अक्टूबर 10, 2020

what is seo

 

What is SEO?

SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” In simple terms, it means the process of improving your site to increase its visibility for relevant searches. The better visibility your pages have in search results, the more likely you are to garner attention and attract prospective and existing customers to your business.


Why is SEO important for marketing?

SEO is a fundamental part of digital marketing because people conduct trillions of searches every year, often with commercial intent to find information about products and services. Search is often the primary source of digital traffic for brands and complements other marketing channels. Greater visibility and ranking higher in search results than your competition can have a material impact on your bottom line.

However, the search results have been evolving over the past few years to give users more direct answers and information that is more likely to keep users on the results page instead of driving them to other websites.

Also note, features like rich results and Knowledge Panels in the search results can increase visibility and provide users more information about your company directly in the results.

SEO Explained

How search engines work

Search engines are like libraries for the digital age.

Instead of storing copies of books, they store copies of web pages.

When you type a query into a search engine, it looks through all the pages in its index and tries to return the most relevant results.

To do this, it uses a computer program called an algorithm.

Nobody knows exactly how these algorithms work, but we do have clues, at least from Google.

Here’s what they say on their “How search works” page:

To give you the most useful information, Search algorithms look at many factors, including the words of your query, relevance and usability of pages, expertise of sources and your location and settings. The weight applied to each factor varies depending on the nature of your query – for example, the freshness of the content plays a bigger role in answering queries about current news topics than it does about dictionary definitions.

Speaking of Google, this is the search engine most of us use—at least for web searches. That’s because it has the most reliable algorithm by far.

That said, there are tons of other search engines you can optimize for.

Learn more about this in our guide to how search engines work.

How SEO works

In simple terms, SEO works by demonstrating to search engines that your content is the best result for the topic at hand.

This is because all search engines have the same goal: To show the best, most relevant results to their users.

Precisely how you do this depends on the search engine you’re optimizing for.

If you want more organic traffic to your web pages, then you need to understand and cater to Google’s algorithm. If you want more video views, then it’s all about YouTube’s algorithm.

Since each search engine has a different ranking algorithm, it’d be impossible to cover them all in this guide.

So, going forward, we’ll focus on how to rank in the biggest search engine of them all: Google.

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