What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and why it is important for Business?
Google, bing and other Search Engines like (Yahoo, AltaVista, duckduckgo …) serve 40% of world population per day searching for services or answers to their questions on internet.
As of January 2014 there are around 861,379,000 registered host names, and this number is growing every day, new business are registered and the competition becomes harder.
So is it possible to win among millions of websites? How much does everyone has a chance to be on top of page one?
The first website on Google’s result page gets more than 30% of the traffic and surprisingly and the tenth only gets 2.4% and results on second page is less than 1%.
So we are getting there that SEO can help to increase the traffic of the site but how does it grow the online business?
Search Engines are trying to serve most relevant, valuable and trusted sites on top, so if the website be on top for many search terms, users trust your business much more and your click through rate grow and more potential customers visit your page.
So what does this mean for your business? It means that if you can continually show in all these search results that you are gaining more and more traffic and probably with more potential customer. Chances are very high that they will eventually click through to your website, and since you continually displayed in all their search results, they will trust you that much more. Which brings us to the next reason why SEO is important for your business.
Comparing your website to a store, SEO helps to locate your store in Downtown of the city where it’s busy and people walking store to store and browsing, without SEO your store would be in a country lane that has no traffic!
Obviously, being in downtown doesn’t necessary makes a business successful, however there are more chances of business growth in metropolis.
Search Engine Optimization algorithm has been improved and developed surprisingly that no SEO agency knows all, but I know one fact for sure that works; optimize the website for your customers not for Google or other Search Engines.
An important aspect of SEO is making your website easy for both users and search engine robots to understand. Although search engines have become increasingly sophisticated, they still can’t see and understand a web page the same way a human can. SEO helps the engines figure out what each page is about, and how it may be useful for users.
There are two main Phases for Search Engine Optimization:
On Page Optimization:
Any activity on your website that helps Search Engines and users to understand the content of your page better, is called On Page optimization.
Some simple examples, imagine there is a slide show on the Homepage and it’s offering a deal, although search engines are smart enough to read all the content, but they are not quite strong in OCR (Optical Character Recognition), SEO suggests to add alt tag and describe to Search Engines what that image is about and make it readable for both human and search engine.
Another sample, is using Rich Snippet, including structured data markup in web content helps Search Engines algorithms better index and understand the content. Have you searched for a movie or a restaurant? Did you notice the rating stars and reviews? And I’m sure you never chose a 1 star restaurant or a bad commented movie!
Off Page Optimization:
Any strategy that be implemented on other websites, Mediums or sources to promote your website is called Off Page Optimization.
For instance, if you own a reseller business and there is a from the whole sale company’s website to your site, that helps you to bring the trust that in face you an authorized reseller and also increase your local traffic for local customers.
Having been said, SEO helps to present your website to more visitors, gain Search Engines trust and been continuously shown on Search Results. As the important role, SEO should be one of the most important tactics of your Digital Marketing strategies.