An introduction to SEO

SEO is an acronym that stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is a practice of making more efficient the websites or webpages to enable them to stand in a higher position of rank in the top results of a search engine such as Google (the best and most popular search engine), Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, AOL.com and what have you.

SEO is a fraction of search engine marketing which gives the site the access to be found by a search engine and also ranks high the entering of keywords or phrases in the result page of the search engine.

A properly designed SEO strategy draws traffic of customers to the web page, thereby facilitating good sales and revenue generation. SEO works to improve the ranking of organic search results.

SEO works through the search engine. The search engine does the function of using its crawler to gather information pertaining a content from the internet to dish out the best answers.

The search engine identifies the answers to the query and shortlists them according to the quality and importance of the information.

Research and studies have shown that the first content of a search engine result page gets more clicks. This gives more credence to the value of optimization.

So SEO has to do with making sure that the webpage is accessible, has a good user interface (UI), technically balanced, uses familiar words when typed in the search engines, useful and quality contents to provide an answer to the user’s questions.

Division of SEO practices

• On-page SEO: They are the activities that are being done in the actual websites to enhance the organic nature. The site is optimized to effect an improvement on the structural quality and relevance such as infusing keywords in the right quantity, inserting internal links, technical auditing, designing a customized URL structure, internal navigation and most importantly providing quality content for the user.

• Off-page SEO: It is the link from other websites and marketing activities coming outside the actual webpage in which all tilts towards enhancing the organic structure. Getting a link from other reputable and quality websites is a credit because it is a factor used by search engines to promote good ranking. Off-page activities can as well be in the form of commenting on a post, liking a post on social media and giving an answer to customers’ questions.

Features of SEO

• Optimized URL design: Uniform Resource Locator is an important part of the SEO structure because it enables the search engine to know what a page is all about and also the link through which the search engine finds the page of information.

• Presence of an optimized internal linking design which enables the search engine to know the pages of a site that is best to answer a query.

• Presence of optimized Title Tags, Meta Descriptions and Alt Tags

• Speedy loading of pages which should be a credit and a good user interface

Benefits of SEO

1. Search engine optimization brings about an increase in a website’s traffic.

This is because the first content of a search engine result page gets more clicks. Thus can foster ranking which would invariably result in more traffic driven to the website.

SEO also creates meta description, keywords and title tags which displays in the results of the pages thus culminates in higher click rate; thereby leading to more traffic drive on the site.

2. Quantifies the Return on Investment. Businesses always spend huge amounts of money on website designing and other marketing strategies such as advertisement campaigns.

This is often done without considering SEO and its less costly nature. SEO can attractively expose your products and services to the full glare of the customers where they are more likely not to resist the usage.

This could facilitate usage on the side of the customers which can as well increase traffic.

3. Increases awareness: The more your pages and content rank in high positions in the search engines, the more chances you have for users to see your content and associate with your products and services. This gives an exposure to the websites

4. Cost savings: SEO helps in marketing by targeting users who are actively looking for your products. The inbound nature of SEO makes it less economical business.

5. SEO helps to improve the user experience and usage of a website

6. 0n the area of completion, SEO can help put a competitor ahead of others because the search engine optimized websites tend to get more customers and more sales.