What is SEO? (Search Engine Optimization)

Have you ever searched an item on the internet using your favorite search engine may it be Google, Bing Yahoo etc.? Of course YES. Anyway, that’s why the internet is here. To help make the world a smaller place to find people, products, places, services etc. After the search, you get so many websites offering a solution.

The websites appear to be ranked with some appearing on the first page and others appearing on subsequent pages. It’s not by magic that the ones on the first page just appear there. To appear there, they have to be optimized or made friendly to the search engines.

This trick of making them search engine friendly is known as SEO (Search Engine Optimization). There are so many advantages by making your website appear among the first in the SERP (Search Engine Result Page). Before we discuss these advantages let’s look at how the search engines catalog the websites to display in the SERPs.

-Spiders/ crawlers

When you speak or type whatever you want to search in the search box, the web crawlers traverse the millions of websites for information that is as close to your search as possible. When they find the information, which is very general, they deliver it to the search engine algorithm that filters through the general information to match it with your query. An index is built and displayed to you in terms of ranked websites.

So how does the crawler determine the information to return, well, it checks for various things in the target websites? Some of the things are;

-Meta descriptions

These are summaries that provide all that a website is about. They are embedded in the HTML attributes of the website. The crawler picks the information in the meta descriptions area of the website depending on how close it matches the question being asked.

-Internal links.

These are links on a webpage to help connect to other web pages but on the same website. They are placed using anchor text which hides the link code. The anchor text is short and used to describe what is on the other side. The crawler will pick the links with anchor text that are close to the query.

The internal links assist the website user in moving from one page to another page with related information. In addition, it helps in establishing a hierarchy of how the information is arranged on the website.

-The robot.txt file.

This is a text file that defines how/when/ what the crawler is allowed to see on the web pages. It defines which pages are to be crawled and which are restricted. The crawler will skip the restricted pages.

The crawler takes into consideration all of the above factors before it passes the information the search engine algorithm.

Do you need SEO?

This question is better answered by yourself. It all goes down to why you have the website in the first place. You wanted it to reach out to your target audience. Right? There are more than 250 million websites today.

A good number of these websites are your competitors seeking the same audience as you do.

It’s a competition and you need to get ahead of it.

Let’s see the huge benefits you are bound to reap by having your website SEO sensitive.

-Strengthening of your brand.

Website users tend to believe that the first websites to appear on the first page of the search engine are authentic and reliable than those on the second and third pages of the SERP. By being on the first on this page, you boost your audience’s trust with your brand by projecting a strong brand.

-Traffic increase.

The first website on the SERPs will have a higher click-through rate. As a fact, the topmost websites on the search engine result page have a 60% click-through rate, leaving only 40% to be shared among the other websites on the first page.

Most website users don’t realize there is a page two of the search engine results page. Translating to low or no traffic to your website if it’s not on the first page.

-Cost effective and ROI

To be ranked on top, it does not have to be paid as in the case of Google Adwords and Pay Per Click (PPC). It’s absolutely free saving you the cost of spending on advertising.

When visitors come to your site through searching for your products/services, they are serious and 4 % of them will convert into sales. On the other hand, the visitors to your website who are enticed by a paid ad will have a 2% conversion rate. This makes the SEO conversion rate better thus guaranteeing a return on your investment.

-Permanent.

Once you put all that effort into making your website search engine friendly, the chance of being ranked lower is minimal, making you stay on top of your competitors at all times.

Can you perform SEO by yourself?

SEO, as we have seen in the first part of this discussion, is a very complicated strategy to pull through. If you are keen on the success, you will need a digital agency to handle all of it for you.

Why a digital agency?

-They have the expertise required for such kind of a job.

-You will be assured of positive returns unlike when you decide to DIY.

-It knows what best works depending on your niche.

• It will help your website not to be hidden from search engines in case of unethical SEO practices.

Final words.

There are two types of SEO, ethical and unethical. The ethical SEO follows all the laid guidelines when dealing with SEO. This guidelines state factors like the length of meta descriptions, the density of internal and external links, the ideal number of keywords allowed etc.

Unethical SEO is where guidelines are not followed and most cases its used to trick the search engine in thinking the information contained therewith is genuine.

Although both of them will serve the same purpose, a website using unethical SEO will be removed from the SERPs when the search engine notices something fishy with the website, including its meta descriptions and links. The website may never rank at the top even if the SEO is reverted to ethical.

Isaac (Ishaq Mustaqim)

Media & Local Business Growth Specialist

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