What is Search Engine Optimization?

What is Search Engine Optimization?

Billions of web browsing sessions begin with a search query every day. With more than a billion websites competing for the top spot in search results, it can be difficult to drive traffic to your site from search engines

Search Engine Optimization SEO is the process of bringing the website visibility in the search engine’s natural or unpaid results.

The higher ranked on the search results page and more frequently a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine's users.

SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, video search, academic search, news search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.

There are various characteristics of SEO:

• Organic: for SEO you don’t have to pay to Google or other search engines.
• Cost-Effective:  Compared to paid advertisement it is very cost-effective.
• Time-Consuming: You have to put in efforts on multiple aspects to bring your website on higher rankings.
• Difficult to measure: Unlike paid advertisement yon cannot measure the SEO quickly. Slowly your website will rank higher based on the actions.
• Dependent: It is dependent on content, backlinks, search engine algorithms.
• Steady:  Once you achieve higher ranking it easier to maintain the position with the right content whereas paid ads will give you visibility only while you are paying.

There are two types of SEO – On-page & Off-page

Let me tell you parameters for On-page SEO:

• Keyword Research: Find out what are people looking for and which expressions have the most search volume.
• Page Title: A page title is a text you see at the top of your browser window when viewing a web page. It’s also the title of the page that is presented in search engine results.
• H1 Heading: The H1 tag (the biggest headline) should appear at the top-center of the page and should be the first thing people see when they land on it.
• Meta Description: It is a summary of the page and appears as part of a search result snippet, below the page title.
• Content:  Write content for people, not for search engines with fresh readable and relevant images
• Image Alt-attributes: Add text to an image so search engines can identify what the image is about
• URL: It should be simple, should contain the target keyword & should describe as closely as possible what the page is about.
• Site Loading: websites that load faster rank better than those which don’t.
• Google Analytics: This will help you understand visitors in a better way – where are they coming from, due to which channels, demographics, etc.

When you apply these techniques you will start getting your site ranked up higher and higher. With such a stiff completion on the same services, it is easier to do SEO than going for paid marketing.

I will talk about Off-page SEO in the next post.