Search Engine Optimization

Do you know how many blog posts are published every day?

It’s quite breathtaking. According to Worldometers over 4.4 million blog posts gets published every single day. Have a look on live blogging statistics.

Now it sounds difficult to stand out but not impossible to make one’s blog successful. This is where SEO falls in.

What does SEO mean?

Many of us know it stands for Search Engine Optimization. Ranking high in the unpaid section on any search engine. The search engine would show it on top results to the searchers if your online content is well optimized.

Let’s try to understand better.

SEO- Everything revolves around the following three things:

  • YOU
  • SEARCH ENGINE
  • SEARCHERS

Now, if your content is about how to make delicious apple pie and you want your search engine (Bing, Yahoo, Google) to show it on top results for “apple pie”. One has to make content such a way where search engine will most likely include it on top results for the particular keyword search.

The following are three parts to know the true meaning of SEO:

  • Traffic Quality: Attracting visitors who are authentically interested in your product/service offerings. It is possible to attract any visitors but if they happen to visit to your site for being wrongly understood by search engine (say, Google) that is, traffic but not quality traffic.

For example: You sell top quality cherry but Google got the traffic for Cherry Shoe polish this is not quality traffic.

  • Traffic Quantity: The quantity of traffic would become better once we have right searchers clicking on result pages of search engine (SERPs-Search Engine result pages).
  • Organic results: Traffic for which one doesn’t pay is known as Organic traffic. Unpaid results are known as Organic results.

Paid search is also know as PPC(paid per click) or CPC(cost per click).Unpaid is Organic search or natural search.

Why is SEO important?

About 3.5 billion searches are processed by Google every day, that means 40,000 searches are processed every second. This means there are millions of people searching millions of things. This is traffic but we need specific and high intent traffic for our business. SEO can help you to get such traffic to grow your business.

For example: Let’s say you’re a gold jewelry seller and decided to put your advertisement for gold necklace on a billboard so that anyone passing by sees your ad. Now with this we are not sure how many are genuinely interested in your products and the probability of ad getting noticed will also be low. But if the same thing is on online, the moment one types “gold necklace” there is a very high probability to increase your sale for the season because the searchers are clear and genuinely interested to buy.

One must understand how SEO works before trying to start anything.

How does SEO work?

Let’s take Google, about 90 % of searchers use it. There is a google crawler which is programmed to crawl over millions of contents and gather information. Bring them back in the form of 0s and 1s to search engine in order to build an index. This index is now an input to the Google algorithm which will try to match that data with your query (your search on google).

Categories of SEO

SEO has two categories:  On-page SEO and Off-page SEO.

On-page SEO (also known as On-site SEO)- optimizing website elements. It could be your headline, content, HTML page source code and structure of your page. A good on-page SEO not only helps search engines to interpret the page content but also helps users to understand about the page and if addresses their search query.

Making things easy for both search engines and searchers is the goal of a good on-page SEO.

  • Interpretation of a webpage
  • Is the page relevant to a search query or queries.
  • Ranking that page well on a search engine results page (SERP).

Off-page SEO (also known as Off-site SEO)-variables which are not in your  hand. Actions that are taken outside your website, those are other sources such as social network, other blogs etc.

One can optimize off-page ranking factors by linking or promoting your own website on reputable places it could be sites, pages or even influential people. Backlinks can indicate your content’s quality, a site will be ranked better if it has many high value backlinks. There are three main link types:

  1. Natural links
  2. Manually built links
  3. Self -created links

Let’s take a simple example to understand On-page SEO and Off-page SEO.

Assuming you own a High end/Luxury Saloon.

Case 1: Your saloon is clean, attractive and has all the equipment to serve a customer. But your saloon is not easily accessible by the customer because of the pathway. Due to this customer might not come to your saloon.

Similarly, if we don’t optimize our page around on-page SEO despite of good page content it is unlikely to get point to our page.

Case 2:  Your saloon is easily reachable by customers. But if your saloon is untidy with no proper equipment will never attract customers to your saloon.

Therefore, both on-page and off-page optimization is important.

The common goal of both On-page SEO and off-page SEO is to reduce the Bounce rate.

When a visitor visits your site and leaves instantly is Known as bounce. For example: A visitor stays for a very shorter duration on your webpage or visited only one out of many is considered as bounce by Google. The higher Bounce rate can worsen the page rank.


Posted

in

by

Tags:

Comments

%d bloggers like this: