What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)? Search Engine Optimization is done to increase the quality and number of visitors to a website. The websites on the first page of a Google search receive 95 percent of the clicks made. The higher a site is listed on the page, the higher the click-through rate is, and the more traffic it generates.
How SEO Works
Search engines such as Google and Yahoo score search results based on the authority and relevancy of the pages they crawl and include them in their web index to provide the best answer to user queries. There are over 200 signals Google uses to score search results.
SEO encompasses creative and technical activities to improve and influence some of those signals. It is useful to focus less on ranking signals and more on providing the best answers for users. SEO involves making a website accessible, being technically sound, and using the words people type into search engines.
The website needs to provide an excellent user experience that has high-quality and useful, expert content that helps answer the queries of a user. A team of search quality raters evaluates the search results’ quality that feeds into an algorithm. There are creative and technical activities to be performed on and away from a website.
How SEO Is Done
Onsite SEO Activities
Onsite SEO activities improve the organic visibility of a website. For the most part, that means optimizing content and a website to enhance the experience of users, relevancy, and accessibility. Typical activities include:
- -Keyword research
- -Technical auditing
- -Onsite optimization
- -User experience
Keyword research analyzes the frequency and types of words used by prospective users to find a brand’s products or services. Technical auditing ensures the website is free from user experience barriers or errors, correctly geo-targeted, and capable of being crawled and indexed.
Onsite optimization improves the content relevancy, on-page alignment, internal navigation, and website structure to help prioritize target relevant search phrases and key areas. Users’ experience ensures content shows trust, authority, and expertise. It must be fast and simple to use. Ultimately, the best possible user experience against competitors is provided.
Offsite SEO Activities
Offsite SEO activities are carried on outside of a website. They improve organic visibility. It is sometimes called ‘link building.’ The aim is to increase reputable links from sites such as this. Links from pages and websites with more relevancy, popularity, and trust give more value to a website than a poor unknown website that search engines do not trust. The signal of the most importance is the quality of a link. Typical offsite SEO activities include:
- –Content marketing
- -Digital PR
- -Outreach and Promotion
Marketing provides website links with exceptional content. Links can be research or news with compelling data, a visualization, a story, or a how-to guide. PR gives other websites reasons to link and talk about a website.
It can include product placement, quotes, expert interviews, original studies or research, writing for external publications, or internal news flow. Outreach and promotion involve communicating with webmasters or influencers, bloggers, and key journalists about a brand, content, or resource to earn coverage and links to a website.