SEO is the acronym for Search Engine optimization. Fundamentally it is a set of practices that help to improve the visabality and positioning of a website in organic search results in search engines such as Yahoo and Google. Because organic search is the most valid process for people to find the content they want online, a strategic SEO strategy is crucial for improving the amount of traffic driven to your website.
To fully understand the importance of SEO, we can break it into three distinct parts:
Organic search results: these are the unpaid listings on a search engine results page (SERP) that the search engine such as Google has decided are the most relevant to the user’s search query. Adverts such as Pay Per Click make up a massive portion of a lot of SERPs. Organic search results differ from these ads because their position is based on the search engine’s organic ranking algorithms and not the paid for advertiser bids. It’s not possible to pay for your website to rank higher in organic search results.
Quality of organic traffic: this is how relevant the user’s search terms are to the content that exists on your website. Let’s say visitors are visiting your site because Google tells them you sell Apple iPads but in actuality you’re a farmer that sell apples, those visitors are going to leave your site quickly making you no sales. Quality visitors includes only traffic that is genuinely interested in the products, service or information that your website offers. Effective SEO activity capitalizes on the search engine’s effort to match a user’s search terms to the content thats listed on your web pages listed in the SERP.
Quantity of organic traffic: this is the number of users who visit your site via organic search results. Its proven that users are more likely to click on search results that appear near the top of the search engine, which is why it’s vital to use your SEO strategy to rank pages with relevance as highly as you can. The more high-quality visitors that you can attract to your website, then the more likely you are to see an increase in engagement and ultimately sales.
How does SEO work?
Search engines like Google and Yahoo employ tools called bots, crawlers or spiders, to search for data from websites on the internet. The bot starts from a web page that it knows and follows any link internally in pages within that site as well as links to external pages on other websites. Any content on these pages, plus the context of any links its found, can help the bot to understand what each page is about and how it’ might be connected to all of the other pages within the search engine’s extensive database. We call this an index.
When a user types something into a search box, the search engine will employ complicated algorithms to discover what it thinks is the most accurate and relevant results for that particular search. These organic results can be made up of web pages text content, news articles and reviews, photos and videos, listings for local companies, and other more specific types of data that it thinks is relevant for the user.