SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization”. It can simply be defined as the process of increasing your online visibility when customers search for your product or service online. Expressively, it’s the practice of optimizing your website and its content to increase your chances of appearing in search engine results page (SERP).
According to research done, search engine optimization means taking a piece of online content and optimizing it so search engines like Google shows it towards the top of the page when someone searches for something. Unlike paid search Ads, you can’t pay search engines to get higher organic rankings. SEO experts have to do the necessary work which is the most significant difference between the two terms. SEO targets unpaid traffic which may originate from different kinds of searches, including image research, academic research, news research, and industry-specific vertical search engines.
What does SEO mean?
Let’s take for instance, I want to search for a cooking recipe online, I’d type “recipe for stir fry pasta”. If you wrote an article about making stir fry pasta, you’d want people to find your recipe. For anyone to find it, you need to rank above all the other websites with recipes of stir fry pasta. It’s not an easy task but that’s what SEO is all about.
As an internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work, the computer-programmed algorithms that dictate search engine behavior, what people search for, the keywords typed into search engines, and which search engines are preferred by their targeted audience.
SEO is performed because a website will receive more visitors from a search engine when websites rank higher on the search engine results page and they can be potentially converted into customers. As simple as it sounds, it requires a lot of action and time because it’s not a day’s job. There are some factors to be considered for an SEO to do well.
There are 2 core elements of SEO: On-Page SEO and Off-page SEO
On-Page SEO is about building content to improve your rankings. In essence, it means incorporating keywords into your pages and content, writing high-quality content regularly, making sure your metatags and titles are keyword-rich and well-written, among other factors.
Off-page SEO is the optimization happening off to your website itself, such as earning backlinks. This involves building relationships and creating content people want to share and it’s integral to SEO success.
It’s important to note that Google is responsible for most of the search engine traffic in the world even though there is always some flux in the actual numbers. But, regardless of what search engine you use, search results are constantly changing. So, how does Google determine which pages to return in response to what people search for? How do you get all this valuable traffic to your site?
Google looks out for pages that contain high-quality, relevant information about the searcher’s query which is why you must make use of good content to get a high traffic to your page. They determine “quality” by a number of means, but prominent among those is still the number and quality of other websites that link to your page and site.
SEO is a broad topic on its own even though it’s one of the digital marketing strategies. Share your thoughts about this in the comments below.
Trust me SEO is one of the best things to venture into as a marketer.
