SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. This is a strategy of digital marketing that primarily focuses on the presence of the website in search results and search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, and many more. There is a lot of thought process behind the idea of Search Engine Optimization and there are a lot of tactics that are employed by marketers to make their pages rank up on the search engine.
The search engine that you use to find out the queries related to your daily life and the current affairs surrounding you, does not randomly take pages out of the blue and present them in front of you to satisfy you with an answer to your question. It has an algorithm that is tasked with a job to present you with the best pages out of millions of others it has indexed for a particular subject. The algorithm puts forward the most appropriate pages in an attempt to best answer your queries.
In simpler words, the whole process of SEO involves the making of certain changes to the design and content of a particular website to make the website more attractive and reliable to the search engine algorithm.
Why is SEO important to Search Engines?
Why does a search engine really need SEO in the first place is a common question which crops up during discussions? There is a possibility that you might easily go on and start to use yet another search engine. The users are not using search engines as a subscription service for which they need to pay. But there is someone who pays to keep the search engines running and they usually make their money back by advertising.
The page which is delivered to the user they enter a query in the search box is known as the search engine results page. It contains a unit of results which are called the “organic results” as well as the series which is called the “pay-per-click” (or PPC). The process of SEO influences the organic results, whereas the PPC ads are the ones that are paid for.
The occupation of any position on the search engine cannot be paid off and locked from Google. However, the ads which are plugged into the page are how they usually make their money. The better the results delivered to the user, the better are the chances of an increase in traffic of the search engine. The more people make use of the search engine, the more money it makes.
How does the process of SEO?
The search engines contain units called spiders. These spiders can collect all the different kinds of information about your website and also the different web pages that make up the website. This makes the spiders determine when to serve a user with a page from the website. These units collect information such as the speed of the website, the title tags used, internal linking, backlinks, social signals, and some other information. There are over 200 ranking factors on Google that are used by algorithms present in the Google Search Engine. There are several factors and actions to consider to make your page rank well in the search results.
The SEO tactics and working mechanisms can be broadly classified into two categories:
- On-Page SEO: The strategies which work and happen on your website Internal such as content placement, Sitemap, robot.txt and many kind of internal process are called on-page SEO strategies. These usually contain the usage of proper title tags, content, the speed of the site concerned, the page URLs, the image alternate tags, the internal linking chains, and many more. On-page boost your website and very effective. If you are doing On-page very consistensly than you will get awesome results on Search Engines.
- Off-Page SEO: The strategies which work and happen to your website without open admin pannel are called off-page SEO strategies. These are almost entirely based on the links to the concerned site from other sites and advertisements on other sites. Off Page SEO means if you are working on the website without open the website interface or admin pannel, means which kind of technique such as Link Building, Article submission on major blogs, Top Quality backlinks and Search engine submissions etc.
Both the mechanisms and systems work together for a particular goal. They try to make your site more friendly and trustworthy by making the pages rank higher up in the user’s searches. The Search engine Crawlers might see how friendly the website is and this will make sure that the website ranks well among the different searches.
One needs to always keep in mind that these procedures are not carried out by humans, rather these make usage of bots powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning to carry out the operation. So, with the usage of these bots, comes a few limitations. They are not as receptive to the content and comprehend the same as humans do. They usually crawl through the code of the website. This only makes the fact true that they cannot see images, videos and nor are they impressed by any flashy design jobs and audio clips integrated into the website.
How long does it usually take for SEO to be effective?
It usually depends on the kind of website and the type of Search Engine Optimization in question. Only the Engine’s parent organization has the information on how the algorithm works. The organizations usually come out with new and effective updates which tweak the working of the algorithm. These prevent any person or organization with a website to gain an undue advantage by breaking the algorithm.
The truth about the duration of a particular SEO is that it may take as long as it takes – maybe a few weeks to a couple of months, everything depends on the strategy applied. If there is anyone out there who researches and does even the slightest of tweaks, it may be enough to bump a long-standing page off the perch of the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).
How Does SEO Work?
The Internet has made life easy for everyone and put everything at the tips of our fingers. The world is now only a couple of clicks away from information on almost everything. When the world needs information, products, and services, they go online.
When you thought of searching about anything on a search engine (simply Google: The most used search engine), there are high chances that you have clicked on a search that is among the first ones on the SERPs. In case you did not find the content that you were looking for, you probably went back and continued the process of scrolling until you get the information you intended on getting.
In case your site is not at a proper level of optimization, it will be safe to assume that you are usually coming to only the first page of the branded search queries, but depending on the name of the business, some changes may not even be the case.
For example, for people who have no idea of your existence but they are looking for someone with characteristics and attributes similar to you, you will not even be getting a chance to tell them why you are better than the rest of the competition in the marketplace.
This exactly means what you are currently imagining. Without the existence of the process of SEO, you are simply giving away the leads to your website.
SEO Factors That You May know about Search Engine Optimization.
Before we look at the specific factors on which SEO trends depend, we need to keep in mind that these factors change a lot, so the correct combination and correlation among the factors go a long way in the best optimization of the search engine. The content which is relevant and optimized to the extent possible always wins.
- Keywords are always critical but the context is also as much important if not more.
- The content should ideally include titles rich with keywords, good and clear meta descriptions, better alternate attributes, ideal H1 tags, and the presence of proper URLs.
- Google, the most used search engine currently used by the world says that the length of the content matters a lot, but what matters the most is the relevance of the article.
- Good metadata is essential. Metadata is the information that appears below a particular search result and indicates the user of the information they will find on the page. The better the metadata is, the better will be traffic on your page.
- The User Interface and the User Experience usually impact the rankings. The key to a good user experience is the good speed of scrolling on a particular website.
- The site should be easy to navigate through.
- Engage with the mobile version of the website as well. In 2018, Google had decided to move from mobile to mobile-first indexing which leads to the search websites now being ranked according to the mobile versions.
Conclusion
Optimizing your website properly for search engines is not as big a task as it seems on paper. With a bit of web strategizing, it is usually quite easy to execute and one should essentially be looking to change and work upon chopping and changing the optimizing procedure quite frequently. This will help you keep up with the global search engine optimization changes and always rank near the very top of the search engine result pages and this will help to increase the number of traffic on the website which is ultimately the result intended to be achieved.
