What is Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) refers to various techniques that help to achieve better rankings and visibility for websites on search engine results pages (SERPs). There are two primary methods:
- Technical practices used by website developers behind the scenes (we tend to refer to this as ‘on-page SEO’)
- Promotional ’off-page’ approaches you can use to raise a website’s visibility (link-building, social media marketing).
In this module, we focus on the 2nd method: Off-page SEO.
Each year more than 2.8 trillion search queries are made on Google alone. This means that Google answers more than 88,700 searches worldwide per second. In other words: If a business website is not indexed effectively on Google, it misses hundreds, if not thousands, of opportunities, in which someone might have accessed their website, viewed their content, and bought their product or services.
Optimizing a website for search engines, not only improves its ranking, and thus be found by potential customers, but you can also create a better user experience. That is the key to SEO: optimizing not just for search engines, for also for visitors.This will help search engines index the site quickly and easily and also, more importantly, provide visitors with a good experience of using the site and encourage repeat visits. Google’s indexing method is increasingly paying attention to user experience.
Google uses many different factors to determine the relevance of a website to a search query. Here are some important factors that the search engine algorithm takes into account when ranking a website:
- The website’s content
- The website’s structure and internal links
- The searcher’s geographical location
- Loading times
- Social signals (links from social networks)
Off-page optimization involves measures which ensure that good-quality, relevant back links to the website are created. Social networks play such an important role in web use. They are used by billions of users around the world, and numbers are still rising. As a result Search engines put great relevance on the traffic generated by links from social networks. These so-called “social signals” can significantly influence a website’s ranking.
The most obvious way to raise a site’s visibility through non-technical SEO means is of course through social media marketing.
- Writing informative, high-quality blog posts about current events, news or content on a website and sharing them on social networks
- Being present on all relevant social media channels, and not just broadcasting content in a faceless manner, but by using it as a customer service channel and genuinely interacting with people in a friendly, helpful and entertaining manner.
These are great ways to generate quality inbound links and “social signals”.
