Search Engine Optimization

What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization(SEO) is a technique of making your website or any content rank higher on search engines. The key difference between SEO and paid ranking is that it SEO deals with natural search results which means you don't pay for ranking. In other words, SEO is using your skills and creativity to optimize online content for search engines. Lets understand this better with an example. When someone searches for say, 'Javelin' on Google, they are probably looking for information about the sport, news related to the it, or maybe they're just trying to buy one. If you have a article related to Javelin, you'd want people to find it. For this to happen you have to rank it above all other articles. Now this is not easy but that's what SEO marketing is all about. In this article you'll understand what SEO is and how it works.

Advantages of SEO

Search engine optimization is an important aspect of online marketing because search is one of the primary ways that users traverse the web. Search results are given in an ordered list, and the higher a site can rank on that list, the more visitors it will receive. For example, the top result for a normal search query will receive 40-60% of the entire traffic for that query, whereas the second and third results will receive substantially less traffic. Only 2% to 3% of searchers go past the first page of results. As a result, many companies and website owners may attempt to manipulate search results so that their site ranks better than their competitors on the search results page (SERP). This is where search engine optimization (SEO) comes in.

How Search engines and SEO works

When you use Google (or any other search engine), an algorithm works in real time to offer you the “best” result that the search engine considers. Google specifically analyses its database of "hundreds of billions" of pages with its algorithms to find a set of results that best match your search. There are three main criteria that search engines evaluate to determine how a site should rank:

• Content and relevancy: This is the most important part of ranking higher than others. Search engines analyze the content of a webpage to determine if it would be relevant for a given search query. A large part of SEO is in creating content that is targeted towards the keywords that users are searching for. Using relevant keywords also is a widely used practice.

• Links: Links from other websites play a key role in determining the ranking of a site in Google and other search engines. Sites that acquire links from many other sites gain authority (called "PageRank") in the eyes of search engines, especially if the sites that are linking to them are themselves authoritative.

• Page Structure: Another major component of SEO is page structure - how the HTML code is structured can impact a search engine's ability to evaluate a page. Including relevant keywords in the title, URL, and headers of the page and making sure that a site is crawlable are actions that site owners can take to improve the SEO of their site.

There's a lot to learn about SEO, but it can be totally worth the time and effort. Those three steps are crucial when it comes to SEO. I hope you enjoyed this little introduction to SEO.