SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION (SEO): WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT!

Ever wonder why whenever you type a certain keyword while you are trying to search for something either on Google or Bing you always find some websites appear in the first page? Believe it or not, that is exactly how the so-called SEO techniques work. In case if you are still not familiar with the term, SEO in my humblest opinion is basically referred to a strategy used to ensure that when somebody is searching your product or service category on search engine, they instantly find your website. In other words, the goal of SEO is to improve and expand the website’s visibility in organic search results. As a result, when you own a website and you are trying to sell your product or service catalog, you will have more visitors coming to your website and it will increase the chances for more conversions; leading to more revenue and greater number of customers.

To begin with, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is "a process of optimizing your website with the goal of improving your rankings in the search results" and driving more organic (non-paid) traffic. Simply put, it is a technique used to rank your website higher in the Search Engine Ranking Page (SERP). The history of SEO can be retraced back in the 90s when the search engine first emerged. However, many marketing experts nowadays believe that it has become part of essential marketing tools and ever-growing industry. After all, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) concentrates on the organic search result which does not involve Paid Per Click (PPC) optimization such as Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads, and alike, yet, both SEO and PPC are part of the Search Engine Marketing (SEM). Below here is the example when somebody types a keyword "Wordpress Themes".

Furthermore, SEO works the best by optimizing a website’s content, conducting keyword research, and gaining inbound links to elevate both the content’s ranking and the website’s visibility. While we can normally see the results take place on the Search Engine Ranking Page (SERP) once the webpage has been crawled and indexed by a search engine, this particular digital marketing method so-called SEO can take months to fully come into effect. Since search engines have one single objective only which is to provide users with the most relevant answers or right information, hence, there are five key factors which search engines use to analyze:

1. The meaning behind someone's queries, which is their intent for starting a search and how that intent matches the most helpful content.

2. The relevancy between the search query and the content on a page, and search engines assess it by various factors such as topic or keywords.

3. The quality of content, which uses the E-E-A-T model to surface content that seems the most helpful based on signals such as experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness.

4. The usability of a site, which considers loading speed, mobile friendliness, and other factors related to how easy it is to discover content on a site.

5. The context, which relies on a searcher's past behavior and settings such as location (cookies).

Meanwhile, there are three core facets of an effective SEO strategy to improve a website’s ranking:

I. Technical Setup

II. Great Content

III. Quality Backlinks

I. TECHNICAL SETUP

This is often referred to as "On-page SEO" which focuses on the improvement of our website’s content through technical aspects such as "keyword research, content optimization, page performance optimization, internal linking, and so on". In order for our website to rank, first, a search engine has to find our pages on the web. Second, a search engine must be able to scan them and be able to understand their topics and identify their keywords. And finally, a search engine needs to add them to its index (a database of all the content it has found on the web). In this case, its algorithm can consider displaying our website for relevant queries (just in case if you are not familiar with the term algorithm, it is technically a set of rules and signals that rank content based on a user’s pattern of behavior such as how frequent they search for something using a certain number of keywords, how likely they visit websites that have similar product catalogues, how they interact, and many more).

II. GREAT CONTENT

Every time we use a search engine, for example, we are always looking for content which is the kind of information we need to solve a particular issue or problem arose. And the content that we are searching for can be in form of text, video, product recommendation, search directory, and so forth. To SEO, this is what helps us earn greater search visibility due to the fact that firstly, content is what customers want when looking for references. Regardless of what they are viewing, by providing high-quality content is genuinely helpful for the end user as long as it does not violate Google’s spam policies. As a result, the more we publish and keep our website updated on a regular basis, the higher our chance of obtaining greater search visibility.

Secondly, search engines use content to determine how to rank a page. It is this idea of relevance between a page and a person’s search query which was discussed before. When search engines are crawling every page of our website, they determine its topic and analyze the elements such as its page length or structure which will help them assess the quality of our website’s content. Based on this information, search algorithms therefore can match a person’s query with pages they consider the most relevant to it. Overall, the process of optimizing content begins with keyword research.

III. QUALITY BACKLINKS

Aside from the above technical and content attributes, both relevance and authority are the contributing factors for website owners to succeed establishing good quality backlinks. And the reason is because without these two factors, there will be no page appears to be ranked on search engines. In their quest to provide users with the most accurate answers, for instance, Google and other search engines prioritize pages they consider the most relevant but also popular to their queries. While the first two areas which are technical setup and great content focus on increasing relevance, links on the other hand are responsible for popularity. Hence, before proceeding with further discussions in this sub-topic, here’s what SEO means when it comes to how the backlinks work.

To begin with, links or also called backlinks are references to our content on other websites. Every time another website mentions and points its readers to our content, we gain a backlink to our website. In the case of search engines, Google employs the quantity and quality of links as a signal of a website’s authority. To put it mildly, its logic is that we as the web owners or we administrators would reference a popular and high-quality website more often than a mediocre one. Obviously, there are some low-quality links which can impact our rankings negatively. The low-quality or suspicious links, for example, are the ones that Google would consider as built deliberately to make it consider a site more authoritative which might reduce our rankings on SERP (Search Engine Ranking Page). That is why when it comes to link buildings, SEOs do not focus on any old links. In other words, they aim to generate the highest quality references as possible.

Furthermore, the process of acquiring new backlinks in SEO is called "link building" and this can be a very challenging activity. Link building, if we wish to do well with it, requires creativity, strategic thinking, and patience. And, in order to generate good quality backlinks, we need to develop a link-building strategy. In any case, keep in mind that our links must pass various quality criteria as they cannot be obvious to search engines that we have built them on a deliberate basis.