Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the act of getting your (organization’s, business’, brand’s) website or webpage to appear at the top of search results and to rank higher in search engines like Google or Yahoo. Ranking higher would lead to more traffic from users. If you are looking to promote your website and generate more user traffic and clicks, paying attention to SEO is something worth your while. If done right, search engine optimization can make your brand or company’s website reach the top form.
In search engines, the results page always shows paid ads at the top, followed by organic search results. Organic search traffic refers to the traffic that comes through SEO, and is different to paid search traffic (which is often referred to as Search Engine Marketing or SEM; or Pay-Per-Click or PPC).
Why is SEO Good for You?
When it comes to online marketing, you need to have your SEO techniques ready to go. Why? Because online search is the first preferred way to navigate the World Wide Web by users, and if you make sure you use the opportunities available to increase your SEO, you can dramatically increase the amount of user traffic your website gets on the internet.
Over 2.5 trillion searches were conducted worldwide across popular search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, Yandex and Baidu, as revealed in a 2014 study. For most websites and pages, organic or natural traffic i.e. traffic that comes from search engines adds to most of their total traffic.
Since search results are presented in an ordered list, the higher up in the list you get, the more likely you are to receive a click from a user. Humans live by the rule that convenience is most important, and so, in typical fashion, the first search result on a page stands to receive 40 percent to 60 percent of user traffic, which significantly decreases when you go down the line. The percentage of users who go beyond the first page of results are a measly 2 - 3 percent. Even a little bit of improvement in your search ranking can create a huge change in terms of user traffic for your site.
Clearly, some manipulation is involved in getting your search result to the top of the page (and is done typically by owners and webmasters), for companies. This is where SEO throws its hat in the ring.
How does SEO Work?
All search engines have a set of rules or an algorithm to determine which pages show up as search result hits. With time, these rules have become increasingly complex, leading to thousands of considerations and ranking factors being put in place to determine which page is displayed at the top. Of the thousands of these, the nexus exists around three core metrics, which encompass the rest of the sub-metrics.
Rich links
Your rank on a search page depends on links from other websites. The quality of those websites determines the quality of the backlink, and such a link is seen as a testament to the quality of your website as well. This is because of the common perception that website owners do not link poor quality websites in their own websites. In the ambit of search engines, those websites that earn quality backlinks from other websites gain authority over others. This is known, in technical terms, as PageRank.
Good Content
Content is king - no matter the backlinks your website receives, they have to be backed by quality content that directs users towards positivity regarding your product or service and also provides a rich user experience. Search engines analyze content on websites as a part of determining PageRank and relevance. This means that content must cater towards particular keywords in order to generate more hits and appear more relevant. This is why website content writers are given keywords to include in their articles - these keywords are always words that search engine users employ when carrying out queries on the internet, so having them in your content will lead to search hits.
Structure
The structure of your webpage is also a key component that is judged to determine your page’s rank on the search hits list. Given that webpages are written in HTML, how said HTML code is constructed can affect the search engine’s ability to evaluate the page. Site owners take it upon themselves to include keywords in titles, URLs, headers and content, and also take steps to ensure that a site is crawlable.
The process of Search Engine Optimization involves optimizing all of the components mentioned above of search engine algorithms in a bid to rank higher on the search results page.
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