Back to Basics: Search Engine Optimization
Every time you come across a blog or create a website, you might have heard of the term called Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO is a vital tool used in digital marketing that creates brand awareness and establishes your company as a trustworthy authority in your field. However, it is a complex and versatile system that takes time to get a hang of. But if you are looking into boosting your brand image and making your services popular in the online market, then SEO is indispensable. So, let’s get started!
Search Engine Optimization is a practice of improving the visibility of a website in search. It is a digital marketing strategy focused on increasing organic traffic. To fully understand and succeed in implementing proper SEO, you will have to work along with other marketing disciplines- like content writing and social media, and also engage with different kinds of SEO specialisations like local SEO, technical SEO and SEO copywriting. But before moving on to SEO, we need to understand about search engines and how they work.
A search engine is a system that carries out web searches. Google, Yahoo and Bing are the major search engines that you might have heard of. However, when people speak of search engines, they usually refer to Google, as Google is the most widely used search engine, and which has the best market share. Google’s webmaster tools also aid in creating an improved online experience.
Each search engine uses robots called crawlers or spiders to discover new web pages. They analyse the data on the page and assign a rank. The pages are then added to an index and catalogued, so that when a user types in a query, the crawlers go through the index and return with the relevant results. The ranks are given based on a website’s authority, the presence of relevant keywords and frequency of usage.
So, what does a website seek to accomplish through SEO practices? The goal is to get your website to be recognised by the crawlers, and to show as high as possible among the organic results that appear on the search page. This is essential because over 71% of all the traffic to a website is from users who visit from the first page of the results. Thus, optimizing your site and ensuring that it occupies a good position is an important part of boosting website traffic significantly. This is done by including the right keywords and using other strategies that come under Search Engine Optimization.
Initially, pages were ranked based on backlinks and content. Many other tactics were also used, some of which could get your site penalized in the present scenario. These were called the black hat SEOs while the white hat SEOs were the best practices laid out by the search engines. Some examples of black hat SEO practices are – adding many keywords as white text so that search engines see them while the users don’t and also adding low quality, spam backlinks.
However, in the present times, search engines have advanced a lot. Search engines have now come to include social networks and social media as well, which include their own algorithms that help gain more visibility. This is also very important, as search engines like Google have started looking into branding and social media presence to determine web page authority. Therefore, SEO has become the need of the hour for companies and their websites.
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