What is SEO? How does it work? How does it help your business? Let’s find out together!
If you want to know how the process of SEO works then this simple guide is for You! When it comes to online marketing, one of the most frequently asked questions is what SEO means and what steps one is supposed to take to implement it the best way possible. Startups who have just finished their websites are often frightened by the tasks and challenges of search engine optimization. With our article today our definite goal is to alleviate these fears.
So in this post we are going to answer the million dollar question: What does SEO mean and how does it works? We will go through the basics of SEO to better understand how search engine optimization affects your business and we will check what you can do and what you must do for better results. Businesses, may I have your attention please? Here come the details!
What does SEO mean and how does it work?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. During this process you optimize your website to bring organic, or unpaid, traffic to your webpages. The point is to get more people to find your website when searching in Google without using any paid advertising. SEO involves certain actions when designing a website and writing content that makes your site more attractive to search engines (in most cases Google). You need to do all the steps to get your site to the top of the SERP that is for the Search Engine Results Page.
While search engine optimization may sound troublesome as it is a very complex process, understanding the basics is relatively easy. The purpose of search engines such as Google is to provide the best possible service to its Users. This means that you will find results on search results pages that are not only of high quality but are as relevant as possible to the users’ and visitors’ inquiries.
To do this, search engines crawl various sites to understand exactly what the given web page is about. This is how they help people find the most relevant results to their inquiries based on the keywords and phrases they type into Google’s search bar.
When crawling, search engines also look at other factors, like how easy it is to navigate on the site or how clear and legible the text on the site is. If Google finds that the website is user friendly, then it will be ranked higher that is in a more advantageous position on the search engine results page.
During the SEO process, businesses or online marketing consultants, SEO experts perform many tasks, take the steps that will ensure that a website will get the highest possible ranking in search engines for certain relevant keywords and phrases.
Search engine optimization offers many benefits to your business. By improving SEO, you can boost the visibility of your website in the search engines. It will also help you find more readers or users for your website and thus more potential customers for the products and services you offer. Creating more attractive, effective, and SEO friendly, optimized content increases your chances of getting more targeted, organic traffic to your site.
Why is it important to deal with search engine optimization?
Organic search and organic traffic are incredibly important when it comes to the performance of a business website. When talking about organic traffic, we refer to users who get to your website from Google’s organic results and not from paid ads. Organic traffic is the most important traffic. Clicks from paid ads, Facebook or any other social media platform are nowhere near organic traffic. Why is that so? Because organic traffic is targeted. If users have stumbled upon your website while entering their search query into Google, it means your website is useful to them, creates value for visitors. These visitors are likely to become your customers, readers, subscribers. Therefore SEO is a critical component that attracts Users and increases engagement.
Every marketer knows that Google owns the largest share of the search engine market, about 75%. The remaining 25% is shared between several competitors such as Yahoo, Bing, Ask.com, AOL and many more. Google is the world’s most visited website and most popular email provider. Not to mention that its subsidiary, YouTube is practically the second largest search engine in the world. It is therefore very important to follow Google’s policy since this company is the market leader.
Most people who have Internet access visit Google at least once a day for certain information. If a huge search engine provider such as Google regards your business as a trusted source and ranks your website at the top of the search results, it will always benefit your brand, your business. A lot!
Factors influencing Search Engine Optimization
Now that you know what search engine optimization means and how the process works, let’s take a look at the factors that influence SEO, affecting your website’s ranking.
It’s no secret that Google uses an algorithm to determine where each site is ranked in the search results list. Although the exact data and ranking factors of this algorithm are not known, it is widely understood what main aspects influence the ranking of websites. These factors include both on-page and off-page factors. So let’s take a look at these factors
1. Content Marketing
Not only does content play a significant role when a website is being crawled but it also helps you connect with people and users.
The higher the quality of your texts, the more relevant content is posted on your site, the more likely you rank higher on Google’s search engine results page. Similarly, the more attractive and effective the content on your website is, the more likely it is that your visitors will spend more time on your website and may even make a purchase or order your services.
The key to creating optimized content, for both search engines and users, is to create different types of content that are well-written and to choose topics that are most relevant to your audience.
Here are some types of content that you should focus on to improve your website’s search engine rankings:
-Blog posts and articles
-Social media content
-E-books
-Videos
-Infographics
-Podcasts
When creating content, it is very important to consider the SEO keywords and phrases that Users type into Google during their queries. By building your content around these keywords and phrases, you improve your chances of getting a better ranking on the search engine results page for those terms.
Another very important factor that influences your site’s ranking is the frequent creation of fresh content. This basically refers to how often a business generates brand new content on a website.
Although it takes time and resources to create content, it is ultimately VERY rewarding. Search engines love great content, and users need quality content in order to better understand the value of your business. It is a good idea to start your content strategy by creating blog posts and then develop your social media strategy.
2. On-page SEO
So on-page SEO factors are the elements that need to be optimized on the website itself. You have complete control over these search engine optimization factors, so you can continually and any time improve these components as you wish.
Here are some of the on-page SEO factors that help your website rank better:
Title tag: The title tag is one of the so-called meta elements. Meta tags are HTML elements that provide important information to both search engines and users. The title tag is practically the page title. The title tag should be up to 70 characters long and include the keyword or phrase around which you have built your content.
Meta Description: The meta description on a web page tells search engines a bit more about the content of the page. It should also contain keywords and phrases, and it is important for the reader to understand what the content is going to be about.
Subheadings: Subheadings make it a lot easier for visitors to read the content and even have the ability to improve the SEO of the page. You can use H1, H2, H3, H4 tags to help search engines better understand the structure of your text.
Internal links: Creating internal links helps search engines learn more about your site.
Image names and Alt tags: If you use images on your site or when writing blog posts, then keywords should be included in the image name and Alt tag. Again, this will help the search engines a lot to clarify your content as it also indexes images.
When designing your SEO strategy, it is important that you place your keywords and phrases in the right way, avoiding excessive search engine optimization. It’s worth knowing that Google penalizes websites for keyword stuffing.
Make sure that each piece of content you create focuses on only 1-2 keywords, as this is the only way to get your content focused and relevant. Trying to incorporate too many keywords in one article will negatively impact your search engine optimization efforts as the content will not focus on a particular topic.
Although content plays an essential role in search engine optimization, it is important to consider the structure of a given website. You need to design and build a website in a way that crawling is as easy as possible for search engines.
Another concern of websites is the mobile friendly or responsive design. As we know, a lot of users are already using their smartphones to browse on the web. Make sure that Users can navigate your site from mobile devices without any problems. A mobile-friendly website not only influences the user experience but also impacts the results of search engine optimization.
3. Off-page SEO
In addition to on-page SEO elements, off-page SEO factors also influence the ranking of your website. While you cannot keep these elements under your direct control, there are a few ways you can improve the chances that these off-page factors will also help your ranking.
So let’s see some of the off-site SEO factors:
Trust: Trust is an increasingly important component of the websites’ ranking process. Visitors’ trust is a very important factor for Google. One of the best ways to increase trust is to get external links from established, high quality websites.
External Links: One of the most popular ways to build off-page SEO is to “get” external links. Be careful, though, because if the links come from spammy sites (that is from web pages that are specifically designed to link to other sites in order to increase the number of external links), Google may severely penalize your web page. Instead, take the time to build sound links and create quality content to get more people mention your website in their articles or anywhere else on their website.
Social Media: Another important off-page SEO factor is social media activities, likes, shares. The higher the quality of the content you post, the more likely it is that people will want to share it with their friends. Of course, in this case you have no direct control over who will share what but the better content you create, the more popular your content will be on social media.
We can say that the more people trust the content you create, the more they will trust the search engine.
Black hat and white hat SEO
Black Hat and White Hat SEO? Yes! Let’s see what this means.
There are two approaches to search engine optimization: black hat and white hat SEO.
Some businesses are only interested in getting their website and content ranked as quickly as possible, so they can make more money in the short term. Black hat SEO means search engine optimization tactics that optimize sites for search engines only, that is they are not interested in how relevant the site or the content is to people. In practice, these businesses violate the rules of SEO in order to improve the ranking of their website as soon as possible.
Black hat SEO will result in pages that people find difficult to read, and they will be more like a spam site. Although these sites are ranked much faster in the ranking process than those who have been properly optimized, this is just an initial ‘victory’ because sooner or later Google will likely penalize these sites, and may even completely ban them from the list of search results.
All in all, this approach, aimed at getting results as quickly as possible without creating real value, completely destroys the chances of businesses to build a sustainable website that could bring in new customers in the years to come.
In contrast, white hat SEO, though slower, is a much more effective method of optimizing your site for search engines and, most importantly, building an effective business on the Internet. This approach to search engine optimization ensures value creation and quality content. In this way it ensures the attraction of organic traffic in the long run.
The goal of white-hat SEO is to create the best content possible, a website that is easy to navigate, and follows the rules of search engine optimization.
I think it is important to say again that while you can use black hat SEO tactics to speed up the ranking process, it is inevitable that search engines will eventually notice what the website owner is doing and ultimately severely penalize the site. The severity of the penalty depends on the severity of the offense but it can easily be the case that a site is penalized in a way that it will no longer be up and running. The only way to build a sustainable online presence for a business is to follow SEO practices at all costs and create effective content that visitors find interesting.
How do you get started with search engine optimization?
The SEO process is more like a marathon than a sprint as results take time, usually six months. The process itself is a lot more than just optimizing some of our existing pages at the very beginning. Unfortunately, there are many who do this and then forget about website optimization once and for all.
Marketers agree that the definition of search engine optimization itself is constantly evolving. A long time ago the best SEO strategy was to use a huge pile of keywords in a single page but those days are gone. There are several steps and methods in an SEO strategy that must be applied right from the beginning.
1. If you want to get started with the SEO process as successfully as possible, create up-to-date and relevant content.
2. While writing your high quality content, target the keywords you want to rank in the Google search results list.
3. Try to create content that will make other websites want to link to your web page.
4. Do your keyword research and track how the users’ search behavior changes in your niche.
5. Create evergreen content as well as up-to-date topics.
Final thoughts
Now that you know more about the process of SEO and how it works, review your website right away and make any necessary changes to improve your search engine optimization settings and thus your page ranking in search engines.
Remember, many factors influence the ranking of a web page, but the most important thing is to write valuable content that is interesting to your audience.
It is important to keep in mind that search engine optimization will take time and results will not be visible overnight. It will take about six months of hard work, but it’s totally worth it!
Do you want to improve the SEO of your website but need help? Contact us and we’ll help you improve your website’s ranking!
Sources:
https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2015/04/30/seo-basics
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/why-seo-is-important-for-business/248101/#close
https://www.lyfemarketing.com/blog/what-is-seo-and-how-it-works/
https://www.brightedge.com/blog/seo-marketing-strategy/
https://ahrefs.com/blog/seo-tutorial/