Search Engine Optimization, or commonly abbreviated to SEO, is a technique or process in which to boost a website’s ranking in “natural” or organic search results which makes it much more visible to people looking for specific products or services related to yours through search engines.
SEO is actually a small part of Search Engine Marketing or SEM. This is a term used for all marketing strategies involving search engines. SEM covers both organic ranking as well as paid search ranking. Paid search refers to paying to get your website listed on a search engine whenever a user searches for a particular keyword or keyphrase. Both organic and paid ranking appear on search engine results but are displayed in different ways on the page.
The question now is why is it important for a business website to rank on search engines?
The answer to the question above is rather simple; over 694,000 search queries are done on Google alone. This means that each second that your site is not indexed or listed on Google; you are missing out on potentially hundreds if not thousands of leads and eventual sales. By practicing basic principles of SEO as well as more advanced techniques later on could drastically improve the ranking of your website in search engines and hence, increase your chances of being found by potential customers.
When it comes to paid search, yes you can do this but in the long run, these campaigns can be quite costly especially if you don’t know what you are doing. On top of that, an estimated 88% of all search engine users doesn’t actually click on these paid search ads anyway.
Since the main purpose of a search engine is to provide their users with the most relevant and useful information based on the keyword or phrase they use, it is best to have your site listed on the organic search result page. As a matter of fact, it is best to stay clear from paid search until you have a better understanding of SEO and organic ranking.
Google is better than a Phone Book
Previous techniques of outbound marketing are now irrelevant. In the past, companies put in huge investments on yellow pages, radio advertisements, and newspapers. In other words, to get customers or clients a company had to literally be in the face of their potential leads. This is not the case anymore. Because of the Internet, the consumer is now in control.
From a consumer’s point of view, the Internet has made it so much easier to decrease the amount of advertisements they see or hear each and every day. Since a company can no longer get their prospect’s attention through typical outbound marketing, the best approach is to take the inbound marketing road.
For inbound marketing, it’s simply making sure that your company can easily be approached whenever a potential client is looking for your products or services. Ask yourself this, when was the last time you actually checked a phone book? The fact of the matter is that Google is now the new phone book. If you have a website and it doesn’t show up in their search results for the keywords or phrases related to your company, then all of your prospected clients will go to your competitors.
The Search Engine Process
When it comes to search engines, they only have one goal in mind and that is to provide their customers or users with the most relevant and useful information possible based on the search query. If it is able to provide results that satisfy the user’s needs, then that is a happy user. And because the person is happy with the service, he will keep coming back to the same search engine each and every time.
But, for a search engine to give good and relevant results they first need to have an archive of information to choose from to answer each query. Each search engine available today has different ways to gather and prioritize the website content they find. This process, regardless of actual tactics or techniques used by the search engine, is known as indexing. Simply put, search engines actually attempt to scan the entire World Wide Web and gather all the information they can in order to show them to a user whenever a search query is performed. They do this through the use of bots or crawlers.
A search engine crawler does nothing but “crawl” the web by scanning all the content it finds, indexing web pages, and following links to the next pages or sites. Simply put, if your site has not been indexed then they will never show up on search engine results. Unless you want to cheat your way to the top of search engine results page, SERP, or you are running a shady online business, then your site most likely has already been indexed.
That being said, large search engines particularly Google, Yahoo, and Bing are continually indexing millions, if not billions of web pages each day. The question now is, how do they choose which sites to show on their SERP and how do they determine their rankings? Basically, there are two main things that they look at:
- The content on your website – When scanning a site, search engine crawlers scan each and every page of the site looking for clues and indicators on what the content of your site is all about. It also scans the back-end code for certain data such as tags, meta, descriptions, and even instructions.
- Linking – As search engine crawlers go about the World Wide Web, they also take note of the amount of links that goes into a website. This is known as inbound links and the more inbound links a site has, the better because this is an indication of the website’s authority or influence regarding the topic it covers.
In other words, each link going into a website is a “vote” for the content. At the same time, the strength or weight of each link differs meaning one link from an authoritative site such as the NYTimes.com (New York Times) gives a bigger boost to a site compared to an unknown blog. This “boost” is also known as link juice.