering to the best practices and guidelines for search engines have a better long-lasting benefit on websites. These tactics are implemented with the end-user in focus rather than the search engine; ensuring that the most relevant and current content is delivered.
When you optimize your site for search engines, you are also improving its performance for all end-users, giving a better overall experience. When this factor improves, the bounce rate will decrease. Users will spend more time on the site, and the number of visitors and conversions will automatically follow. All these factors feed into the bottom line of the website.
Other SEO tactics try to abuse the guidelines and best practices in attempts of improving ranking. These tactics rely mostly on bypassing the algorithms, through various efforts, that include hidden texts and page swapping. These tactics will work for a while until they are heavily penalized once discovered by search engines. Penalties may include sanctions and ultimately a permanent ban for the search engine results page. Recovering from a penalty will take weeks and sometimes even months.
Today it is harder than ever to bypass algorithms and crawlers. Recent updates ensure all such tactics fail almost immediately. Google carries more than 500 annual algorithm updates all aimed towards preventing any abuse of the guidelines.
Choosing the right SEO Experts
If you are new website owner, all this information may sound daunting. Luckily, the internet has infinite information, guides, tools all relating to search engine optimization. SEO is an ongoing long-term investment and is not something that can be done overnight.
Depending on the type and size of the business, hiring consultants and experts is always an option. The bottom line here is that if your customers cannot find you, you’re missing out. Find the experts that help your customers find you on the first page of their search results.
