One of the things you are bound to hear a lot when you start a website or a blog is Search Engine Optimization(SEO). A quick google search of what SEO is might have left you a bit more confused- and for a good reason too. Search Engine Optimization is incredibly wide and most certainly, this article will not provide all the answers you need. In this article though you will hopefully get a quick guide of what SEO is, a few technical terms used in the industry and what you can do to use a little bit of SEO on your website.
What is SEO?
Simply defined, search engine optimization is the process of making the amount of unpaid traffic to your website the maximum by making sure that the site ranks highly on search engine results. When you look for something on a search engine such as Google, you commonly follow the results on page one, right? All the pages that search engines rank highly did something unique to be placed there and they most likely used SEO tools like KW Finder to help them achieve their high rankings. From an overall point of view, SEO is the collection of all activities done to make your content rank higher. How then do search engines rank these websites? You might ask. This next section offers a peek into the process.
How Do Search Engines Work?
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Search engines go through the entire internet landscape looking for content through a process known as web crawling. After discovering where content lies, the results are then scanned and organized in a process known as indexing. Finally, the search engine and the top 10 google searhces as of 2020 so far displays the results best suited to your request in a process called ranking. Higher ranked websites get a lot more non-paid traffic(also known as organic traffic) compared to lower ranked websites.
Why Is SEO Important?
As we have previously established, it is important that your website ranks highly to get more traffic. A point to note also is that although paid advertisements, social media and other platforms can draw clients to your brand, most of the online traffic is driven by search engine results. Aiming for organic traffic should be your priority since these organic search results appear more authoritative and receive more traffic. Optimizing your site for SEO will, therefore, give search engines an easier time in identifying and ranking your site better than the rest.
While SEO may seem to be a complex subject to many, understanding how it works may help build your site’s rankings and consequently your website traffic. Hopefully, this article has cleared some fog around SEO knowledge and you now have some fundamental understanding of what SEO is. If you run a small website, you might study a little bit more and even do the optimization yourself. Running a larger site takes a lot more technical knowledge, hence an SEO expert can be a great investment. Remember, the biggest goal of SEO is to maximize traffic to your site and as such, always look for ways to make your content better.
