There is no denying that today when the world is online, search engine optimization or SEO is crucial; for any online business’ success.
Every company that has a website must understand what SEO is and how it works. It will not only help you to expand the reach of your website but also the potential traffic it can generate for every kind of website.
This article is for everybody who wants to know what SEO is, how it works, and how it can help a website get more exposure, traffic and potentially new customers. Let’s begin with the basics – that is understanding what is SEO for online business.
What Exactly is SEO?
As mentioned earlier, SEO stands for search engine optimization.
SEO can be understood as the rules or the set of rules that can help in optimizing a website, to achieve better rankings in the organic results in search engines. It is a tested and one of the most effective ways to improve a website’s quality by making the website faster, easier to navigate, and user-friendly.
In simpler term, when you have a website and you want to get a higher ranking in search results, you will need SEO. A great resource for learning about SEO and content marketing is SERP University. Be sure to check them out.
SEO for Beginners
For beginners, the definition given could be slightly complicated.
To put it in easier terms: Search engine optimization or SEO is used for improving a website’s performance as well as the ranking in search engines, such as Bing, Yahoo!, Google or any such search engines.
We all perform multiple searches on Google every day and Google returns our query by suggesting us websites that it think can have the solution. The order in which the search results are lined up is based on a complex algorithm.
Such algorithm is also known as search engine ranking factors. These algorithms take into consideration many factors before deciding the sequence of the webpages.
Therefore, when you optimize your website with a good SEO, you will get an advantage over the non-optimized websites and your website will rank higher than them. For an indepth and easy to follow guide, I highly recommend reading the Essential SEO Guide for Beginners by Galactic Fed here.
Is SEO and Digital Marketing the Same Thing?
This is one of the most common question that can come to anyone’s mind. The answer is No! Digital marketing is the broader term and SEO is a part of it. However, that no way means that SEO is a small part of digital marketing! SEO can sometimes be a part of the overall campaign of digital marketing that generally includes many other things such as content strategy, PPC, social media advertising or promotion, etc.
Importance of SEO
The whole world moved online and right from selling to purchasing, people do them online. Therefore, in today’s market, SEO is much more important than anything.
Search engines are the place where almost every internet user uses to find answer and solutions. So, when you think about it million users look for answers or a solution for their problems and they will not stick around for long.
Whatever comes within the third or fifth position, usually they will click on it. Therefore, if your website is ranking higher and is one of the first five search results, the chances of users to click on your link will be much higher. To ensure that you need SEO!
Need more reasons to understand why SEO is important for online business? Here are few more reasons:
More than 65 per cent of the users of the search engines, click on any of the first five suggestions.
SEO is not just about the search engines, a good SEO will make sure that the users have a positive user experience and improve the website’s usability.Search engines are trusted by most users and when a website is listed in the top five suggestions, the users tend to trust the website more. Therefore, it’s an excellent way to build trust between your business and the users.
A good SEO can also improve your social presence. For instance, when users will find a website that is suggested by reputed search engines like Yahoo! and Google, people are more likely to recommend the website by sharing it on their social media platforms, such as Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, etc.
SEO can also help you in staying ahead of your competitors. If you and your competitor is promoting the same product or service, the SEO friendly website between the two will rank better and eventually get more traffic that will convert to potential leads, and finally resulting in sales.
Stages of SEO
SEO is a framework that has processes and rules, not a static process. SEO can be divided into three types for better understand.
1. Technical SEO
Technical SEO is the first stage of the process. As the name suggests, technical SEO is not concerned with the website’s actual content or any method used for the promotion of the website. Instead, it concerns itself with the required settings that are needed for the configuration, which can make the search engine crawlers’ job easy.
It is important because if your website is not properly crawled or indexed, your website can be affected negatively on the rankings.
2. On-site SEO
The On-site SEO is the second stage, which mainly deals with the website’s content as well as other elements.
Unlike the off-site and technical SEO, the primary focus of the on-site SEO is to help the search engine crawlers understand the website’s content and its meaning and context as well.
Search engines do not read a web page like any human being, they look for signals that help them to figure out the content of the web page; the on-site SEO provide such signals.
Further, on-site SEO an also help in improving the credibility and usability of any website.
3. Off-site SEO
Off-site SEO is the third stage, which offers other ways to improve a web page’s rankings. Off-site SEO is also known as link building and it uses a number of techniques to do that.
Off-page SEO practices include using the incoming backlinks. It will also help your website to rank higher.
Key Learning
The maximum traffic of the search engines go to the first five results. With SEO you can get your website rank among the top five! Not only the visibility will increase but your website will have more visitors too.
SEO should be your top priority if your business has a website. When you do it right, your business will be in a position for success with new traffic and potentially new customers.
Let me help you achieve your goals. With my Dedicated SEO Campaign, your business will gain the exposure that you need and get ranked on the first page of Google. Click here to learn more about how I can help your business grow.