A Brief Guide To What Is SEO?

The word SEO is common all over the internet, and most people do not understand what it is and how it is crucial for website owners. This article will explain what is SEO and highlight some important aspects of it. Read on;

What Is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization is a marketing area that deals with growing a website’s online visibility based on organic search engine results. It includes both the creative and technical elements that are needed to boost search engine rankings, drive traffic and make a site seen to search engines. SEO is a broad niche, and it deals with various distinct elements as it will be seen below. In simple terms, it is a marketing technique that requires you to structure your website in such a way that the search engines comprehend and want. The algorithms used to rank sites are always changing, and they need to be up to date if they are to rank well.

Why Is It Important To My Site?

A huge percentage of internet traffic is driven by search engines. Well, it is obvious that every time someone needs information or a commodity, they will go to a search engine such as Google and type in their query. While other sources such as social media can generate traffic, search engines are the dominant source regardless of what your site has to offer. One special thing about this traffic is that it is targeted in that it comes from people looking for what you have. Search engines are like the guides that direct people to your website and if you cannot be found, you will miss out on massive opportunities.

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Why Is It Necessary?

One important thing about SEO is making your site easy for both web users and search bots to understand. It has been mentioned that these bots are always changing and becoming more complicated, but they can still comprehend a web page if it is structured well. However, you should understand that the bots are artificial and might not see a web page the same way you see it. They look at the technical aspects, and you need to work on them. A search bot should not have any problem crawling and indexing your site if you want to rank well.

For instance, bots might not see the information contained behind online forms such as logins. Duplicate content is also a red flag since the bots are always looking for original content. Poor link structure and errors in the site’s backend code might make your site completely invisible. In a nutshell, getting the technical aspects of a search engine friendly web development is paramount for it to be crawled and indexed.

Keyword Research and SEO

Before you begin any SEO campaign, it is vital to know what you are optimizing for. This entails finding the terms that people will use to search your business, known as keywords. Doing so is not very simple since you will need to take several factors into account. First, look at how many people are searching using a specific keyword. Second, look at the relevance of the keywords since you don’t want your website to show up in results that are completely irrelevant.

Lastly, look at the competition for specific keywords since the more there is, the lesser the chances of ranking highly for the same. Luckily, there are several keyword research tools available on the web that can be used to find the right search terms for your SEO campaign.

SEO Success Factors

The factors that determine how you rank on search engines can be categorized into three namely;
• Technical.
• On-page.
• Off-page.

The technical aspects have been mentioned above and include anything that affects the performance, visibility and how the search bots access your website. They include indexing, crawling, page speed, site structure, URL structure, and others.

The on-site aspects refer to the content on your site, both the ones that are visible to users and the search engines as well. People need to be happy with what you offer since they will spend more time on your site and they will mostly look at the text, images, video and audio content on your site. The search engines look at the HTML tags and structured data among others.

The off-site aspects are all the things that affect your SEO but are not on your website. They are used to demonstrate your website’s authority, relevance, and trust. They include backlinks, social media marketing, user reviews, and user-generated content.

Trends In SEO

The SEO area is very dynamic, and some new things are expected to become the new norms in a few years. Recently, user experience emerged as a critical SEO factor, and this will continue to dominate owing to new algorithms created to analyze how much people spend on a site and update the rankings real-time. The rise of voice assistants promises to increase the prominence of voice search significantly. This search changes the whole turf since they are different from the text searches we are used to.

The SEO area is extensively wide, and the answer to what is SEO cannot be exhaustively answered in one piece. However, this article has hinted on some crucial aspects about it, and it should help you understand a few basics of this marketing technique.