If you research online marketing and the ways to do it, you will probably come to the conclusion that search engine optimization is one of the most talked about way of ma…
If you research online marketing and the ways to do it, you will probably come to the conclusion that search engine optimization is one of the most talked about way of marketing out of a bunch of others. “Content is king” is the statement you mostly see associated with SEO. However, this statement does not fully carry the idea of search engine optimization and what it can achieve to new business owners. SEO, SEO experts, SEO professional etc. why are all these terms so frequently used, and what do they really do for a business? Here is some information for you to understand what SEO is really all about.
What Exactly is Search Engine Optimization?
The processes and techniques used for making your website rank higher on search engines are called SEO or search engine optimization. Since there are thousands and millions of businesses competing to be on the first page of a search engine, they have to follow certain guidelines and improve their content to appear in top results. By improving and optimizing the content it does not only mean to write better words. All form of content such as images, videos, gifs, text etc. will be considered content, and will have to be optimized. SEO professionals have to be hired to work on this and much more.
Search engine crawlers are always frequenting the websites to see that the content on a particular website meets the guidelines of the search engine. Since these crawlers can’t understand videos and images, you have to use captions, transcriptions etc. to optimize your images and videos. Page titles also have to be improved by incorporating keywords in them. Keywords are the industry specific words that people are typing on search engines to search for your business. SEO professionals will also work on improving the coding of your website to reduce your web page load time.
Backlinks form an important part of any search engine optimization strategy. These are the links that direct back to your website from other websites. To do that, you have to create content, have it hosted on other websites and include your link in the content. You can develop B2B relations and ask bloggers and your business partners to include your website’s link in their content. The websites that host your link should have good reputation for search engines too – this is referred to as quality backlinks. Bad quality backlinks will push your website down in rankings.
Benefits of SEO
Search engine optimization has huge benefits for small, midsized and large businesses. The first target that SEO achieves for you is that it makes your business more visible on the internet. When you are doing SEO properly, your website appears in top results for users search for your industry/business related terms on search engines. This drives huge volumes of traffic on your website. The more traffic you have the more opportunities of conversions you will have.
Users consider the top results on Google or any search engine to be more reliable, and this is why they click on them the most. This means SEO will earn your brand reliability too. Since search engine optimization is all about optimizing your content, you end up with informative content that engages your website visitors. When visitors spend more time on your website, this sends a green signal to search engines, and they rank you higher than your competitors. Furthermore, the constant mining, filtering and testing of keywords refines the most working and potential keywords for your business. This means you can use only the working keywords in your marketing campaigns and leave out the non-working keywords.