What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of increasing traffic to a given website by increasing the visibility of the site in the search engines results. The SEO process ultimately leads to more traffic for the site because it will appear higher in search results for information pertaining to what is offered by the site. It is the best way to increase the quality of websites by making them user-friendly, faster and easier for navigation.
It can also refer to a set of rules that are followed by web site or blog owners to improve their rankings in the search engine results.
The Importance of SEO
The market is increasingly becoming competitive every single day. Search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing usually serve millions of the Internet users who are looking for answers to their questions and solutions to their issues.
These search engines have primary results according to the search. In these search results, they show different web pages and any other content including videos. These search results are ranked according to what the search engines consider to be the most relevant to its users. The Web pages owners do not pay anything to make their pages appear among the top results.
SEO is important because it makes your website easily understandable by both users as well as the search engines. Search engines however much sophisticated cannot see and understand a web page the same way as human beings. SEO helps to easily figure out what each web page is all about and how much it can be useful to the users searching for information.
SEO has become more important than ever because of the following reasons:
A higher proportion of search engine users is more likely to choose one of the top suggestions in the first results page. Higher ranking for your web page will definitely increase the visitors to the page.
Good SEO practices also improve the user experience and usability of your web page.
Users trust their preferred search engines and the presence of your web page at the top results boosts their trust for your web page.
SEO gives you an advantage in competition. In cases where two or more web sites are dealing in the same product, the site that is search engine optimized is more likely make more sales than the others which are not optimized.
The Main Stages for SEO Process
SEO is not a static process but it is rather a framework comprising rules and different processes. There are two stages for SEO process:
1. On-site SEO
This is the process of makes changes to your web site so that it ranks higher in the search engine results. It entails changing the structure of your site for SEO and also for a better user experience. This enables you to come up with a site that is user-friendly, easy and fat to navigate and serves its purpose of attracting new customers, getting more subscribers and increasing sales among other purposes.
2. Off-site SEO
Apart from the changes you can make to your web page to achieve a higher ranking in the search engine results, the use of off-site SEO techniques can also achieve this. Off-site SEO refers to link building to promote your web page and ultimately improve its ranking in the search engine results. You need to have effective back-links from other web pages which increases your web page authority.
