Billions of people all around the world often search for various information on the internet, and they achieve this feat through the help of search engines. I’m sure you must have been searching for information on SEO or something similar and you were directed here by your search engine. The search engine you used didn’t just pick a page at random hoping it would answer your question on what is SEO. Rather, the search engine uses a complex algorithm to determine the most appropriate page that can answer your query from a vast list of over 21 million pages indexed on the subject of SEO. Therefore, if you own a website and you’re looking to raise its search ranking then you need a understand what SEO is, and how it works. Luckily for you, today’s post is the answer you’ve been looking for. Read on!

What is SEO?

The word SEO stands for “Search engine optimization”. It is the process and technique of increasing the quality and quantity of website traffic, as well as promoting your brand through organic (non-paid) search engine results. SEO is not just about the search engines, but also about the people and understanding what they are searching for online. SEO takes into account what people are searching for, the kind of answers they are looking for, the selected words they are using, and the type of content they want to find. Getting the answers to these questions will connect you to numerous people around the world searching online for the solutions you offer. SEO can be described as a digital marketing strategy that focuses on your website’s visibility in search results. Hence, when you fully understand how SEO works, you will be able to improve your website rankings in search results.

How does SEO work?

Many search engines like Google and Bing make use of crawlers/spiders/bots to collect information about all the contents on the internet. The spider starts from a known web page and then follows the internal links to other pages within the website, and also follows any external links to pages on other sites. The spider uses the content on these pages in addition to the context of the links to better understand what the page is all about and how it is connected to the millions of web pages contained in the search engines database, called index.

When a user inputs a query into the search engines search box, the search engine immediately uses its complex algorithms to bring out the most accurate and resourceful list of results for that query. These can be web pages full of resourceful text, news articles, videos, images, and many more types of content. Search engines continuously update their algorithm in a bid to keep up with user behaviour and advances in machine learning.

An SEO expert uses his understanding of these ranking factors to develop marketing strategies and techniques in order to boost and maintain a good search ranking for his website or the website he manages. If you have an online marketing company and you wish to have and maintain high SERP rankings, with high-quality user traffic but you’re still new to SEO strategies, then you should employ an E-commerce SEO expert in order to boost your marketing company.

Why is SEO important?

Although paid advertising, social media and other online platforms can help generate traffic for your website, the majority of online traffic is driven by search engines. Organic search results cover a vast quantity of digital real estate, savvy searchers see organic search results as more credible and it receives more clicks than paid advertisements. SEO can generate more traffic opportunities than most paid advertisements. When set up correctly it can continue to pay dividends over time. If you produce a quality piece of content that can be ranked high, then your traffic will rise over time, whereas, paid advertisement requires continuous funding to sense traffic to your website. Optimizing your website will make the search engines understand your website better so that your content can be indexed and displayed within search results.