What Is SEO?
Search engine optimization, SEO for short is exactly what the name suggests: it is the aspect of optimizing/tweaking web text, images, and videos to affect their organic search engine visibility.
Now, you may be wondering “Why? Why should I bother with SEO?” Well, one of the reasons why SEO is such an important aspect of website traffic and why search engine optimization is a big bucks business is as follows.
Optimizing Website Content
Optimizing your website content, i.e. optimizing your text, video, and image content affects how search engine spiders (not actual spiders but a generic term used to refer to search engines algorithms (called web crawlers) that periodically crawl, and index web-pages in order of relevance to search queries) view your website and the position they place it on their index. The more visible your content is to these ‘spiders’, the higher your website ranks on SERPs. The higher a page or content ranks, the more traffic it receives.
Search engine optimization considers what users search for (the keywords they type into their search boxes), how search engines index websites and the content therein, and most recently, how relevant and user-friendly content is to users and user queries.
In general, SEO involves optimizing your website design by making it easier for users to interact with content on various devices, using relevant keywords, creating links between your website and other relevant, high quality sites on the same topic, and the mobile friendliness of your site.
How Search Engines Rank Websites, and Important Ranking Factors
The World Wide Web is a vast information forest. Naturally, in a forest, it is easy to get lost: enter search engines. Using the forest as an example, search engines serve two major functions: create an index of all trees in the information forest, and provide forest visitors with a detailed path to the tree species they want. This sounds oddly technical so let us simplify it as follows:
Search engines use web crawler algorithms to craw all information placed on the internet and create an index. Then, when users use search engines to search for information, search engine spiders take the keyword, match it to information on their index, and return the most relevant information within a matter of seconds. To determine relevance, web crawler algorithms use many factors.
Important Google Ranking Factors
Google uses over 200 ranking factors; some of these factors hold more weight over others. In this sub-section, we review the most relevant ranking factors Google, and other search engines use to rank websites in 2017.
Conclusion:
Talk to an SEO professional about how ranking your website could pay off in more sales. SEO professionals will always offer a free consultation about your business. Most SEO professionals are also very passionate about what they do and are usually happy to give you advice before even suggesting paid services.