Search engine optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimization?(SEO) is the process of improving the quality and quantity of?website traffic?to a?website?or a?web page?from?search engines.SEO targets unpaid traffic (known as "natural" or "organic" results) rather than direct traffic or?paid traffic. Unpaid traffic may originate from different kinds of searches, including?image search,?video search,?academic search,?news search, and industry-specific?vertical search?engines.

As an?Internet marketing?strategy, SEO considers how search engines work, the computer-programmed?algorithms?that dictate search engine behavior, what people search for, the actual search terms or?keywords?typed into search engines, and which search engines are preferred by their targeted audience. SEO is performed because a website will receive more visitors from a search engine when websites rank higher on the?search engine results page?(SERP). These visitors can then potentially be converted into customers.

History

Webmasters?and content providers began optimizing websites for search engines in the mid-1990s, as the first search engines were cataloging the early?Web. Initially, all webmasters only needed to submit the address of a page, or?URL, to the various engines which would send a?web crawler?to?crawl?that page, extract links to other pages from it, and return information found on the page to be?indexed.[4]?The process involves a search engine spider downloading a page and storing it on the search engine's own server. A second program, known as an?indexer, extracts information about the page, such as the words it contains, where they are located, and any weight for specific words, as well as all links the page contains. All of this information is then placed into a scheduler for crawling at a later date.

Advantages

Free

SEO is totally free of cost, and it depends on how much time you spend researching keywords and utilizing them in your high-quality content.

Localized Traffic

Using local SEO tools such as Google My Business can help you improve your localized traffic.

Mobile Friendly

Good SEO means your site is responsive, your site speed is good, and there’s no latency for mobile users.

Expert Status

Following best SEO practices means your site is an authority. You only have one article per keyword, and you only have backlinks from high-quality sites.

Customer Friendly

Potential customers find your site because of your SEO. They come to your site and see that you’re professional. There are no grammatical errors in your content. You’re using the latest technology on a secure site, and they only need to locate the buy button.

Disadvantages

Targeted by Competitors

Effective SEO means you rank high. Sites that rank high are targeted by competitors who want a slice of the SEO pie, which means you’re always on your toes.

Changes

SEO can change. Just say the word “panda” and watch business owners frown. One small change to SEO, and you can be at the top of the search results one day and the next day find your site greatly demoted.

Penalties

You need to always be on top of your game, which may require some financial investment. One example is websites that haven’t been upgraded to responsive design will be penalized.

Slow Results

SEO isn’t a fast-moving process. You can update your site and use best practices and not see results for months.

5 Crucial SEO Features To Look For In An E-Commerce Platform

1. Ability to customize Title Tags, Meta Descriptions, URLs, and Header Tags

If your chosen platform does not give you the ability to edit title tags, meta descriptions, URLs, and header (H1, H2, etc.) tags for your home page, product pages, collections pages and other customizable pages.

2. A well-optimized URL structure and simple 301 redirects

It is a very common problem for e-commerce platforms to automatically generate URLs that are hard for search engines to understand, especially on product pages and pages that are dynamically generated. However, the URL continues to be one of the most important components of any page for SEO purposes, not only because it tells the search engine what the page is about, but it also is the path through which the search engine finds that page.

3. Mobile customization

An SEO-friendly e-commerce platform should also have a way to deal with any potential issues that may arise with duplicate content being displayed on your website's root domain as well as the mobile site.

?4. A powerful internal search feature and proper indexation of internal search results pages

As far as SEO is concerned, it is very important that the platform allows you to control whether these pages are displayed on external search engines, and how they actually appear on those engines. This will require that either you or someone at your e-commerce support team has the ability to edit individual internal search results pages, such as by adjusting their title tags and meta descriptions and by editing the content on the page.

?5. Good customer support and a savvy technical team

Because implementation of many of these strategies hinges on the capabilities of each e-commerce platform, it will be crucial to maintain a relationship with the support team at that platform to ensure that your online store complies with these important SEO recommendations.

Best Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tools

The best SEO tools also provide reports about how you measure up to competitors and where the greatest opportunities lie. What’s more, they allow you to measure search performance countries, regions, or languages.

1. Ahrefs: SEO Keyword Tool

2. Google Search Console: Top SEO Tool

3. SEMRush: Marketing SEO Tools

4. KWFinder: SEO Keyword Tool

5.?Moz Pro: SEO Software

6. Ubersuggest: Keyword Tracking Tool

7. Answer The Public: Free SEO Tools

8. SpyFu: Free SEO Tools

9. Woorank: SEO Ranking Tool

10. Majestic: Marketing SEO Tools

11. Google Trends: SEO Checker Tool

12. SEOQuake: Free SEO Tools

13. Siteliner: SEO Analysis Tool

14. Fat Rank: SEO Tools

15. Keywords Everywhere: SEO Keyword Tool

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results.

What does it mean?

Quality of traffic?– Quality of traffic means you need to attract right kind of customers who are attracted to your product.

The quantity of traffic?– Once you have the right kind of people clicking through from the search engine result pages (SERPs), more traffic is better.

Organic results?–?Ads make up a significant portion of many SERPs. Organic traffic is any traffic that you don’t have to pay for.

Functions of Search Engine Optimization – SEO

Crawling and Indexing

1. Even as we are discussing the Google Search Engine, Google is crawling the web using web crawlers to organize the information available on webpages and other publicly available content on the Search index. Before you even type in a search, Google web crawlers crawl across billions of webpages organizing the information in the Search index. The crawling process begins with a list of web addresses from past crawls and?sitemaps?provided by website owners.
2. As Google crawlers visit these websites, they use links on those sites to discover other pages. Google offers?webmaster tools?to give site owners granular choices about how Google crawls their site. The information available on publicly available webpages is discovered by software known as web crawlers much in the similar fashion as you browse through the content on the web. They go from link to link and bring data about those webpages back to Google’s servers. When a crawler finds a webpage, the Google systems render the page much as a browser does. They note the key signals from keywords to page freshness and keep a track of them into the Search index.

Search Algorithm

1. Google ranking systems sort through hundreds of thousands of webpages to give you useful and relevant results in the fraction of seconds. These ranking systems are nothing but a series of algorithms made up to analyze what you are looking for and what results to show you. Here are some of the ways Google uses Search algorithms to return useful information from the web: Analyzing the words of a query to understand it is crucial to return pages with relevant information. Google has built language models to try to understand what string of words should be looked up in the index.

Useful Responses

1. Google has made a lot of progress in delivering you the most relevant answers, faster and in formats that are most helpful to the type of information you are seeking. Thousands of engineers and scientists are hard at work refining the algorithms and building useful new ways to search.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results.