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Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most difficult aspects of managing a website. The way Google and other search engines rank your website changes constantly. This means that you have to follow the latest developments in SEO if you want to outperform the competition. The good news is that there are many great tools you can use to combat SEO on site and get the data you need to improve your ranking in SEO. If you know what they are and what they can do for you, you will be well prepared to succeed.
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Why is SEO important?
Search engine optimization is important because:
- The majority of search engine users (more than 65% – see graph below) are more likely to click on one of the first 5 suggestions from search engine results pages (SERPS). To take advantage of it and gain visitors to your website or customers on your online store, your website must appear in one of the best posts.
- SEO is not just about search engines, but good SEO practices improve the user experience and usability of a website.
- Users trust search engines and having one of the top positions for keywords sought by the user increases the trust of the website.
- SEO is good for the social promotion of your website. People who find your website by searching on Google or Yahoo are more likely to promote it on Facebook, Twitter or other social media channels.
- SEO is important for the proper functioning of a large website. Websites with more than one author can benefit from direct and indirect referencing. Their direct benefit is increased search engine traffic and the indirect benefit is that they have a common framework (checklists) to use before publishing content to the site.
- SEO can put you ahead of the competition. If two websites sell in the same way, the website optimized for search engines will probably have more customers and generate more sales.
What are the main stages of the Search Engine Optimization process?
As mentioned above, SEO is not a static process, but rather a framework with rules and processes.
To simplify things, SEO can be divided into 3 main types:
- Technical SEO: With SEO, you can ensure that search engines can crawl and index your website without any problem.
- On site SEO: rules to apply to your site and content to make it user-friendly for search engines.
- Off site SEO: ways to promote your website or blog so it ranks higher in search results.
How Search Engine Optimization Works
Search engines such as Google use an algorithm or a set of rules to determine which pages to display for a given query. These algorithms have evolved to become extremely complex and take into account hundreds or even thousands of different ranking factors to determine the ranking of their SERPs. However, search engines evaluate three essential measures to determine the quality of a site and its ranking:
Links – Links from other websites play a key role in determining the ranking of a site in Google and other search engines. The reason is that a link can be seen as a quality vote of other websites because website owners are unlikely to create links to other poor quality sites. Sites that acquire links from many other sites acquire an authority (called “PageRank” in Google) in the eyes of search engines, especially if the sites that bind them are themselves authoritative.
Content – In addition to searching for links, search engines also analyze the content of a web page to determine if it is relevant to a particular search query. A big part of SEO is to create content that targets the keywords searched by the search engines.
Page Structure – The third basic component of SEO is the structure of the page. Because web pages are written in HTML, the structure of the HTML code can affect the ability of a search engine to evaluate a page. Including the relevant keywords in the title, URL and headers of the page and ensuring that the site is explorable are actions that site owners can undertake to improve the SEO of their site.
Optimizing Search Traffic: From Clicks To Conversions
The search engine optimization performed properly can potentially significantly increase the traffic generated by a website, but all this search traffic will not help to grow a business unless it becomes a paying customer. This is where Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) comes into play. Conversion rate optimization involves the use of methods such as the A / B test to make changes to websites and measure the impact on the conversion rate of a site. Successful search marketers know that traffic to a site is not enough, it is equally important that traffic is generated once on the site.