What Is SEO and Why Is It Important?

 

What Is SEO?

SEO stands for search engine optimization. It is a way to boost the ranking of a website on a search engines' organic search result.

Basically, it is a way to improve a website so that it appears closer to the top positions in the search results of search engines like Google.

This is a great way to better the quality of a website by making it user-friendly, easier to navigate and faster.

 

Why Is It Important?

In today’s competitive market paid advertising, social media, and other online platforms can generate traffic to their websites but the majority of the online traffic is driven by search engines. SEO helps a blog, website or an online business gain more traffic from search engines.

This is because organic search results get more clicks compared to paid advertisements as organic search results appear to be much more credible to skeptical search engine users.Billions of searches are conducted on search engines daily.

People search for specific things and SEO helps to make sure that the service or products that are offered by a website using SEO appear on the top results of the result page of a search engine.

 

Why Do We Need It?

1. Most search engine users tend to click on the top 5 suggestions in the results section of the search engine. They are likely to not go beyond the first page. SEO helps your website in making sure that your website is on that list on the first page. It helps increase traffic on your page.

2. Most users trust search engines and having your website or page appearing on the top positions for the keywords the user is searching increases the credibility of your website.

3. SEO is also good for the promotion of your website. People who find your website on a trusted search engine are more likely to later promote it on their social media.

4. SEO is also beneficial for the smooth running of big websites with more than one authors. It can both increase the traffic from search engines and it can also provide a common framework or checklist to use before publishing anything on the website.

5. If two websites or online business is offering the same thing or a similar product that you are promoting, SEO can put you ahead in the competition. This is because a search engine optimized website has more credibility hence more sales.

 

The Main Stages of the SEO Process

When a search is run on a search engine the order by which results are displayed is based on complex algorithms. These algorithms take a bunch of factors into account before they decide on the order of the web pages to be displayed. SEO is a framework with rules and processes.

 

This can be broken down into 3 main types:

1.Technical SEO

This is the first stage in the Search engine optimization process. This has nothing to do with the actual content of the website or its promotion. It deals with the settings which one needs to configure to make the job of the search engine crawlers easier.

Once the user gets the technical SEO down correctly, they do not have to deal with it again. But if they don’t, they would have problems with indexing and crawling that would negatively impact their websites’ ranking.

 

2. On-Site SEO

This is the second stage and it has to do mostly with the content and other elements found on a page. The main focus of this stage is to provide search engine crawlers with enough signals so that they can understand the meaning and context of your content.

Search engines do not read pages like humans, they look for signals to figure out what the page is all about. In this stage, one will deal with website structure, SEO keywords, title optimizations, headings, internal links, image SEO, structured data makeup, and other techniques that can send the right signal to search engines.

 

3. Off-Site SEO

This the third stage and it refers to the techniques one can use to improve the position of a website in the SERPs or the search engine results page.This stage has to do with the promotion methods employed for ranking a website higher in the SERPs.

 

Good Content Is the Most Important Factor for the Success of Your Website

With or without SEO, the success of your website or online service depends on its quality. A website with good content can do well with or without SEO but if the website does not have very good content the chances of it succeeding are minimum.

 

Written by - Christeena George

Edited by – Adrija Saha