What is SEO? Definition, Examples and Strategies
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The internet has permeated our lives today so deeply, it makes our generation think that life is not possible without the internet. Many of us keep wondering how we managed to live all along without this technology and without Google! Though the history of the internet goes back to as far as 1950s, the commercialization of the internet happened not until 1980s and the internet came out in full swing during the 90s. Once the internet technology was commercialized and once it found its use in commerce and trade, many new opportunities and challenges emerged. To utilize these opportunities and to overcome the challenges many new industries emerged and one such industry is the SEO. This article will discuss in detail what is SEO, how it works, what are the benefits of SEO to a business and its website, key factors in SEO or key SEO concepts. This article in conclusion will help you appreciate why and how SEO has become a prerequisite for any brand's success today. In other words, you will be able to get a better perspective of the fact why no business (both online businesses and offline businesses) can dream of success without SEO and without good visibility in search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. Tighten your belts and get ready for a deep plunge into SEO.
Definition of SEO
SEO is the acronym for Search Engine Optimization.
SEO can be defined as a process or as a set of processes that helps a website improve its visibility in the organic search results of a search engine or search engines with the intention of increasing the percentage of targeted traffic that comes to the desired pages of the website and thereby improve the overall revenue and profitability of the website.
In other words, SEO makes your website or your brand more easily accessible to your target audience in the search engine results when there should be a competition for the given set of keywords that are targeted by a web page or website.
What Exactly Is SEO?
Though we have defined SEO in the above section, you may still not have a clear understanding of what exactly is SEO. To understand what exactly is SEO and its place in your online marketing efforts, you need to get the bigger picture first. If you want to implement SEO for your business website, it is essential that you understand this framework in which you need to operate. Without getting a clear picture of what you are trying to fight, you cannot make meaningful and coherent efforts that will help your website get the desired search engine visibility.
The Bigger Picture
The bigger picture has number of components, which we shall discuss below and see how they fit in to create the backdrop for SEO.
1. http://99webtools.com/ - Page Authority and Domain Authority Checker
Let us try to get a better understanding of this concept. If you remember, we did mention about the opportunities and challenges that resulted after the commercialization of the internet. When the internet was commercialized, it became a fancy idea to have a website for one's business. Initially, only big brands ventured into launching websites because of the expenses involved in launching and managing a website but soon cheap website building and hosting technologies emerged which made medium sized players join the band wagon. Today, most of the businesses that you come across regardless of their size and reach have a website. Everyone from a billion dollar aircraft building companies to sewage cleaning service provider owns a website today. When everyone wants to secure their space on the internet, it resulted in obvious competition in every niche market.
2. Typical Search Behavior of the Internet Users
There can be thousands of service providers in a given niche but the internet users behave in a very typical way. When an internet user makes an internet search online using a search engine, the search engine lists several thousand websites. However, the internet user tries inadvertently never goes beyond the first two pages of the search results and in rare cases to the third page of the search results. Only websites that are listed in the first ten or twenty listings of the search results page count. The user clicks on one of the websites listed in the first ten or twenty results hoping to find the information they needed. If the required information is not found, they come back to the search results page to find a better source. This process is repeated for a couple of times and if the user does not find satisfactory information, revises the search terms and makes a fresh search and repeats the entire process. In all these situations, the user never goes beyond the first twenty results and that is how you and I too behave when we are making an online search.
3. Different Types Of Internet Visitors
Not everyone that makes an internet search is planning to make a purchase. The internet users or visitors can be classified in to the following groups:
- Information seekers such as students, travelers, researchers, etc.
- Buyers that are in actual need of your products or services and they can be further classified into the following groups.
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Buyers with immediate need
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Buyers that are still in the initial stages of the buying cycle, comparing the features and prices.
- Existing customers of your brand that want to get in touch with you.
- Businesses that are trying to identify their competitors for a given keyword search.
A website visitor can belong to any of these segments. As you can see not all traffic will prove to be beneficial for your brand. You need to attract the right visitors to your website and that will include buyers with immediate need and buyers that are making their initial survey. This insight has a special significance in fighting the online competition and in increasing the ROI for your SEO spending which leads us to the next point.
4. Filtering The Actual Competition Online
As we have just noted, as far as online competition is concerned, anyone can turn out to be our competitor. So if you want to understand online competition correctly, it is vital that you appreciate the fact that anyone that competes for the same keywords is your competitor. For example, you might be offering SEO services and another website may not necessarily offer SEO services but offering information on what is SEO like in the case of a Wikipedia page. For all practical reasons, Wikipedia is in no way your business competitor but despite that it turns out to be your online competition because of the keyword targeted here in this case the common keyword is “SEO.” You should know how to filter out the unnecessary competition and gain visibility for the keywords that really matter the most and target visitors that have the prospect of becoming your customer.
So to tie the loose ends and to get the complete bigger picture:
The pressure of online competition is becoming insurmountable day by day, the internet users have a typical behavioral pattern as a result only the top twenty listings of the search results matter, not all visitors make business sense for your brand and there is a possibility that you are losing your energy in fighting with the unnecessary competition.
SEO tries to systematically fight each one of these hurdles that we have listed in the bigger picture and helps your website attract visitors that have the likelihood of becoming your customers and thereby making your brand remain profitable. To achieve this goal, multiple ranking strategies are implemented in conjunction with the latest search engine algorithms, in particular Google's ranking algorithm, which literally monopolizes the search industry.
When we are trying to understand what is SEO, it is vital to note that SEO is an ongoing process and not just a onetime endeavor that you can implement and forget. You will be required to have an in-house SEO team or establish long-term association with a trusted SEO service provider to take care of your website's SEO needs.
SEO - How It Works?
We have been trying to understand what is SEO all along. Now the question is how does it work? How exactly does SEO help your website get better search engine visibility?
When a user types a certain keyword phrase and hits a search button, the search engine tries to search its database to identify the best matching websites for the search performed by the user. Within seconds, thousands of results are lined up. In order to produce these results, search engines like Google makes use of highly sophisticated ranking algorithms or programs. Google for example makes use of more than 200 parameters to rank the websites. If your website meets the demands of these ranking criteria, it will be given prominence in the search results. The goal of SEO is to make your website compliant with the ranking algorithm and make your website look important in the eyes of the search engines so that they list your website in the top positions for the appropriate keywords. SEO tries to make your website search engine friendly so that it gets good search engine visibility.
Let us try to go through ranking process to get a better understanding of how SEO works.
1. The first step in SEO is keywords analysis. To attract the right traffic you need to first identify keywords that matter the most for your business. Keywords analysis is a scientific process, which takes into account regional user search patterns, linguistic differences and semantic nuances to identify the most accurate keyword phrases that will fetch highly targeted traffic to the given website.
2. The next step is to understand the competition in the given niche market. The competition analysis tries to identify the level of competition for each keyword in the keywords analysis report and tries to categorize them based on the competition. The idea here is to spot keywords that have lesser competition but still widely used in the searches so as to drive meaningful traffic to the website with lesser efforts. If you are going to target keywords with very high competition just because they are used frequently, you are going to invest a substantial amount of time and money to achieve the desired ranking goals.
nce you have the right keywords, all the subsequent efforts can be categorized under two major heads namely on-page SEO and off-page SEO.
a. On-page SEO
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When a website comes out of the web designer's desk, the web pages may not be in line with the required SEO standards. It is not enough that a website is aesthetically appealing but it is even more important that it is search engine friendly. On-page SEO tries to make your visually appealing web pages to search engine friendly pages. Web pages that are not search engine friendly will have indexing problems. Search engine indexing is the prerequisite for good search engine ranking. Only when your website is indexed completely, search engines will be able to assign its rank in the search results.
On-page SEO covers the following aspects:
i. Page title optimization
ii. Meta tag optimization
iii. Navigation URL optimization
iv. Alt attribute optimization
v. File name optimization
vi. Image description or caption optimization
vii. Content optimization
viii. Proof reading
ix. Page footer optimization
x. Internal referential linking
xi. Sitemap generation
xii. XHTML validation
xiii. Page speed optimization
xiv. Entire site review to ensure that there are no 404 errors within the site and
xv. Creation of mobile friendly versions of the web pages
b. Off-page SEO
Top search engines make use of another important factor to rank websites and that is the website's link popularity and website's authority in the given niche. Search engines do have a tough time in ranking websites. Google for instance wants to list the most relevant websites for any given website. In order to decide whether a website is important for a given search, Google tries to go by the website's popularity.
Top search engines make use of another important factor to rank websites and that is the website's link popularity and website's authority in the given niche. Search engines do have a tough time in ranking websites. Google for instance wants to list the most relevant websites for any given website. In order to decide whether a website is important for a given search, Google tries to go by the website's popularity.
Google assesses the popularity of websites at three levels one is the link popularity, social media signals and content. There is an ongoing debate whether social media popularity is truly a ranking factor and there are very good reasons for us to believe that top search engines could be using social media popularity as one of its ranking factors. Even if it were not to be so, you have nothing to lose. To be on the safer side, try to promote your website in the social media sites too. As far as content is concerned, it is not limited to the content that is posted in your website that matters but distribution of high quality content in various platforms that essentially point to your brand and website.
i. Link Popularity Building – Link building has come a long way. Search engines like Google constantly revises its policies on link building there are numerous ways to build the link popularity of websites. When building links webmasters need to exercise extreme caution because Google scorches manipulative link building efforts. Some of the common approved link building strategies include directory submissions, article submissions, Squidoo lens creation, hub page creation, infographic promotion, social bookmarking, press release distribution, link baiting and many more.
ii. Social Media Optimization - Numerous social media platforms are emerging constantly however to get started your website should be promoted in the top five platforms namely Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn and Pinterest.
iii. Content Marketing - fter the Google Panda 4.0 update content marketing is gaining centre stage. Content has been playing a very crucial role even before this update but the Google Panda 4.0 update came out very decisively on the importance of quality content. Websites and brands that are well-supported by wealth of good quality content got Google's special attention.
Sound SEO will take well-balanced on-page and off-page optimization efforts to achieve the desired ranking goals. Search engines pays attention to all the above factors in rating websites. The closer you get to the mark the greater the chances of getting better visibility in the organic search results. As you can see, SEO is not a ‘plug and play' kind of switch that gets you instant results. It requires a lot of efforts, vast field experience and most importantly, it takes time to achieve the ranking goals. There are no short cuts and if there are any they are sure to put you to serious risks.
Benefits Of SEO To Your Business Or Your Website
We have covered a lot of ground in trying to understand what is SEO and how it works. Now its time to understand the importance of SEO and the possible benefits of SEO to your website or business. You have reached this far, it shows that you are really serious about ranking your website and that you understand that it is not enough to have a beautiful website but it is even more crucial to have a website that performs well in the search engines.
#1. International Telecommunication Union (ITU) projects that by 2015 the number of internet users will hit the 3 billion mark, which is close 40% of the entire world's population. This figure also includes the slower internet penetration regions and the internet penetration level in the US has crossed 84%. It simply means that we are talking about a massive segment of prospective customers. All these people are your customers to at some level or the other. Here is your chance to tap the potential of a highly prospective segment of target customers. Not to make your brand accessible to this segment will certainly be a phenomenal mistake. SEO is certainly the best way to target this potential group of customers and without SEO you are simply doomed.
#2. SEO puts you on top of the competition.
#3. You will be able to filter out the unnecessary competition with effective keyword targeting which is part of the SEO process.
#2. SEO puts you on top of the competition.
#3. You will be able to filter out the unnecessary competition with effective keyword targeting which is part of the SEO process.
#4. Your brand can achieve sustainable online visibility.
#5. Increases overall traffic rate to your website.
#6. Generating organic traffic through SEO helps you save money on paid traffic generation methods.
#7. Helps in improving brand loyalty besides generating new business leads.
#8. Excellent way to improve your brand's online reputation.
#9. Ultimately by implementing SEO for your website, you will make more money.
SEO - Key Factors
There are certain key factors to SEO, which will help you, take your business to the next level and save your website from unnecessary risks.
#1 No shortcuts and quick fixes To SEO - Do not look for shortcuts, there aren't any. If someone is promising you overnight success with Google then you should know that it is a sure fire way to get your website off Google's listings. Keep your SEO efforts 100% clean.
#2 SEO is not just about link building - There is more to SEO than just link building. Link building is one of the important aspects of good SEO practices.
#3 Invest on content marketing - If you are planning long-term then invest on content marketing. Build wealth of content around your brand and you will certainly not regret. Make sure that all the content that you are posting online meet stringent quality standards and that they are resourceful to your target audience. Stay away from using shallow content that just targets the search engines and fails to interest your audience.
#4 Set up a blog - You should already be having one, if not set up a blog and populate your blog regularly with quality articles relevant to your niche market.
#5 Spend time on social media optimization – Social media marketing has become mainstream long time ago. If you have not been focusing on social media, it is high time that you started laying your eggs in this basket too.
#6 Never be over confident of your personal SEO capabilities SEO requires time and expertise. If you want to take out the competition, you will need lot more than just directory submission skills and article submission skills. Work with an experienced SEO service provider. It is worth investing on an SEO service provider because you will know for sure that things will be done correctly. This way, you will also free up your time to focus on other important business tasks.
#7 Plan for long term and be consistent When you are making your SEO efforts, it is vital that you plan for long term. Sporadic SEO efforts will only drain your marketing budget. Consistent SEO efforts on the other hand will have cumulative positive effect on your website's search engine ranking.
Conclusion
Every website is subjected to a very high level of competition. Surviving the online competition is a daily struggle and SEO will help you put up a good fight against the challenges. You should also keep in mind the fact that just as you are reading this, your competitors are busy making aggressive SEO efforts. What efforts have you taken? Where does your website stand? SEO is real and not without reasons all the top brands invest heavily on SEO. Your website too needs SEO and with sound SEO practices will prepare your brand for a glorious future.
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