You might have heard of SEO before, but do not know what it is, exactly. Though SEO (search engine optimization) is a digital marketing tactic that has been around for a while, it’s still misunderstood by many business owners. And so to better understand this important and powerful tool, here’s my definition of SEO: SEO is a marketing strategy that helps increase the visibility of your website in search engines like Google and Bing.
What is SEO ( Search Engine Optimisation)?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of a website or webpage on a search engine results page (SERP) so as to make a company’s website more discoverable (i.e., on the first page/s), thereby driving traffic and sales. Tedious, involving technical and business decisions, and not guaranteeing results—it nonetheless provides lasting benefits.
SEO often involves the concerted effort of multiple departments within an organization, including the design, marketing, and content production teams. While some SEO work entails business analysis (e.g., comparing one’s content with competitors’), a sizeable part depends on the ranking algorithms of various search engines, which may change with time. Nevertheless, a rule of thumb is that websites and webpages with higher-quality content, more external referral links, and more user engagement will rank higher on an SERP
How Does SEO Work?
SEO works by making your website more visible in search engines, like Google, Yahoo and Bing.
When you type something into a search engine, the engine scans all of the pages it has in its index and tries to return the most relevant results. So how does it know what is relevant? The answer lies in the millions of bits of data stored in its index.
The information stored in this index makes up what we call the ‘knowledge graph’ and includes everything from who wrote a particular piece of content, where they work and where they are located. It also includes content recommendations based on your own browsing history and previous searches.
How Does Google Work?
When building a website, it's important that you have some understanding of how Google and other search engines work. It may seem complicated at first, but once you have a grasp of the basics, it becomes much easier.
So How Does Google Work?
Google uses bots to crawl pages on the web, going from site to site, collecting information about those pages and putting them in an index. A search engine needs two key ingredients for this system to work:
A huge database of information about the web
An algorithm that can surface the best results for any given query
The first part is relatively straightforward — Google has an army of crawlers (we call them spiders) constantly visiting new and updated pages to add more data to that massive database we mentioned earlier. This data warehouse is called the index.
For example, if you were in charge of this process, you'd start by creating an empty index (a fancy word for database). Then you'd have your spider program visit one page at a time, extracting all the words on each page (known as "indexing"). You'd then go back to the index and create an entry that lists all the words on each page along with their location.
Why Does Google Show This Search Result, And Not Others?
Google's algorithm is a complex beast. It changes all the time, and what worked last year might not work this year. But there are some high-level fundamentals that don't change. Here's how Google works:
First, it tries to understand what you're searching for. Google does this by scouring its index of hundreds of billions of web pages. The index is essentially a huge database of everything that Google knows about the internet — each word on every page, the location of every image and video and so on.
Second, it tries to match what you're looking for with what's in its index. This is where all those factors come into play. Some of them are more important than others — Google has said that links are still its top ranking factor, but it also looks at things like your search history, location and social media usage as part of its calculations.
Related Topic: Draw More Traffic To Your Site With These Tips
Third, it ranks web pages in an order that it believes is most relevant to your search. Its algorithm uses hundreds of factors to decide which pages match your query best and how they should be ranked against one another.
So How Does Google Figure Out What Pages to Return For What People Are Searching For?
The goal of search engine optimization is to have the search engine spiders not only find your site and pages but also specifically rank the page relevance so that it appears at the top of the search engine results. The process of optimization is not a one-time process but requires maintenance, tuning, and continuous testing and monitoring.
So how does Google figure out what pages to return for what people are searching for?
That's where web crawling comes in.
Web crawlers look at web pages and follow links on those pages, much like you would if you were browsing content on the web. They access those servers and then index everything they find without bias.
The crawlers bring all those 1s and 0s back to the search engine to build an index. That index is then fed through an algorithm that tries to match all that data with your query. That algorithm is constantly improved so that it can provide better results for searchers — but it's never perfect.
How Can I Make My Website Rank Higher in The Organic Search Results of Google?
There is no easy way to guarantee a high ranking on the major search engines. However, search engines like Google do have a set of guidelines for webmasters to help them reach higher rankings.
These are the most important factors they consider when they rank a website:
Relevance - Your site should be relevant to your readers. If you write about health-related topics, your website should not be related to technology or software. The algorithm detects the relevance between your content and keywords, so make sure that everything is related to each other.
Quality - You should have quality content on your website and all around the web if you want to get ranked high by Google. Make sure that your information is unique, informative and reader-friendly.
Domain age - It's very difficult to get a good rank in search results if your domain name is brand new because Google wants to serve up older results first. However, as your domain gets older, you can expect a better rank for it.
Links pointing back to your site - The more links you have coming from other websites, the higher you will rank in search engine results. You can use link building strategies (like blog commenting and forum posting) to get backlinks for free or you can pay for ads that automatically creates them.
How To Rank Higher in The SERP ( Search Engine Result Pages)
There are a lot of factors that go into ranking higher in search engine results pages (SERPs), but there are some main factors you can focus on to get your site ranking as high as possible.
Make sure your site is highly relevant to the keyword(s) you're targeting. The more relevant your web page is to the keywords, the higher it will rank.
Create a descriptive title tag that accurately describes the content on that page. Title tags are generally 50-60 characters in length and should include your keyword phrase.
Create an accurate description of your page that includes your keyword phrase. Meta descriptions are generally 150-160 characters in length and provide information about what's on the page to both users and search engines. They should include your keyword and be written for humans, not search engines.
Use headings, subheadings and bullet points to structure your content so it's easy to scan. This makes it easier for users to find what they want while also making it easier for search engines to analyze your content.
Include links in your content that direct people to other areas of your website or to sites outside of yours, such as a supplier or vendor partner's site.
Search Experience Optimization: The New Trend For SEO
The digital marketing world is fast paced and trends change quickly. We’ve seen many trends come and go in the last few years. This is where search experience optimization comes in. Search experience optimization (SXO) is the combination of SEO and conversion rate optimization (CRO). And it’s the next big thing in digital marketing.
What Is Search Experience Optimization?
Search experience optimization is the combination of SEO and CRO, or the process of improving your website to satisfy both users and search engines. It focuses on optimizing a website for user intent, meaning it takes into account a user’s intent behind their search query to deliver a satisfying result that meets their expectations.
SXO takes into account why people are searching for certain things, how they want to consume this information and what action they want to take after seeing a result. It gives marketers more insight into what drives a person’s behavior during their search journey and how to reach them in the best way possible.
It works on multiple levels. It can help you create better content that satisfies your target audience while also helping you rank higher in organic search results, which will bring more visitors to your website.
Conclusion
Becoming a valuable contributor is never easy, but the basic concept remains the same: create quality content with an audience in mind, and you'll be rewarded. But with that said, it is important to remember that the web is still a volatile place. Google's algorithms are always undergoing changes, and you have to have the right information and strategies in order to evolve along with them. This should keep you ahead of the curve when it comes to utilizing SEO methods for growing your audience, as well as making sure that your efforts won't mean nothing if Google changes its algorithm again.
I hope now you have a better understanding of what SEO is and why it's so important. But don't worry about it too much because there are tools to help you with your SEO—I'll list some at the end of this post. Hopefully, this will help you better understand and improve your website.
