Let’s Get Serious: Why do we need SEO?

It can take a long time for Search Engine Optimization to produce some sort of useful results.

Even though you can’t force Google to rate your website high, there are some very quick things you can do to improve SEO to your website.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJh090XjMf4&feature=youtu.be

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of maximizing the number of visitors to a particular website by ensuring that the site appears high on the list of results returned by a search engine.

SEO analyzes how search engines function, what users search for, the real search phrases or keywords typed into search engines, and the search engines preferred by their target audience as an internet marketing strategy.

Let’s make it easier:

1. SEO optimizes your site for search engines. In other words: SEO should make it easier for Google to find your site.
2. SEO also increases traffic to your site. More visitors means a higher potential to convert them into customers.

What are the benefits of SEO?

1. Free search traffic (unlike paying for ads)
2. Organic traffic is typically consistent once you’re ranking is high (unlike social media which requires fresh content constantly – or unlike email marketing, which can land in spam or be forgotten).
3. SEO provides an opportunity to reach a massive audience

There are many search engines out there like Bing, Yahoo, Yandex or DuckDuckGo. But 90% of people use Google. 5.6 billion searches are performed on Google every day! This is why we are going to focus on Google.

As you know, the search results aren’t returned in random order.  Google tries to display the most relevant results first by using sophisticated tools. If you are completely new to SEO then it’s easier to think of search engines as libraries.

But instead of storing books, they store copies of websites and web pages. So when you search for a query, the search engine will then look through all pages in its index, and it will try to return the most relevant results.

The SEO helps to demonstrate to the search engine that your page is that result.

Crawling and indexation

These allow Google to discover web pages and to create their search index.

To obtain information, Google uses crawlers – also known as spiders – which gather public information from all over the web. The spiders start crawling from a list of known URLs called seeds. They follow the hyperlinks on these pages and crawl those newly discovered pages. This process goes on and on. And then they take all this data back to Google’s servers to be added to their “search index”. And that is what people are searching through when typing in a query in Google.

When you write a query on Google, the upper part of the resulting page is the ads. The second part is known as the knowledge graph.  They display the results that Google believes are the best at answering the query. After that, Google shows the organic results. Typically, there are around 10 results on the first page. Organic results are results that are not paid ads. The website page matched what Google thinks is a good result for the query.

Only 25 per cent of users go to the second page. So 75 per cent of users stick to the first page of the search results and if they cannot find their answers they will adjust the search criteria. The first 3 organic results get around 70% of the clicks. That is why it’s so important to make sure that your website is among the first ones to appear on the search engine. You want to make sure your website is what the search engine is looking for when users search it on Google.

But precisely this is also the problem: How can you get rated highly on Google, which means how do you get into the top 3? Google uses more than 200 factors to determine what is relevant in their algorithm. They make 500-600 tweaks to their algorithm per year.  We will not be able to cover the exact factor the algorithm looks at when it ranks a web page, but we do know a lot about the most important ranking factors, so we can make optimizations.

Now you know how google works. Next time we will talk about how to use this knowledge to improve your site’s ranking!

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See you in the next post!

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