Search Engine Optimization (SEO) 101

What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the practice of taming the search-engine ranking of your site. It encompasses numerous optimization techniques that make your website get more traffic and more conversions. SEO is the mission of increasing the visibility of your website in search engines using quality links, social media and domain authority. Simply put, it’s the process of making your site search engine “friendly” and “compatible”. By doing optimization, you want to tell the search engines that your site is the most relevant in terms of a search query. SEO roughly starts with the identification of your site’s current search engine statistics. This data can further be used as the ground for optimization. Your site’s weaknesses are uncovered in this phase so that SEO specialists can make strategic and sustainable plan to target and alleviate these weaknesses. Following this phase is the On-page Optimization.  On-page calibration is the process of abiding your site’s physical page elements with what search engines look for. The search engine ranking of your site is determined by several factors, including how your site is coded, and how you use specific tags. To understand better what search engines do, read my article about ‘How Do Search Engines Work’. After on-page optimization, here comes the painful process of Keyword Research. Keyword Research is a tactful long process of identifying effective keywords for your site. Effective keywords are not just those keywords that suites your site’s genre, but these may refer to the keywords that bring more traffic through search engine searches. I have described this topic well on this article, “Keyword Research | An Introduction”. Next to Keyword Research is a more stabbing work, Link Building. Most simply put, Link Building is the process of getting inbound links from other domains. One ranking factor is on how many authoritative sites link to your website, this factor is what link building addresses.  This phase is the longest period of SEO and oftentimes it lasts months, years and even during the whole lifespan of your site.

Why do you need SEO?

The internet has become a cut- throat market place. There are millions of websites longing for attention from internet surfers. A recent research shows that almost 90% of these surfers are using search engines to navigate the web. Now, how would you be found and be relevant enough to make search engines realize to include you in their search results? Answer, Search Engine Optimization. So if you don’t want to miss this enormous opportunity to attract more traffic to your site, you should start considering SEO.

I always love to hear from my readers. For you, how do you define SEO?