What is SEO and How Does it Work
SEO and search engine optimization refers to a set of practices that serve to increase a website’s traffic either by optimizing the content or by link building to improve domain authority. Today, it has become one of the most important steps in determining the success of a website. All websites and pages need SEO, whether it is an e-commerce site, a blog, landing pages, social media platforms or contact pages.
Good efforts expended under the umbrella of SEO bring positive results where websites traffic and sales are concerned. So, it is important to learn what SEO is and how it works.
So, let’s find out.
What is SEO?
SEO includes two types of optimization techniques. These include;
- On-page SEO
- Off-page SEO
On-page search engine optimization includes steps like Meta tags, keyword density, site map, internal links, canonical URLs and site performance. The things to consider for this type of SEO are the content on the website as well as the HTML source code. These techniques typically make your content and overall website structure search engine friendly.
Off-page SEO techniques help to improve the visibility of a website on SERPs. These include steps like RSS feeds, article marketing, guest posting, social media marketing, blogging, and directory submission. It achieves building of links, which are of three types;
- Natural links
- Manual links
- Self-created links
Link building takes time and it is usually an on-going process. It is best to hire an SEO firm to take on the job of link building because these experts would develop a strategy based on your goals and make use of various outreach techniques to build natural or real links.
How SEO Works
All search engines including the major players like Google and Bing keep an index of websites, which is based on something called “crawling”. They use spiders or bots to crawl the web looking for newly added pages. This is possible only through interconnected links of various websites. The process of crawling starts by picking up a previously built list of websites and then move forward from thereon.
When the search engine bot finds your website or webpages, it indexes that page under relevant categories as well as search terms or keywords.
Now this is where the importance of SEO is recognized. If you don’t optimize your pages using relevant keywords, you might not be able to get relevant traffic to your website. And everybody knows that in order to make a website successful, relevant traffic is very important!
Conclusion
When it comes to getting relevant traffic to a website, organic search is considered the #1 driver. Search engines can send 300% more highly targeted traffic to a website than social media sites. Search engine optimization therefore plays an important role in a website’s success. It helps to increase ROI and also make lead generation and conversion more effective and successful. Most companies nowadays hire SEO firms to assign them the job of on-page as well as off-page search engine optimization of their website.